By henry on february 17, 2010 below is an essay that i wrote for my undergraduate class last semester, providing them with my doubtless idiosyncratic ideas about how to write good political science essays. As well as multimarkdown its native format , latex and rtf in case someone wants to play around with it e.g. Feel free to suggest improvements, point out grammatical errors or typos etc in comments, or indeed to comment generally on good and lousy writing in undergraduate papers. Cross posted to the monkey cage this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution noncommercial share alike 3.0 united states license. Leo tolstoy famously observed that happy families are all alike every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Had he been, he might have observed that undergraduate political science papers are subject to a different logic.

Really good papers are unique each has its own particular thesis, style of argumentation, body of empirical evidence and set of conclusions. They draw on the same evidence garbled versions of what the professor has presented in class , are organized according to similar principles of incoherence, and all wend their eventual ways towards banal conclusions that strenuously avoid making any claims or positive arguments whatsoever. What it can do, however, is help you avoid some of the most common pitfalls of undergraduate essay writers. You can surely avoid being a very bad essayist, and you can very likely become a better essayist than you are already. What follows is a short set of suggestions, accompanied, where available, with cautionary examples drawn from online essay mills.

read the requirements for the assignment

this suggestion may be taken as insulting because it is so obvious still, it is commonly ignored in practice.

The professor usually drops some very strong hints about what she is looking for when she assigns a piece of writing. For example, if you are asked to write a term paper on a problem of international cooperation, you should ensure that your term paper explicitly focuses on a topic that a involves cooperation, b has, at the least, some international aspect, and 169 is potentially problematic. In these cases it is obviously best to ask the professor what she is looking for it is often better to ask via email, to ensure that you have a written explanation of what the professor wants that you can refer to later. If you are trying to write an exam answer , you may want to be quite clear in saying how you are interpreting the question. For example, you might want to start by saying in this answer, i interpret the phrase international cooperation to mean if your interpretation is a reasonable one, this places the onus on the professor to either read the essay according to your interpretation or to justify at least to herself why not.

avoid data dumps

poor essays very often ignore the question asked in a quite specific way. The student spots some topic in the assignment that seems familiar, and immediately sets about writing an essay which tells the professor everything they know about that topic, in no particular order. Universities encourage or, at least, they should encourage students in the social sciences and liberal humanities to criticize, to analyze, and, ideally, to think. Mere demonstration that one possesses a disorganized body of knowledge on a topic, and is prepared to inflict this jumble upon the professor in printed or worse handwritten form, suggests that this encouragement has fallen on untilled ground.

cut to the chase

undergraduate essays frequently begin with an extended session of throat clearing irrelevances and vague generalities. The onset of computers on the general population has given a boost to the economy in the worlds market. People who werent much aware of the world became drawn to computers, which in turn brought about the internet, connecting the world all over. Everyone who owns a computer is logged on to the internet and this has made the world seem smaller. No one has to wait for the postman to deliver the mail, but instead one can just connect to the internet and right away, you got mail. This, like many other essays that i have corrected on the political consequences of the internet i sometimes teach a course on this topic begins with a paragraph that has nothing whatsoever to say about the politics of the internet.

Academic Essays Online

Instead, the papers author sees the word internet and grabs desperately for banalities that he associates with this word. Alternatively, students sometimes state and re state the question in a manner intended to suggest that they understand it, without ever providing anything so provocative as an actual answer. The internet is a wonderful place for entertainment and education, but, like all places used by millions of people, it has some pecularities that lead to a lot of talking and arguing over, should the internet be censored? most of people who use the internet are furious about the censorship on the internet. The issue of whether is it necessary to censor the internet is being argued all over the world. It sets out a short, pithy question that the reader might hope will be answered in the paper. The second sentence restates the first, garnished with a couple of irrelevant commonplaces.

The third sentence suggests that there is controversy surrounding the topic of internet censorship a safe guess, given that the writer has been asked to write a paper about this controversy. The writer evidently knows little or nothing about the essay topic, and is trying to conceal that fact. Still, many essays do begin with weak and meandering introductions that do not address the topic of their paper. This is your best opportunity to grab the readers attention and to persuade her that you have something interesting to say. By the time the reader has finished reading the first two sentences, she should know which question the essay addresses.