If you’ve read the previous two posts on essay writing, you now know about each type of essay they might ask you to write, and what that means. You’ve been warned not to plagiarise anything and been told how to avoid doing so. I’ve told you how to set up a filing system that will save you time and headaches over lost documents. We’ve also gone over the naming system to use with your documents, and touched on formatting them according to the professor’s guidelines.
If you’ve followed all of those steps, you’re finally ready to look at the essay question.
Ideally, during your first class, your professor gave you a study-guide that contains the requirements we’ve just discussed – referencing style (with examples), formatting guidelines, and file naming criteria. Also, ideally, in that same document is a list of all the assessments, along with their essay prompts.
That’s not always the case, though. Sometimes they bring it up as part of their introductory remarks. Sometimes they leave it their TA to deal with all that. And some professors give only a week or two notice for essay topics rather than letting students stress for half a semester. Sometimes your professor will set the essay question and sometimes they’ll provide a list of questions you can choose from.
If you’re lucky enough to get your choice of topics, decide as early as you can.
You’re probably starting to sense a couple of themes here. One, professors do things their own way. It’s up to you to fit yourself to their style, which might mean taking the initiative and asking for information rather than waiting to be told. Two, prep everything you can as early as you can.
You’re going to be under a lot of pressure to produce a lot of assessments, mostly essays, as the semester proceeds. If you get all of this set up in the first week, you won’t have to struggle to figure it all out in the final hours before your essay is due.
The earlier you get all the prep work out of the way, the more time you’ll have to spend on the fun bits, doing the research and writing. Doing research outside the assigned reading list is an easy way to impress professors, so long as you do all the assigned reading, too. Even if you don’t have time to reach beyond the assigned list, you’ll probably find that a lot of the assigned readings touch on your topic. If you’re paying attention from the start, you’ll be able to include all the relevant quotes in your list of sources.
Choosing the question
It’s likely that your professor has given you several essay topics to choose from. This is partly because it’s really boring for them to read a couple of hundred undergraduate essays on exactly the same topic. Most undergraduates struggle to express themselves clearly and coherently, let alone come up with an original idea. Giving all of you different topics to write about ensures you’ll each pick topics you find interesting. This makes writing them easier for you, and marking them a lot more interesting for your professors.
If you’re given a choice, you can’t just pick the first topic you see that sparks your interest. When choosing your essay topic, you need to ask yourself, ‘Is this something I think I can actually do?’ The topic might be interesting, but if it’s asking you to ‘critically analyse’ someone’s theory, you know you’ll need to read a lot of source documents. If your reading speed is on the slow side, or if you’re committed to a lot of school activities, you probably won’t have time to do the necessary research. In a case like this, you should probably pick a different topic unless this one is really calling to you.
When picking the question, choose one that looks interesting and is within your capabilities. You can push yourself a little here, but remember, you’re not taking on this essay in isolation. If you’re doing a full course load, you’re going to be doing four other assignments. All of them will be due around the same time. Then you’ll have another five essays to write and hand in just a few weeks after that. Then there are your exams to prepare for. Just getting all that work done and handed in on time is going to be a significant challenge without you picking the most difficult essay topics off the list, too.
But all this presupposes your professor actually gives you a choice. If they don’t, you’re stuck with whatever topic they decided, and you’ll have to dig into the question even more carefully. In this case your essay won’t be competing with those written by a handful of other students, but with the essays written by every other student in the class. You’ll have to do something pretty spectacular to stand out. Whether you get to choose your question or have to take what the professor gives you, you’ll need to take a close look at the question to figure out the best way to answer it.
Analysing the question
The first step in analysing the topic question/statement is to read it carefully and pick out any key words. The most import keywords are–Discuss, Analyse, Examine, Compare, Review, Assess, Describe, Justify, Evaluate, Define, Demonstrate, Elaborate, Explain, Explore, Identify, Illustrate, Outline, Summarise, Clarify, Contrast, Critically evaluate, and To what extent…
These tell you what type of essay your professor expects you to write. (See the post on What is an essay for more on the different types.)
Secondary key words could be names, dates, or theories. They won’t be limited to just these though, and some topic questions contain key phrases. These secondary key words and phrases will be tied to your subject, and thus should be relatively obvious – e.g. Discuss the primary causes for Ceasar’s crossing of the Rubicon. (Keywords: Discuss, primary causes, Ceasar, Rubicon.) You’ll know all of these if you are studying ancient Roman history. – e.g. Critically evaluate Jung’s theory of the origin of the Id. (Critically evaluate, Jung, origin of the Id.)
Once you’ve used the keywords to work out what type of essay to write and what information needs to be in it, you can think about your response to the prompt. I suggest writing the essay prompt, using the exact wording, at the top of both your ‘research’ and ‘essay’ documents. You can always delete it from your essay before submitting it if your professor doesn’t want it there. Having the prompt at the top of these documents puts the topic right where you can see it whenever you’re working on the essay. It will serve as a constant reference and help you to stay on point. Remember, whatever else you do, if you don’t answer the question, you’ll get an F.
Analysing the question isn’t just so you know what sort of essay to write, it’s also so that you know what sort of answer to provide. I’ve seen too many students lose marks, or even fail, because they didn’t read the question carefully and so wrote an essay that, however interesting or well written, didn’t provide an adequate response to the topic raised or question posed. These are assessment essays. You can’t just write whatever you want and call it good. The assessment isn’t about whether you can write in English, though terrible grammar will probably lose you marks, it’s about whether you know enough about the topic to answer the question, or about showing that you have the skills to uncover that knowledge. This is a prime difference between a language proficiency essay and a university assessment essay.
Just to reiterate, you should carefully read through the question and analyse the topic before you start researching so that you know both what sort of essay you’re writing and what answer/response you need to provide. Knowing what it is that the professor wants will give your research direction, and save you time and effort. Having some idea of what your answer to the question will be will allow you to look for supporting evidence and opinions in the assigned readings. It will also allow you to follow all those lose threads to other, non-assigned texts from which you can pull quotes. Doing this makes a good impression on your professor, and, all other things being good, will probably get you a higher grade.
