Alright! Now we get to the juicy part! Or the difficult part. Whichever, it’s the part where you take all that knowledge, and all the amazing quotes, you’ve spent however many weeks gathering, and you put it all together into one strictly structured and tightly written package that will impress your professor, or, at the least, get you a passing grade.
Remember to double check the expected word count as the requirements can vary from between 1500 and 5000 words depending on your course and year you’re in. Graduate school essays can run from between 2500 and 6000 words.
Structure
All essays follow the same structure –
- Introduction
- Body
- Conclusion
That’s all simple and straightforward enough. The introduction ‘introduces’ your topic and usually lays out, in the broadest terms, your thesis or answer to the topic question or statement.
The body is the big bit. This is where you use all of those quotes that you gathered in your notes while putting forward all the evidence to support your thesis or answer. Each paragraph deals with a single topic or point. A topic can carry over to more than one paragraph if you have different points to make about it, but you should never introduce more than one topic point in a single paragraph except the introduction. But in the introduction, you’re just stating all the points, you’re not talking about them. So, for the body, one paragraph = one talking point. And you introduce that talking point in the first sentence, then provide more detail and support throughout the rest of the paragraph. If you want to get all deep and philosophical about it, each paragraph is its own mini essay. It has an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Though the introduction is usually only one sentence introducing the specific point you’re talking about, and the conclusion can be the lead in to the next paragraph.
The conclusion is where you wrap everything up in a nice pretty bow, bringing the whole discussion back around to the thesis you stated in your introduction. You don’t want to just copy your introduction, but you do want to restate it in such a way that your thesis feels true, inevitable.
A lot of readers, when reading academic papers, tend to read the introduction, the first sentence of each body paragraph, and the conclusion. Those parts should contain enough information for them to understand what it is that you’re trying to say. They need to be clear, concise, and impactful.
The concise bit is just as important as the others, because in an assessment essay at the undergraduate level, you are give strict word counts, usually with a percentage of wiggle room, often 10% at this level, to either side of that word count where you can be a few sentences short or long. If you’re way under, or over, it’s possible that the marker won’t even bother reading your essay. They’ll just mark it F and move on, because you very clearly didn’t follow the directions.
If you are approaching the deadline and you are way under, you can always ask your professor for an extension. If they’re in a good mood, and if you have a valid reason for the delay, they might give you an extra week to finish. Or they might not. It pays to make sure you leave a good impression on all your professors all the time. If you’re sleeping in class or doing other things to disturb their lectures, it’s unlikely they’re going to feel generous when you come to them begging for more time on an assignment. There are a lot of much better reasons for making good impressions on people, but not flunking out of uni because you couldn’t get your professor to grant an extension because you were drunk in class and spewed all over the person you were trying to hit on has got to be up there.
Content
This is where having a copy of your essay question in front of you at all times really comes into play. While you’re writing, you need to be constantly looking back at that topic question and asking yourself, ‘Am I answering the question?’ Or, if it’s a topic statement, ‘Am I providing the information required in way desired?’
This has been mentioned before, several times, but it stands being repeated again.
If you don’t answer the question,
if you don’t follow the guidelines about length and referencing style and number of quotes,
if you write the wrong type of essay,
it doesn’t matter how good your essay is,
it’s going to get an F.
Keep that essay question at the forefront of your mind all the way through the writing process. It is extremely vital, especially if you’ve been doing a lot of research (which is what you were supposed to do). When you’ve done a lot of research, it is way too easy to get sidetracked into tangents as you follow the bouncing blue bunny down the rabbit hole of fascinating facts. These tangents take up time and word-count. They will have to be cut, or they will cost you points on your grade because, however fascinating they are, they aren’t supporting your thesis. They aren’t helping you to answer the question.
The danger of getting sidetracked is less likely if you followed my earlier advice and put your essay topic statement at the top of your research notes and referred to it while you were taking notes, but it can still happen. Truthfully, it’s better to have way more notes, way more quotes, than you need than way fewer. Some professors have ‘quote quotas’, meaning they have requirements about how many, or how few, quotes you are allowed to include in your essay. This requirement arose because some people don’t include enough quotes, which shows they didn’t do enough research, and some people include way too many, turning their essay into a selection of other people’s words. Neither of these is good. The professor wants you to write the essay in order for them to assess your knowledge and your research skills. You can only show both of those if the majority of the essay is in your words. The essay needs to express your knowledge, supported by facts and academic opinions gleaned from a wide spread of sources.
Do not reference only one source, and don’t reference yourself, or the professor (if you can avoid it).
Referencing only one source shows that you didn’t do enough research, unless, and this is probably not going to be an issue for an undergrad essay topic, there just aren’t any other sources available. This can happen if the topic you’re writing about is brand new, cutting edge, revelatory. But, as I said, you’re an undergrad. The likelihood of you being given an assessment that delves into something that new is practically zero, so find multiple sources and quote from a variety of them. Preferably a variety of authors, too, not just a variety of books or articles by the same author.
You may be wondering why, at this point, I’m belabouring the point about using the right number of quotes from a broad selection of sources. Good for you. The reason is because, at uni, no one cares about your opinion unless you can bring in a quote from an authority in the field that supports your opinion. It’s harsh. But the truth is that, being an undergrad, you don’t have the right to an opinion yet. In the world of academia, you are basically a baby. You don’t get to decide anything, not without the approval (written document) of an authority figure, usually a big shot professor somewhere who has spent decades researching and writing about the topic. Often, even your lived experience isn’t as relevant as a professor’s research, because, despite having lived through the experience, you weren’t thinking about it academically. You are a good interview source for that research professor, but, unless you luck out with your course and your essay topic, your personal experience doesn’t count as an authoritative source.
Okay, so you’ve gathered together a lot of information. You have a whole doc full of carefully referenced sources. And you have a clear idea of what you want to say. Great. Let’s put that all together into one kick-ass essay.
Flow
The first thing you want to do is check the question.
The second thing is to go over those notes and find all the sources that support the thesis you want to write to answer that question.
The third thing is to start fitting all those points together so that they move smoothly and effortlessly from one to the next, building on each other to create the monolithic statement that is your essay.
I’d say, have some idea about how everything is going to fit before you start writing, and, if possible, have more points than you think you’ll need. It is way easier to trim down an essay that’s too long than it is to pad out an essay that’s too short. Too short means you don’t know enough about the topic. Too long probably means you’ve followed one too many bouncing blue bunnies and might have a tangent or two to trim.
So, the key point of this is that you are creating a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece of evidence, every source, every idea, is one of the pieces. And the whole essay, from introduction to conclusion, is the finished puzzle. If you want that puzzle picture to look nice, you can’t just go jamming pieces in wherever you want. You have to make sure they fit. Don’t put a sky piece in the middle of the grassy lawn.
I know that, so far, this probably all feels completely unhelpful. I’m not trying to be. So let me see if I can give you a clearer image than just… create a pretty jigsaw puzzle.
Each of your points, your paragraphs, should lead into the next one like cause and effect. If this, then that. This is where the first sentence of each paragraph comes into play. These sentences are called the topic sentence, and they both indicate, and shape, what the rest of the paragraph is going to be about. You should try to use the last sentence of your paragraph as a set up for the topic sentence of the next paragraph. And it should feel right. Smooth. Like butter on hot toast, or water over slick stone. You don’t want any jarring juxtapositions. Each paragraph should draw the reader deeper into your essay, deeper into your thought process, so that, by the time they get to the conclusion, they’re nodding along and agreeing with everything you’re saying, no matter what their opinion was when they started it. That’s the goal, anyhow. The dream. We don’t always achieve it, but it’s what we aim for. And the closer you get to it, the higher your total grade will be.
Formatting
This could have come earlier in the process. In fact, I usually set up all the appropriate formatting as soon as I open the essay doc the first time. Your professor is going to have a list of requirements for the way they want the essay to look –
- margin width
- font and font size
- information to include in the headers and footers (student ID, class ID, name, assignment name/number)
- location of notes and references (bottom of the page, end of the essay)
- style for any images, block quotes, tables, or spreadsheets, including if you need captions or not
Like I said, I do all this up front, the moment I create the essay doc, which might be around the same time I create the research doc. Doing it that early means you don’t have to worry about it later. Screwing this up can lose you marks because, once again, it shows that you can’t follow simple directions. Setting it up early, and naming all your files appropriately, means you can do it at the very beginning of the semester when you have a little more time to spend on things like making sure you know how to insert footnotes and endnotes and how to inline insert a captioned pie chart. Waiting til the last minute means you’ll be stressed and more likely to screw up something stupid that will cost you easy marks that you could have kept if you’d done it at the beginning. So now you know.
