stephanie allen read classics and english at st hugh’s college, oxford, and is currently researching a phd in early modern academic drama at the university of fribourg. whatever your brand of brilliance – whether you’re a physics genius, a sporting hero or like me a blinky, bookish type – there comes a point in most students’ academic careers when being good at life means being good at essays. As the subjects you study get more advanced and complex, you’re increasingly asked to think, evaluate, and have opinions where you once might have simply made calculations or learned definitions. In general, the further you progress through your education, the more rote learning will be replaced by the kind of analysis usually best demonstrated by essays. If by some miraculous feat you manage to avoid writing anything substantial at high school, it’s something you’ll almost certainly have to face at university yes, even if youre studying a science subject although the essays wont usually be quite as long. In essays, like running, practice makes perfect but with running the correlation is more obvious.

The likelihood is that at some point in the not too distant future unless you are both incredibly reluctant and startlingly resourceful you will have to write an essay, either in exam conditions or in your own time, that will count towards a final grade in some way. The bad thing about essay writing is that it’s not something – like french verbs, or the ability to run long distances – that miraculously gets better on its own if you just keep having a go. Students often need a paradigm shift: to figure out exactly what isn’t working, and why, and to learn and apply a new way of doing things. The good news, on the other hand, is that the individual skills required to write a strong essay are things you can learn, practise and improve in. This article is all about pinpointing what those skills might be, and giving you some suggestions as to how you might develop them. Not all these tips will work for all of you, but being good at essay writing, like being good at any other school related discipline, is all about trying different things, and devising your own way of doing things.

Before you even start planning an essay, i’d recommend you sit down and have a quick think about how you want to do it. First, what resources will you need? the internet, or library books? this might affect where and how you decide to work: i have wasted a huge amount of time trying to find versions of articles on the internet that i knew were in books at the library, or procrastinating because i wanted to work at home rather than leaving the house. I would recommend taking yourself to a library ninety nine times out of a hundred.

Secondly, if you’re working from books or downloadable articles, can you afford to work somewhere without the internet? the absence of facebook and instagram will guarantee your concentration will be about a hundred times better, which will show in the quality of your work. Make a list of everything you want to read and try to get hold of all your material before you start. Think about how long you’re going to spend reading and researching, planning, and writing – leaving a day or two before the deadline to make any significant changes, or just in case things don’t go to plan. I’d recommend allotting 3 hours to read a 20 page article, and about a day to write 20 words.

This might sound like a silly amount of planning, but the point of it is this: hundreds of all nighters have taught me that essay writing becomes incredibly stressful and painful when you’re up against the clock, and a reader can tell immediately if something is rushed or dashed off at 2am on the day of the deadline. if you’ve got time, have a look at this – comically eighties and slightly cringey – video about creativity. A lot of what the speaker says about thinking and playfulness is, in my opinion, directly applicable to essay writing. looking at things other than the set reading list means you won’t be reading all the same things as your classmates, leading to a more original and interesting essay.

Some teachers set reading lists for essays, or make suggestions about where students should look for information others ask you to find sources yourself. Even if your teacher does prescribe reading, it’s always worth seeing whether you can find something extra that will add breadth, depth or a fresh perspective to your argument. However, it’s important to think carefully about whether a source is reliable and valuable. Here are some common ones: academic articles: these are essays by scholars at universities, and usually published in journals or as books. They are always useful, and can be found by looking in the library ask your teacher for recommendations! , having a poke around google scholar, or, if your school has a subscription, on the website jstor.org.

Newspaper articles: might be useful evidence for an essay in history, but may not be detailed or scholarly enough for biology. If you use a newspaper article or opinion piece, think about the factors that might bias it and include your thinking in your essay! wikipedia: a very useful starting point, and an increasingly reliable resource. However, avoid referencing it: a teacher or examiner might not like it and may take against your essay. Instead, look at the reference section at the bottom of the article and see where the writer has gathered their information from.

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Online blogs: in general, stay away from these, as you don’t know who’s written them and how valuable their opinion is, or how reliable their facts. Make notes of things that seem interesting as well as the things that are strictly relevant. You want to be sure you answer the question but that interesting comment will often work its way into your essay and you don’t want to waste ages searching for it. It might feel like the world’s greatest faff, but taking good notes from your sources will save you a huge amount of time when you come to plan and write your essay: type out notes as you read, rather than simply underlining or highlighting – thus you’ll have a summary of the most important chunks of essays ready to use when you plan, rather than having to trawl through whole documents again looking for quotations. For this reason, if you think you might want to quote something, copy it out in the exact wording of the writer. In order to engage intelligently with what you’ve read, you’ve got to remember who said what, what they meant by it, who they were fighting against and whether you agreed with them or not.

At the end of each new essay or article, write a few lines summarising the author’s main points, and whether or not you agree with them. Your critical engagement with the scholars and authors whose work you’ve read will count for a huge chunk of marks. This does not mean listing a load of names and rehearsing their arguments nor does it mean disagreeing with everyone for the sake of it. Instead, think about whether or not what they’re arguing holds true in your experience – or compare them to each other. Planning is the single most important step in writing a good essay, and, frustratingly, also the step that’s most often rushed or neglected by students. If your essays often get criticised for having poor structure or unclear lines of argument, chances are you need to practise your planning. I use the following step by step process to turn my notes into a good plan you can try it too, and see if it works for you.

1 re read your notes a couple of times, and underline anything you think is particularly important, interesting, or relevant to the area of the topic you want to discuss. As far as possible, try and organise your thoughts into sections, and see if you can link ideas together. tip: it might be that you’ve got two or three different ideas for a topic, and you’re not sure which to go with: in this case, you can use a couple of different spider diagrams to see which works best. Where do the ideas link together most easily, or fall together into neat sections? which question would you be able to answer most fully? 2 sit back and look at your diagram s , perhaps alongside your notes, and work out the main ‘point’ or conclusion you want to make in your essay. The best essays are characterised by a clear line of argument throughout – i don’t really buy the idea that essays should present both sides of a question. I always decide what i’m trying to say the point i want to conclude with, before i start.

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3 work backwards, using the links you’ve made on your spider diagram: what do you need to argue or show to make your point? jot these ‘points’ down in a couple of words each. 4 start to fill out your skeleton with information from your notes, and any extra ideas you might have. If you’re writing a literature essay, it’s crucial that you include some close analysis of passages to support your argument.