With a simple desire to help, here are some of the friendly advices I would like to share in order to write an essay. It’s worth noting that these are just some tips among a plethora of ideas that can be consulted anywhere (a tree inside a jungle), so I hope the public can take the most advantage of them and better them if they feel so.

Preamble to writing essays

Before anything, an advice to share before writing any piece of work is to think:

  • To think about things you like and don’t like, you aspire and despise
  • To develop those ideas that you like and argue with yourself why you would hate it
  • To think about the counter arguments to those ideas
  • To think how these ideas can be applied to real life and daily activities

Basically, a key to writing a good essay is to choose a topic within a course you chose because it’s aligned with your future aspirations. For instance, if you want to become a linguist in the future and chose something related to linguistics, it would be recommendable you start relating daily activities to concepts you have learned in lectures, id est., ask yourself:

  • Why can I still understand my friends when they pronounce the wrong words? When do they say the wrong words?
  • How are sentences structured in languages I don’t know?
  • Is the English I use in WhatsApp the traditional English I learnt in school?
  • What’s up with LOL, “ain’t no”, etc.?

Another example would be if you want to become a philosopher, look attentively at daily events and extract meaningful ideas and ask intriguing questions:

  • Why do I make friends? Is it moral or not to not have them?
  • Do all of my social circle behave the same? Why did they choose certain major?

As in general, when we look attentively to daily events such as riding a bicycle, watching TV, cooking, being part of a society or doing charity work, deep meaning can be extrapolated, and we can thereafter engage in internal monologues or dialogues with our companions about interesting ideas. In order words be curious as to ask, for almost everything we perceive:

  • What is happening?
  • When is it happening?
  • Where is it happening?
  • How is it happening?
  • What are the implications of it?
  • Why is it happening?
  • What is the possible intention?

We could also get interesting ideas from web sources such as YouTube: fragments of videos related to your subject that can be considered interesting, i.e., TED talks, Veritassium, Kurzgesagt, interesting debates, among others. One can also only type in Google: [insert course name] interesting quotes, and be impressed about the data present.

Ultimately the main reason for doing this kind of mental practice is to not begin writing an essay from point zero. The progress bar can be predisposed with a 10%-40%, and whenever we look at difficult questions, we can get at least a simple answer to it based on what we already thought of.

Brainstorming

There is usually breadth as to what kind of topic or stimulus one can choose. If you are indecisive still choosing about a topic, look at what question you can relate the most and appeal to. In other words, all questions can have those simple answers, but for what question can I explore further and make it more complex.

  1. What is the mind?
  2. What is language?
  3. What are emotions?

For 1. I have seen interesting quotes, such as “I think, therefore I exist”. What does thinking means, or exist means? I’ve seen a TedTalk titled “Your brain hallucinates your reality”; my friends like to hang out and have fun, instead of only focusing on survival like other non-human animals do, so why is this the case? Are other non-human animals able to develop a social media platform like WhatsApp? Since we all have brains, what separates us from non-human animals? Is the mind what allows humans to have WhatsApp?

If 2. and 3. have no more development than 1., one can start writing, and what follows concern the actual structuring of the essay:

Essay structure

Give possible answers to those previous questions, Google simple ideas and define a rough draft, or a backbone for the essay.

A basic structure to accommodate those ideas is as follows:

INTRODUCTION

  • Context
  • Thesis: possible answer to the essay’s question
  • How to aboard the thesis?
  • Meaning of terms

BODY

  • Argument #1 with analysis
    • Author one’s point of view
    • How model X can be applied
    • Implications of definition X
    • Description of experiment and data collected
  • Argument #2 with analysis
    • Author’s two point of view implications + examples in real life
    • Analysis of data and what knowledge can be distilled
  • Counterargument and/or limitations
    • What criticism is behind the points of views?
    • Uncertainty in procedure of experiment and data results
    • Failures of models on certain situations

CONCLUSION

  • Conclusion
  • Paraphrase thesis and arguments concisely
  • Open question to end essay
  • Show passion towards the subject

BIBLIOGRAPHY

  • Coherent (APA format is recommended). I use (MyBib)[mybib.com] to manage my bibliography.

We proceed to explain each one in detail:

INTRODUCTION

Though introduction comes first, it’s not necessarily what should stress the writer, as “it’s always hard to begin”. Therefore, we can break it down as follows.

One can begin writing the context for the question, meaning what is the history of that concept, what are the current debates about it, a simple definition, among others. After that struggle, we propose the thesis, which is a possible answer to the essay’s question, of course, expressed in a very formal, and direct way, which means that it lacks arguments to support it. Sometimes, one can write how will you answer the thesis, meaning, what authors will be appealed, what models will be applied to explain certain phenomena, what ideas will be contrasted and compared to answer the question, etc.

BODY

Whatever is written all depends on the author, so I can only provide some tips to prevent some mistakes:

Structuring

  1. Always juxtapose your thoughts and writings with the question of the essay and the thesis, in other words, everything written must be related to one another and to the questions. Constantly ask: does what I’ve written answer the question and relates to a previous point and a future point I want to make?

  2. A common mistake when writing is that the author wrongfully assumes that the reader knows what the author is referring to when writing. For example, the constant use of loaded terms without defining them, the pushing of complicated ideas without explaining them, appealing to experiments without saying their procedure, among others. For instance, consider: “The results of the Sinner’s box (Reader: what results of what experiment?) shows that language lacks a metaphysical (Reader: how did the author defined language and what is a metaphysical structure) structure to be perceived”. So assume that the reader knows almost nothing about the subject; of course, one shouldn’t fall into the idea that every single term must be defined and every idea should be explained. A useful practice is to pretend you don’t know yourself, or have a friend, to read the essay and let that person explain to you what you’ve written.

  3. In essays, don’t suggest that ideas are dogmas, as it’s not academic, therefore it’s pertinent to explore counterarguments. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean opposing your own views, but also includes complementary views or discuss what uncertainties are present in the work you are appealing to.

Information gathering

There is an infinite amount of data present in the University and Internet, so here is a list of them:

  1. Use operators in Google and search for key terms of the questions. For example, if the question is: what is the mind? Search for: mind site:edu or search for mind in Google Books to get academic articles, and then from those articles identify key terms, authors, quotes, models to search for more. The key is to find uncertainties in ideas and explore those uncertainties.

  2. In YouTube, focus on renowned academics’ summaries of their works to extract main ideas, whether is in TED Talks or any YouTuber that shares interesting notions.

  3. Recall important ideas pushed forward in lectures, and remember the proffessor’s name to explore his/her research. Go to that proffessor’s profile in Google Scholar.

  4. Find papers and track their references, you can try online knowledge graphs which represent semantic webs of papers. If one wants to only skim through a paper, focus on abstract, introduction, some parts of the argument, and future directions. If it sounds interesting, you can read it in-depth such as results, methodology and discussions.

CONCLUSION

Usually, this is the thesis reinstated but with more confidence from the author as one should have already gone through information gathering that allows you to firmly state a backed thesis.

An advice to showcase further interest in the subject is to end the essay with an open question that might stem from the limitations identified in your essay.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FOOTNOTE

All websites, books, articles, etc. that have been consulted should be organized in a systematic way. Microsoft Word’s “References” tab contains all the methods to do that, or as shared above, you can use an online tool like MyBib.

Good luck in your essay!

If you have any feedback, or study tip you want to share, please do so to help each other!

PS: The thumbnail was the output of Microsoft Bing’s DALL-E powered image generator, given the prompt “pen crafting an essay”