How to Ace that Essay Pt.1

With the impending end of the semester coming upon us we are faced with one of the greatest challenges most university students will have to face: “the dreaded term paper”. But fear not! The Student Success Centre Team is here just in the nick of time (yes the nick of time is this early in the year) to give you some tips on how to handle your essays and mid-terms.

1. Give yourself plenty of time to plan and organize your essay.

STORY TIME!

In my third year of university I was in a sociology course that required an essay every 2 weeks. While I did love the class I dreaded the essays, especially because I was a fairly weak writer (or so I had always thought). I had always been one to leave essays to the last minute leaving me with little time to research or form proper ideas. Deciding that I really wanted to do well at this class I did something a little different from my norm.

On the day the essay was assigned, I came up with a topic and did some initial research, pulling out pieces of information from the articles that supported my position. This took me a grand total of maybe 2 hours tops (for the short 3 page essay assigned at least). What this allowed me to do is not only get started early, but it gave me the time to let the ideas bounce around in my head when I was not working on the essay. When I did come back to form and outline or actual start writing I had tones of material to work from, or I had deeper questions to return to my research with. I had never received so many B+s or As on essays in my life!

So to summarize this first step: Get started early – that doesn’t mean you need to bang out a draft on the first night, but come up with a topic and find some research right away. This will allow you to have the ideas bouncing around in your head for longer. Also by breaking an essay into parts, it becomes easier to do. You don’t just sit down and work on an essay till it is at a certain level of complete, but rather you finish one part then come back later for the next. Which leads us to the next tip…

2. Know how to break down the parts of an essay.

It is far too common that a student sees an essay single task -“today I am going to work on my essay) rather than breaking it down into parts- “today I am going to make my outline for my essay and brainstorm a thesis” (sound much less daunting doesn’t it?).

There is an old saying that goes – “how do you eat an elephant?” “One bite at a time”. The same goes for an essay we can turn a dauntingly large task in to something manageable by breaking it down. We tend to procrastinate less when the tasks are smaller and are accomplishable in a single reasonable sitting (and no 6 hours is not a single reasonable sitting…)

Now the breakdown of an essay can vary from student to student, but I am going to give you an outline of what one very basic breakdown is:

1) Pick a topic – Brainstorm
2) Research
3) Organize the ideas
4) Make an Outline
5) Write the rough draft
6) Write a good copy

1) Pick at topic and brainstorm

After the essay is assigned sit down and figure out what topic most interest you, you want something you can really sink your teeth into and enjoy writing about. HINT: if you wouldn’t like talking about your essay topic to one of your friends, you might have picked the wrong topic. Your topic should involve a relationship of some sort. By that we mean that it should be a cause and effect relationship, a relationship of elements or a comparison and contrast.

One of my favorite essays was for my neuropsychology class in which we had to watch a movie about an individual with a mental disorder and write about whether or not the disorder was accurately portrayed in the movie. I choose “One Flew Over the Cuckcoo’s Nest” and I picked Jack Nicholson’s lobotomy as my topic. Here we see a good example of a topic – we have a compare and contrast topic between the actuality of disorder and how it is portrayed in the movie, and it was something that I was highly interested in. I had to cut the essay down I had so much to write about.

Brainstorming is essentially you just writing any ideas you have about the topic and about how to make connections between your topic and the literature. Write anything and everything down. If it is a bad idea you are more than likely going to know that it is once research starts, but its better to have something on paper that might be

2) Research

Now that your essay has a topic and some brainstormed ideas, it is a lot easier to approach the research part of the essay as you know what you are looking for. This is surprisingly the easiest part of the essay writing process. While it can be time consuming, if you have the direction of already having a topic and brainstormed ideas research and finding papers becomes a lot easier and faster. As you research your topic, copy paste out parts of the articles that relate to your topic on to a separate word document along with all the bibliographical information on the top of that page. This will essentially be a form of “highlight” and also a way for you to track back where you got your ideas from so that you can cite them properly and avoid plagiarism (make sure to have one page for each source to keep them organized).

3) Organizing your ideas

Now that you have your research done, along with supporting information on a separate word document, you can begin to organize your ideas into categories. These categories will later become your paragraphs. Make sure to also look at the how the categories are related to each other, it is these relationships that will become the transitions between the paragraphs.

In my essay about lobotomies and Jack Nicholson, in my first paragraph I wrote about the history of lobotomies and whether or not it was realistic that he would receive a lobotomy during that time period. My second paragraph was about the reasoning behind the lobotomies and how likely it was that they would give him a lobotomy considering the circumstances he was in. The perfect transition in this case was talking about the historical context of why lobotomies became so popular, thus connecting history and reasoning together.

4) Make an outline

It is at this point you can look over all the information you have gathered and organized and make a thesis statement. In tomorrow’s blog post I will be going over thesis statements in more detail. The thesis should reflect all the main ideas in your paragraphs though.

Check out this sheet for help in forming an essay outline. Outline Sheet

5) Craft a rough draft

The idea here is to begin to flesh out your essay and get your ideas on paper in actual sentences and paragraphs. I try to make my rough drafts as carefully as possible as if I was really writing a good copy.

6) Good copy

In the good copy I re-read what I wrote down in my rough draft first and see if there are any glaring mistakes that need to be addressed. After that, I re-write (not edit) my essay in a new document. I do this bit by bit, allowing me to look at how I wrote my essay the first time and by re-writing the essay it allows me to ensure that the essay comes out cleaner and that each sentence is not just me spitting out what I can about the topic but rather paying attention to how it contributes to the essay as a whole.


And there you have it, the format for an essay!



Expect more guidance on how to write en essay tomorrow as we continue our journey into University essay.