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:


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