There are different types of essay. At School, you may have to write discursive essays – which involve giving your opinion on a particular topic. At University, however, you must write academic essays – which involve constructing arguments using academic research (from e.g. books and journal articles). Many University students have good subject knowledge, but struggle to adopt the formal conventions of essay-writing. To compound this issue, degree courses do not typically prepare students for writing essays.
Read more: How to write an academic essayThis article is a step-by-step guide on how to write an academic essay. The advice in this article applies to all levels – from Undergraduate to PhD – and it applies to all subject areas. I organize this article as follows: (i) Understand the task, (ii) Plan your essay, (iii) Find relevant sources, (iv) Read and take notes, (v) Write up your essay, and (vi) Review your essay.
1. Understand the task
Many students gloss over this simple (yet deceptive) stage. They skim-read the essay title and jump to conclusions about what their essay should be about. You should read the essay prompt carefully and highlight important words. For each essay, there will be (i) a general topic, and (ii) a specific focus. It is vital to respond directly to (ii) – but at the same time an examiner must believe that you have a solid understanding of (i).
One of the most important words in any essay prompt is the strong verb (a verb is a ‘doing word’). This tells you what you need to do in the essay. Do you need to discuss (i.e. explore a topic from different viewpoints)? Do you need to evaluate (i.e. judge the effectiveness of a given approach)? Do you need to argue (i.e. present evidence in support of a particular position)? In short, the strong verb in your essay prompt will inform you of the approach you need to take.
2. Plan your essay
Many students understand their subject matter, take effective notes and yet struggle to write up their findings. But the writing-up stage should be the easiest. If it isn’t, it means something has gone wrong. Invariably, there is a problem with the essay plan. Many students begin their research before making an essay plan. It is easy to spot essays that have been constructed in this way: they tend to lack clear structure; they often include irrelevant information, and the conclusion is probably not forceful enough. You must plan before you read – to ensure there is a single thread of argument running through your entire essay.
Here is how you should plan an essay. Imagine you are preparing to read an essay that has your chosen title (without any prior knowledge of the topic). What questions would you have about the topic? What information would you need in order to make sense of the essay? Those questions must be answered by your essay. Some fundamental questions you need to consider are: (i) What is the purpose of your essay (choose a strong verb)?, (ii) How will your essay achieve this goal? (iii) What will your essay include? (iv) What will be omitted and why? (v) How will your essay be structured?
3. Find relevant papers
Many students complain about the time it takes for them to produce an essay – and most of this time is consumed by research. But it is possible to cut the research time drastically – provided there is a clear plan in place. The essay plan should essentially consist of a series of specific questions, arranged in a logical sequence. This means that – instead of spending ages reading around the topic of your essay – you can search for book chapters and articles which each pertain to a specific question in your plan. This helps to ensure that your essay will have a clear structure.
Your two priorities during the research phase are efficiency, and relevance. For any topic, there will be seminal research (i.e. paradigm-shifting research which served as a starting point for lots of related research). Take some time to identify the seminal papers in your area of study. These tend to be book chapters and articles with lots of citations (i.e. lots of other researchers have cited them when producing their own work). Google Scholar will enable you to find related papers and to see citation counts. Alternatively, you could attempt this manually – by using the reference lists of a seminal paper as a roadmap for your own further reading.
4. Read and take notes
To reiterate an earlier point: each book chapter or article you read should respond specifically to a question stated in your essay plan. But do not read the whole article thoroughly before deciding if it’s relevant or not. Start by skim-reading the abstract, the conclusion and then possibly the methods section. If the article turns out to be relevant, you must note down the full citation (so you don’t forget to do this later, or in case you lose the article). In reality, there is no clear reading phase – as you should take notes or record your thoughts as you go along.
University tutors tend to assume that students know how to take notes. But note-taking is an under-valued skill, which requires conscious instruction and practice. There are many good YouTube videos available on this topic – so I do not dwell on it here. Suffice it to say that we should acknowledge the importance of pre-reading. This involves making predictions about the contents of a particular text. In the case of essay-writing, the pre-reading stage would involve posing questions which you hope the text will answer. In this scenario, reading does not become a time-consuming, aimless activity. Rather, the reading process involves seeking out specific pieces of information.
5. Write up your essay
By this stage of the essay-writing process, you should have a plan (which consists of a series of questions in a logical sequence) as well as properly referenced notes (which correspond to each question of the plan). Your next task is to turn these notes into well-formed sentences and paragraphs. Your notes may contain a lot of direct quotations. You must use as few direct quotations in the final essay as possible. The trick here is to just keep specific words and phrases in quotation marks; the rest can and should be paraphrased. This technique is known as embedded quotations – and you must learn this to secure the highest marks.
The writing-up stage should be straightforward – provided you have followed a clear plan. Nevertheless, you must pay special attention to your paragraph structure. You must structure your paragraphs according to the acronym PEEL. P stands for point (begin your paragraph with a short topic sentence which serves as an introduction to the paragraph). E stands for evidence (here you will need to provide a quotation and / or a citation). E stands for explain (here you will need to contextualize the evidence you have chosen). L stands for link (here you will need to form a bridge between the current paragraph and the next). Each paragraph should only contain one main idea – but all paragraphs should be linked.
6. Format and review
Each University department will have guidelines for how to format an essay. You should be told about referencing styles, font sizes, margins and the like. If the formatting guidelines are flexible, however, I recommend adopting the following. Select ‘no spacing’ and then Arial pt. 12 with a line spacing of 1.5 and a margin size of ‘moderate’. You should leave a blank line space in between each paragraph (and do not indent your paragraphs). Direct quotations should be enclosed in single quotation marks (italics is not necessary). If your quotation extends beyond one line, you should format this as a block quotation (i.e. as its own paragraph, indented and single-spaced).
After you finish writing and formatting your essay, it is best to wait a day or so before you review it. This ensures that you check your work with fresh eyes (you are more likely to spot mistakes this way). The advice that is often given at this stage is to read through your essay at least twice. First, read the essay backwards to check for technical accuracy (i.e. spelling, punctuation and grammar). Pay close attention to sections of your essay where have relied heavily on sources – as you need to avoid accusations of plagiarism.
Conclusion
I have marked many student essays. It’s frustrating to see that so many capable students miss out on high marks due to not following an effective method. It’s also frustrating that there is often no time on undergraduate degree programmes to train students in the right essay-writing method.
Students tend to hate writing essays. They often complain about the time it takes them to produce one. Moreover, they often complain that their mediocre marks do not reflect the effort they put in. In fact, writing an essay is fairly straightforward and it needn’t take very long. The trick is to follow the steps mentioned in this article. Many students waste too much time on the initial reading phase. The most important piece of advice I can give is this: plan your essay before you start reading.