With midterm season comes essay-writing season for many of us Arts and Humanities students. Rather than cramming for a multiple choice test, we are combing through texts for inspiration strong enough to craft a thesis. Essay writing is a skill, and university-level academic essays are a whole different language to master.
When I came to Western as a seventeen-year old fresh out of a small-town, public highschool, I didn’t even know the basics of writing academic essays. The structure, grammar, and content was all new to me, and learning how to write in the ways that my professors wanted took time, practice, and quite a few tears (at first). However, three years later, my skill has grown dramatically to create the quality and content that professors respect.
Now that midterms and, for us English students, essays, are crowding our calendars, it is time to snap back into essay-writing mode. Whether you are new to university-level essay writing or reading this for a refresher on what professors expect, I am going to list some of the tips that I’ve added to my arsenal in order to crush these assignments.
1. Getting Started
For all you procrastinators out there (and yes, I am one of you), getting started is the first daunting task to accomplish. It is easy to sit down in front of an open Word document and tell yourself it is time to get started, but typing anything of use is a whole different story. Luckily, after years of procrastinating to the point of sheer panic the night before a deadline, I’ve discovered ways to kick my brain into gear.
READ. That’s it. That’s the first, much easier task to start with. Read the text you’re discussing, read a few secondary sources, and go back through your class notes. Keep a notebook or a highlighter nearby and mark down quotes that interest you. Very quickly you’ll find yourself leaning towards a central idea that can help shape your thesis.
Once you’ve done this, start outlining before diving right into the thick of writing. Although outlining can be annoying, it is not a waste of time — in fact, it will make your writing process much faster. Pick out your thesis, your arguments, and the quotes you want to use to back up each of your points, then plot them out in order. This way, your structure will already be solid before you write the nitty-gritty, and you won’t find yourself staring helplessly at the page.
2. Analyze I cannot stress this enough: analyze the quotes you are citing! A quotation in a university-essay never speaks for itself. It is not enough to list your citation as proof of your argument; you must explain it. Go deep and dig into the structure and the literary devices of the passage. Pick the quote apart and dissect it as deeply as you logically can. You’ll find that your professors often exemplify this in class when they talk for twenty minutes about different aspects of the sentences in whichever text you’re studying. This is what your professors want to see in your writing.
If you are crafting an essay about John Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” for example, and you quote a passage, specifically mention the words he chooses to use, the literary devices he employs, the rhyme scheme, and use those points to strengthen your argument.
3. Use Active Voice Active voice versus passive voice is an either/or that changes from language to language. Some languages love passive voice and others hate it. University professors asking you to write essays in English hate it with a fiery passion I have not seen matched. Sometimes it is unavoidable, and passive voice is the best option. But more often than not, I recommend using active voice whenever it is possible.
Active voice is strong and confident: “Isabella lunged at the palace guard.” Passive voice does not project the same way in many cases: “the palace guard was lunged at by Isabella.” Not only is one more concise, another thing that professors appreciate, but it is more direct.
4. Revise Thoroughly Editing is a tedious job after you’ve spent hours writing your essay. It’s like cleaning up the kitchen after dinner: dreadful and exhausting. However, editing is also incredibly necessary. It is important to give yourself some space after finishing your draft before editing, otherwise you’ll be so used to your own language that you’ll miss many mistakes. Take a break but always return.
Editing will make a world of difference in the quality of your work. Change the font, read it out loud, ask a friend to read it, and don’t hesitate to mess with the structure of your essay. It isn’t enough to do small copy-edits, you need to go through and deeply revise the work. I often turn on dual-screen mode and have my draft in one tab and a fresh document in the other. Then, I go through the entire essay rewriting it from scratch. I’ll copy and paste sections I’m okay with to save time, but I often rewrite major parts of the work, and my marks have thanked me for it.
5. Learn to Cite
Along with not being taught how to write a proper essay in high school, I was never taught to cite one either.. Since it is necessary to avoid plagiarism, you need to take your time citing your sources properly. There are online citation machines that can help, but I recommend going through each of the citations it produces to make sure they include everything they need to in the right format. Just like all technology, these citation websites are not perfect. I use the Purdue Online Writing Lab: OWL, which was recommended to me by several professors at Western, and has an in-depth formatting guide with examples. Citing doesn’t need to be daunting, but it should be taken seriously.
6. Read Your Professor’s Feedback I have had my feelings hurt many times by feedback on my essays. Whether the marker pointed out every small grammar mistake or over-all hated your thesis, reading all the faults in your time-consuming essay stings. Many times, I’ve avoided even glancing at their feedback, but in recent years I’ve discovered that their comments are golden nuggets of information telling you exactly what they want. By forcing yourself to go through the feedback (a process which gets easier over time), you’ll know exactly how to do better on your next assignment.
Many of these tips are easier to write out in theory than to employ, and I still find myself struggling with essays now and then. Although, I can say that these tools have helped me many times, and I am now much more confident when writing academic essays. Hopefully some of these tools will help you as well, and if you find yourself needing more guidance, the Writing Support Centre on campus or your professors themselves can provide more insight. Either way, remember to go easy on yourself. Essay writing is a skill, and you’re learning.