Essays

• Approaching essays
• Understanding the question
• Introduction
• Main body
• Conclusion
• Presenting your essay

Approaching essays

Why do many of us, when we have an essay or seminar to research, go to the library, read dozens of books, make detailed notes, and only try to knock all that material into shape the night before the deadline? The first thing to do when researching any kind of project is to think about what kind of information you want, and why.

Think about how you usually approach a creative project - or plan any other aspect of your life. There may be some external factors, such as how much time or other resources you have available, which you take into account from the start. There will also be more specific decisions to make, some of which will involve research. But you are unlikely to start by collecting every piece of information you can find and then narrowing this down at the last minute. Instead, most of us engage in a continuous dialogue, however unconscious, where each stage of finding out generates new questions and new decisions, until we arrive at a satisfactory resolution.

Whatever the question, most essays will have a common basic structure. They need an introduction, a main body (usually divided into sub-sections) and a conclusion.

Understanding the question

What is the brief? An essay question is rarely, if ever, an invitation to find out and communicate everything about a given subject. The wording of the question will usually specify what kind of approach you are expected to take. Underline the key words and try to work out what type of answer is implied in each case. For instance, if you are asked to compare two things (whether artworks or ideas or explanations), then the essay will need to be structured around that comparison, rather than a description of one followed by a description of the other.

Even the neutral word 'discuss' implies a logical consideration of the arguments on a particular issue. If what you are being asked to discuss is a quotation, then you may need to put it in context - who said it, when and what was it about - but the main focus is likely to be on unpicking the assumptions embedded in the quote, and weighing up the arguments for and against.

With seminars you may have a broader brief but you still need to think about what the purpose is - an introduction to new work for the benefit of the whole group, perhaps, or discussion of a specific problem where you can assume everyone is familiar with the background.

Stating the purposes of your project in writing right from the start will help you to keep them in mind and avoid a lot of wasted time.

For a downloadable table explaining what words mean in your assignment titles, click here: INSTRUCTION_WORDS.doc

The introduction

This is where you set your reader's expectations, by identifying the central problem or issue that you will be dealing with, and indicating how you plan to go about exploring this. This first impression is important. A good introduction can reassure your reader that they are in competent hands (and convince your tutor that you have understood the point of the question). Even for a short piece, it is useful to give a brief outline of the way you have organised the essay, so that your reader knows where the argument is heading. (It should be clear from all this that you can't write your introduction until you have the main body of the essay in a more or less final form.)

The main body

The structure of this will be influenced by the demands of the particular essay question (see What to do when faced with an essay topic on the Researching Essays page). But it is unlikely to contain more than 3 or 4 main sections, each of which should have their place in the argument clearly signalled, and will themselves be sub-divided into paragraphs. As mentioned in Effective Reading, each paragraph should deal with a single theme or idea, which will probably be indicated in the first sentence.

Working to a plan has many advantages, although some people prefer to start writing wherever they can, just to get going, and then sort it out later. Either way, the final piece should be carefully constructed so every point is supported through argument or example, and its place in the overall structure clearly indicated to your reader.

The conclusion

In the conclusion, you should summarise the main points of your essay and pull it all together. Your final section should show how you have answered the question set or (where you had a free choice) that you have addressed the problem you identified in the introduction.

Don't forget to include proper references and a bibliography. Visit the 'Referencing' section of this site for more on this topic.

Presenting your essay

Legibility. The minimum requirement is legibility. Even if you are not required to type your essays, they must not be difficult to read. Anything that slows down communication will make your ideas seem less interesting to the reader (though tutors do try not to be influenced by poor handwriting). Avoid solid blocks of text that may be hard to decipher. Double spacing will help, and so will leaving an extra gap between paragraphs to make them stand out more clearly. If your spelling is poor, leave enough time to check and correct it.

The document. Remember that tutors may have lots of essays to mark in a short time, so make it easy for them. Essays should be written on A4 paper, on one side only. Write your name, course and year and the title of the essay on the front page. It's sensible to number your pages and hold them together in a way that allows the pages to be turned easily. (Some clip binders need extra wide margins if they are not to swallow the first or last word of every line.) Stapling the top left comer is OK, but paper clips have a nasty habit of getting lost - disastrous if that leaves a heap of disordered, unidentified, unnumbered pages! You should leave sufficiently wide margins for tutorial comments, which are designed to help you with the development of your ideas and your writing. For the same reason don't put individual pages in plastic pockets.

Illustrations. Illustrations may form part of your argument, and should be planned along with your rough draft. They don't need to be in colour if that would be too expensive - black and white photocopies are usually OK for 1st and 2nd year essays. Be selective, and make sure that they are clearly related to your written text. Think about where to place them for maximum effect. Whatever you decide, all illustrations should be properly numbered and captioned, and you should use these numbers for reference when you are discussing them.