#essay-writing

hmm i think you might have the wrong person lol i’ve never made a post about essay writing before... but i guess i can give my 2 cents, based on personal experience. keep in mind these can be quite subjective and what works for me might not necessarily work for other people–ultimately it’s important to find a methodology that is optimal for you, personally (this necessarily involves some trial and error).

generally, i think the most important quality an essay should have is clarity–both in speech and in the ideas being explored. you can have really original or unorthodox insights about a topic and strong arguments, but conveying them ineffectively will undermine their potency and validity, which can ultimately jeopardise your whole essay. a huge part of the editing and redrafting process for me is just about improving the clarity of my writing lol, i.e. getting it to a place where the points i’m making hit the way i want them to. i’m prone to writing in an unnecessarily convoluted manner so clarity is something i’ve had to work on a lot, and i still struggle with it to this day. you don’t realise how much of a difference it makes until you learn to make the adjustments for yourself... sometimes the only difference between good writing and great writing is how effectively you can deliver your points. this doesn’t mean simplifying the concepts or ideas you’re talking about; it just means simplifying the way you think about them and explain them. rarely do i ever sacrifice clarity for originality–if i can’t make a point in a way that is lucid, then i’ll just not pursue that line of argument at all. it’ll just muddy what i already have. 

of course, being able to convey complexity with clarity requires a lot of practice. it’s not something that came naturally to me–it’s a tactic i had to learn and consciously employ. here are some ways you can improve your writing & your argumentative skills:

read nonfiction, of all varieties (every nonfiction book is like a 300-page-long essay)

reduce your affinity to internet lingo and be more willing to read stuff on the internet that isn’t just soundbites and discursive tropes

practise writing in a way that isn’t shaped by the 140-word limit of a tweet or the performativity of a tumblr post

think more critically. this means being proactive instead of passive in your consumption of media, rethinking your relationship to media, and reconfiguring your brain to engage first and be a voyeur later

learn to think more independently. aka less reliance on what you see on the news, on the internet, or on social media and more self-directed research & reading 

these tips might not sound immediately relevant to essay-writing but trust me, once you instill these habits in your life, essay-writing becomes much easier by default. after all, if you are already in the habit of thinking critically & analytically, writing an essay is just a matter of translating your thoughts onto the page.  

as for the actual process of essay-writing, i’ll say the biggest tip i can give is to do a LOT of pre-emptive research. anecdote: i once had 2 months to write a 10-page thesis on a literary topic of choice. it was very open-ended and there were no strict guidelines, so i basically had to figure out everything for myself, with the help of a teacher to orient me, of course. i spent the first 8-9 weeks doing research. i didn’t start writing the actual paper until like, mid-September (the paper was due Oct 7). but once i started writing, i was OFF. i didn’t even do a lot of planning. i had already done a lot of research and reading beforehand, and my brain was primed to be analytical already anyway, so over the weeks i just naturally absorbed the ideas that the research yielded for me and when it was time to write, i could formulate my own thoughts and arguments pretty easily. the Analysis and Coming Up With Stuff To Talk About wasn’t the hard part; it was the organisation and the structuring and the cogency that i had to expend a lot of effort on. but i made the job way easier by having a robust research document i could fall back on, both for coming up with points and for configurating them. research is planning. sometimes multiple drafts aren’t necessary. i worked and re-worked the same document and never felt the need to start over, because i already knew what i wanted to talk about and how i wanted to talk about it before i started writing. the basic steps:

open-ended essay assignments are the perfect opportunity to explore whatever niche interests that you have, or topics that you have been curious about but never got the chance to delve into in class or in your free time. genuine curiosity and enthusiasm on your part factors greatly into how painful (or not) the research & writing process is going to be. i settled on my thesis topic by going with my gut and choosing something i had already been interested in before i even got the assignment. this reduced my stress & anxiety by like 70% lol. for example: let’s say you want to write about sentimental literature and its pedagogical value. the next logical step is to google “sentimental literature” or “sentimentalism” to get a brief idea of what the big picture is. this means establishing basic definitions, historical context, and the major themes/ideas/tenets of the topic. note these down in a separate document

step 1 naturally leads into step 2: it’s time to get a little more specific with your search terms. sometimes you find an idea from step 1 that piques your interest and that you want to explore further, for example the relationship between sentimental lit. & political consciousness, so you start delving deeper into that sub-theme. this is an iterative process–whatever idea or argument catches your fancy, you chase that line of thought. this is where you start looking for scholarly references. i had 10+ tabs open while i was doing this and cross-examining the articles to look for similarities between ideas, themes, and sentiments that i could draw upon and anchor myself to. i also looked for where academics differed in opinion & viewpoint so i could formulate my own thoughts about the topic. this second step is usually the most time-consuming, because you’re really getting into the specifics and making connections and feeding your brain ideas. if you’re not descending into the academic equivalent of an internet rabbit hole, you’re doing it wrong. likewise, compile your thoughts into the same document as before–note down the ideas that speak to you, and append them with your own takes so you don’t have to do as much thinking while you’re writing later on (you can just refer to what you already have in your research doc)

step 3: consolidation. ideally, at this stage you have a bunch of stuff crammed into your research document. hopefully, you’ve noted down everything and anything that appeals to you–e.g. quotes from specific authors & texts, an interesting line of thought from some random pdf article you found, whole chunks of info from wikipedia or britannica.com–because indiscriminate note-taking (step 2) is key. step 3 is where you start to filter what you’ve got. look through the document and do a quick appraisal of everything that you’ve noted down. make tweaks–e.g. adding stuff or taking out redundancies, combining ideas. then start getting rid of what can’t fit within the scope of your essay. do this while keeping in mind what you’ve garnered from step 1–the core definitions, themes, and historical backdrop. in other words, trim your research. this doesn’t mean simply deleting things that don’t fit; it means doing an evaluation of the research and editing it so that it basically becomes the conceptual & analytical framework of your essay. the skeletal frame, if you will. this helps clarify & reinforce the ideas you’ve absorbed from the process–by decluttering your research doc, you declutter your mind

step 4: sit on this research for a while. don’t go straight into writing your essay. let your brain process & internalise the information it has accumulated over the weeks. once you feel like your brain isn’t so abuzz with Knowledge™️ anymore, you can begin the writing process. at this point, starting your essay shouldn’t be too daunting, because you’ve already done the bulk of the work during the research phase. you should be itching to write, actually, because you want to fill up the page with the hot takes™️ that you’ve developed. the actual writing stage should mainly involve structuring and articulation. do a word-vomit, and try not to exceed the word limit by too much. then backtrack and make the necessary changes

step 5: EDITING. this step mirrors step 3. refine your arguments. rephrase the points you think are long-winded. remove redundancies. trust your reader. keep it simple, but don’t dumb it down. don’t nitpick too much. if possible, get someone to look through the essay for you–fresh eyes and a second opinion can be invaluable. refer to your research doc as much as you need to. if you have to workshop an entire point, it’s fine, don’t panic; you don’t need to start from scratch, bc you’ve got your research handy. be adaptable. find a way to make it work without having to restart. be confident in yourself.

I’m making a point of examining the great surviving tragedies of Ancient Greece. The time was right, I knew, when a Signet Classics edition of Euripides: Ten Plays looked at me invitingly from a shelf in the Sofia Airport bookstore this January. It’s a wonderful pocket edition, and it set me back by three euro. My piece of advice? Never miss out on a brand new book full of Ancient Greek goodness…