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Contents
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Writing
essays can be a very daunting task. At
first it is difficult to know what exactly is required in terms of content,
format, vocabulary, length and so on. Techniques,
however, do improve with practice,
so do not get despondent if at first you
don't achieve very good results. No
one is expected to run before they can walk. Case
Studies Perhaps
you can identify with one or two of the following case studies of students who
experienced problems with their essay writing, but found ways in which to
overcome them. Student
A This
student always had difficulty in getting his essays started.
After amassing all the information
he needed, and writing a plan, he
found he could just not get going. One
day, as he was writing a letter to a friend in the USA, he realized he had no
trouble getting started in writing his letter: so next time he sat down to write
an essay, he wrote:
Then
when he had finished, he got a pair of scissors and cut off the first couple of
lines. He then had the first draft of his essay, which he then
revised. Student
B Our
second student always found it ways to express herself when talking to people
but as soon as she picked up a pen to start writing,
all her ideas seemed to fly out of the window.
Eventually someone recommended using a tape recorder.
In this way she found she could "speak" her essay, transcribe
it and that this gave a useful first draft, which she could then revise.
(This is also a good idea for students who think faster than they can
write.) Student
C This
student, when writing an essay, used to tie himself up in knots trying to
express a complicated idea, often finding it just would not come out.
He would struggle for hours over just one paragraph, changing first one
word, then another, trying to achieve the required meaning or trying to end a
sentence which would not come out. The
solution he found to this was so simple, he wondered why he had never considered
doing it before. It was to discard the paragraph he was writing and begin
again afresh! This worked
particularly well when he said to himself, "Now what exactly am I trying to
say?" and jotted down a list of points in short simple sentences before
re-writing as a paragraph. Student
D Jane
always had difficulty in finding the right word to express precisely what she
meant. Buying a Roget's
Thesaurus was the best investment she made during the first term of her
studies. Once she had become
familiar with its layout and was used to using it, she found it could supply her
with all those words, which had been on the tip of her
tongue and just out of reach. Student
E This
student was not very good at expressing himself in words and the thought of
writing reports used to horrify him. He
eventually hit on the idea of breaking the whole awesome task into a set of
smaller sub-tasks, and breaking these in turn down into yet smaller tasks, then
all he had to do was to tackle each small task one at a time. Important points:
Keywords are:
You
must first be sure that you
understand what you are being asked to do
in an
essay so that you can gather appropriate information by reading and can
structure your essay. If
in doubt - ASK A TUTOR! |
Introduction
Glossary
of Essay Terms
Essay
Writing
Essays
form an important part of your various courses because they serve as a guide for
important aspects of your reading and they enable you to
acquire information and
present
the information in your own way.