A Quick Guide to Essays

Note Taking Tips:

1. While reading, look for anything that catches your attention. Something about it will

speak to you. Pay attention to your emotional response and you may notice this might

be something you think is important, something you seriously disagree with, or

something you want to know more about.

2. Avoid highlighting and underlining it is trivial.

Instead, read a bit and write down what you have learned or any questions you

might have never copy anything word for word. This is the dialogue you are

having with the author of the source.

If you find this hard, read a paragraph, then look away, and then say to yourself

out loud what it meant. Listen to what you said and quickly write it down.

3. Take about 2 3 times more notes than you will actually need for your essay. You need

to know far more about your topic than you actually communicate.

4. From these notes, you should be able to derive 8 10 questions. You will need these

questions to create your outline and form your thesis.

The Essay:

1. ALLOW YOURSELF TO WRITE BADLY IN YOUR FIRST DRAFT

2. When picking a topic, it HAS to be something that is important to you.

Your topic should be formulated as a question you want to answer this will be

your thesis statement.

3. Come up with 8 10 important questions when reading your source(s). If you cant do

this, you havent read enough.

4. Use the best (or all if necessary) of these questions as an outline sentence for every 10

sentences (or about 100 words) of writing you are required to do.

5. Fill in your outline without thinking about sentence structure or grammar. Try to produce

a first draft that is 25% longer than the final product is supposed to be. This will be

condensed later.

6. While answering your outline questions, be sure to indicate where references are

necessary. Fill this in as (REFERENCE) for now and format it properly later on

according to your required citation style.

7. Editing and Arranging Sentences in Paragraphs:

Create a new document and copy your first paragraph under a heading and label

that heading as Paragraph 1.

Ensure that each sentence is spaced out so that it has its own line and also make

sure that each of these sentences is typed in italics.

Underneath each italicized sentence, rewrite that sentence in regular text and do

so trying to be more concise and meaningful.

In the earlier draft, you were told to try to inflate your writing by 25%.

Now see if you can shorten each sentence by 15 25%.

Do not use words you would be uncomfortable using in spoken

conversation. Write clearly at a vocabulary level that you have mastered

(with maybe a bit of stretching to produce improvement).

Repeat this process for each paragraph.

 Create a heading called New Paragraph 1 and copy all new sentences there. Do

this for each of the new paragraphs.

Repeat the entire process again if you feel it is necessary.

You may find that the order of the subtopics within your original outline is no

longer precisely appropriate. Create exact copies of your improved paragraphs

and re-arrange them until the ordering is more appropriate than it was.

Example of a Good Outline:

Here is an example of a good simple outline:

Topic: Who was Abraham Lincoln?

Why is Abraham Lincoln worthy of remembrance?

What were the crucial events of his childhood?

Of his adolescence?

Of his young adulthood?

How did he enter politics?

What were his major challenges?

What were the primary political and economic issues of his time?

Who were his enemies?

How did he deal with them?

What were his major accomplishments?

How did he die?

Here is an example of a good longer outline (for a three thousand word essay):

Topic: What is capitalism?

 How has capitalism been defined?

o Author 1

o Author 2

o Author 3

Where and when did capitalism develop?

o Country 1

o Country 2

How did capitalism develop in the first 50 years after its origin?

o How did capitalism develop in the second 50 years after its origin?

o (Repeat as necessary)

Historical precursors?

o (choose as many centuries as necessary)

Advantages of capitalism?

o Wealth generation

o Technological advancement

o Personal freedom

Disadvantages of capitalism?

o Unequal distribution

o Pollution and other externalized costs

Alternatives to capitalism?

o Fascism

o Communism

Consequences of these alternatives?

 Potential future developments?

Conclusion

Beware of the tendency to write trite, repetitive and clichd introductions and conclusions. It is

often useful to write a stock intro (what is the purpose of this essay? How is it going to proceed?)

and a stock conclusion (How did this essay proceed? What was its purpose?) but they should

usually then be thrown away. Write your outline here. Try for one outline heading per 100

words of essay length. You can add subdivisions, as in the example regarding capitalism, above.

Additional Tips from Reddit

If you have an eight page paper to write: you need to write roughly 16 paragraphs.

o If you write an introductory paragraph and conclusion, that leaves 14 body paragraphs.

o Write down 14 ideas that support your thesis, rearrange them to make sure there is a

natural thought progression, and before you know it you had an 8-page well-structured

essay.

Intro and conclusion: these should be last things you write.

o In the course of writing a paper you will almost definitely reach conclusions or think of

new ideas that didn't occur to you when you set out.

o If you get too attached to your original intro and thesis statement, you risk fudging your

results to fit your hypothesis, when you should really make your thesis fit your findings.

o Your introduction should be written like you're trying to explain the paper to a friend

who doesn't know anything about the topic.

o Your conclusion should be written like you're trying to explain to your professor why

your paper is important.

 Topic sentences: It should be possible to read only the first and last sentences of each
paragraph and still understand what your paper is saying.

o Not only should they capture the point of the paragraph, they should indicate how one
paragraph leads to the other.

Organizing research: when doing your reading, keep a word document open and transcribe
passages from the books or articles, with page numbers.

o Not just quotes you intend to use, but the key points in every source, so that you can

review them easily without going back to the book every time.

o A good writer will stop occasionally to summarize succinctly what he's just said. Collect

these key sentences in your notes and you will always have an easy guide to each of

your sources, not to mention that simply writing it all down will help it stick in your

brain.

o 90% of what you've copied out won't make it into your paper (I sometimes wind up with

30 pages of notes for a 15 page paper), but you will be able to easily copy-paste quotes

into your paper, and remember how they fit into the original article, so you don't risk

misinterpreting.

SEER Method:

o State the main point.

o Example that backs it up.

o Explain how it backs it up/why it matters.

o Restate the main point, considering all the EE points you covered.