Essays can seem really daunting when all you have is a title or theme and a word count to fill. As someone who has written many, many essays in her largely humanities-based subjects, I’ve come up with a method that makes sure I cover everything required of me and don’t get lost or overwhelmed
1. Exactly what is the essay about?
I start every essay by sitting down with a blank sheet of paper with the title or topic at the top. Then, I make a small list (normally around 5 items for a 3000-word essay) of what I need to cover. This takes 2 minutes at the most but really gets the ball rolling. These are not specific points, but are more like subheadings or sections of the essay that you will later fill.
For example, if I am writing about uh the successes of Augustus’ building project in Rome, my five sections would be like this:
If you are writing an academic essay where you are doing wide reading and research about the topic, instead of using unreferenced class handouts/lecture notes, then you need to do a WIDE range of reading. When people only use a few sources or papers, you can definitely tell just by reading it. They won’t be offering many viewpoints, they are more like to ‘waffle’ on and the argument they put forward will not seem convincing.
This can often be the most time-consuming part of the essay and may well drive you slightly insane when you have a stack of books and journals peppered with post-its. I make sure I cover every possible aspect of the sections I laid out in the first step, and make referenced and organised notes so I can easily go back and pick out relevant information when it comes to actually writing the thing.
It ends up looking something like this ^^ - it might seem quite crazy and my notes might not quite make sense, but they are ideas I am taking from the text, fully referenced and ready to slip into the sections whenever I need them. (These are some of my notes for an essay on treatment of the dead in Christian/Pagan Europe, by the way)
3. Bulk out those sections
It’s time to merge the first two steps. I start to build ideas from my reading and link together evidence or arguments I have found to create small arguments or points I can pack into the skeleton plan I made at the start. This starts off as a sort of template, just adding some indented bullet points to my sections. Eventually, as you start to copy and paste your notes from your readings, it can get so bulky, that you only need to rearrange some points and add in grammar to actually turn it into your essay!
^^ Start of filling in points, again from my Christianity/Paganism essay - you can see my original sections and how I have begun to add in the points I will address.
^^ Here is where I have bulked it out even further, adding in exact examples and evidence, again fully referenced to save me time when I’m finishing off the essay.
4. Fill in the gaps and write the ruddy thing!
As you can see, I don’t really sit down with a blank page and just start writing. I feel like I get too easily lost or my argument loses steam that way. While that might work for some people, I’ve found this method works every time, regardless of what subject I’m writing for and whether it is a humanities, arts or scientific essay.
– I hope this can be of some kind of help, although it may just be an incredibly bulky and rambly text post (clearly not written with my template method!)
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