Basic advice on essay writing
What follows is a slightly edited version of the essay-writing advice handed out by Dick Hudson to students taking Foundations of English Grammar.
The main thing is to write clearly and in a way that will make it easy for
the reader to follow your argument. If you have three arguments for some view it
will be excellent if you say "I have three reasons for believing this." One
way to help me to follow these points will be to use numbered paragraphs,
or bullet points. But if you prefer to use continuous prose (preferably
clearly signposted with "first .... second .... third" or "the first
argument is ...; Another argument is ...; and the final argument is ..."),
please do. In a longer essay, use section headings to structure the text.
One of the most important skills you need to develop during your time here
is the ability to write FOR THE READER. This is rather different from what
you may have learned at school, where the reader was the teacher, who
supposedly understood everything you could throw at them. In the world of
work things are very different - you're often writing for people who have
very little time, limited ability to understand and even more limited
willingness to spend time battling with your writing. The writer has to do
most of the work, and the reader is at liberty to stop reading at any time
that the going gets too hard. As a reader you know how you react to badly
written stuff; you have to remember this when you're writing for others.
University is a half-way house to the world of work, where you learn to
write for the reader. The good news for you is that (unlike The Public or
an employer) we can't just throw your writing in the bin - we have to read
it; but the bad news is that we give you marks, so we can reduce your marks
instead. So anything you can do to make your work easier for us to read is
worth doing:
- ALWAYS read it through looking for mistakes and bad phrasing, and fix
them; if you can't be bothered to read it, why should we?
- DON'T try to impress us by using obscure words or academically complex
sentences; too often these alert us to the lack of ideas and facts.
- Don't be afraid to go back to the beginning and start again - that's
often easier than trying to plough on from a bad start, and the experience
of writing the first version will make the second version much easier to
write.
Further information
Apart from the information you can find on our Study Skill Pages, you can also find some model essays (American style) on the following sites - but
of course none of them is about linguistics, so they'll just give you an idea of
what academics are looking for in a good essay:
www.essayedge.com/graduate/essayadvice/samples/
http://www.essayedge.com/promo/samplework.shtml
http://web.uvic.ca/wguide/Pages/SampleEssaysExpos.html
http://members.tripod.com/~lklivingston/essay/sample.html