advice on writing academic essays? please?
i can’t speak for anyone else and their methodology, especially for different disciplines (i have NO CLUE how you write a hard sciences paper) but here’s what i do
gather a bibliography. what i usually do here is search key terms about the topic i’m looking for on google scholar, jstor, etc. the nice thing about these websites is that they’ll format a citation style for you if you click the citation button. what you wanna do here is basically just skim the paper. you don’t need to read it in a super amount of depth, but you wanna get the general gist of it and the argument it’s making. do this maybe 10-15 times until you have enough sources, then put them, formatted, in a little doc in alphabetical order. at this point, you might not know every single detail about the topic you’re writing about, but you’ll have a general idea of what the relevant information is about it and you’ll probably be able to conceptualize in your head what kind of argument you’ll be making in loose terms.
summarize them in that doc! this is usually a pretty time consuming process. what used to be so frustrating for me in my first year is i would read a bunch of papers and remember what they were saying, but then when i was writing my essay i would pretty much have to type everything from memory, and then when citing facts from it, i would have to manually go back every single time and find the thing i remembered and what page it was from. so what i do here is i summarize all my sources, really in depth, page by page, and after every single sentence i type, i put the page number in a little parenthesis. what this does is it means when i’m doing the writing part, i don’t have to go back and check the papers; i can pull directly from this doc. all i have to do is add the author’s last name and date and the in-text citation is ready-made. so, what i do here is when i’m summarizing my sources, i’m already describing them in academic language. i’m rephrasing the facts and information from those sources in a way that’s already fit for academic writing, to minimize the amount of editing i’ll have to do on it later. so for example, my most recent paper is about whale hunting and the 1982 ban on it. so my notes taking doc where i summarize the readings looks something like this:
the (hurd, 2011, p. ) thing was added later, but everything else is just from reading the paper and taking notes on what it said while rephrasing it into original, more academic terms at the same time
the third part is basically source assembly. i usually don’t write my intro paragraph until the very end. i’ll put some placeholder thing like “Blah whales exist. My research question is [research question]” and finish the intro later. this is because intro writing sucks and you can get stuck in a rut on it, and also because it’s easier to introduce the paper when you know fully what the paper is going to be. here, i pretty much copy and paste a lot of what i’ve already written when i summarize relevant facts, which is why step 2 is so time consuming but really helpful. like now i already have all the factual information about this topic down with in-text citations ready to go. often times you’ll be mixing and matching information from different readings and figuring out what should go where. you probably won’t include every piece of information you summarized in the original doc, but that’s okay
the next thing to do is basically write transitions between these points. here is how this thing relates to this thing. this is usually pretty easy once you already know the information, because it’s just putting stuff you already know in the right order. basically, this is where you add your own context to the information, explain what it means, make transitions between your points. this is also where you might notice you have certain information gaps in your paper, so if you need a news source that confirms something you already know or more context, you know where to get it
then you want to include your own analysis of the facts in a paper, usually. how convincing are the arguments you’ve discussed/summarized? what does any of this mean? what can we learn about it? this is the last large piece of original writing you’ll be doing here, and it’s pretty much just your opinion, but it should be your informed opinion. this is the hot take section, basically. you might be adding these hot takes mostly by the end or different ones in different paragraphs, depending on your topic and structure
then you go back, write an intro paragraph now that you have most of the paper written (here’s some context. here’s my research question. here’s the argument i’m about to make), then write up a conclusion. usually the conclusion is like the ‘so what?’ section. so it’s less a matter of just summarizing the paper, though do that too, and more a matter of saying why this matters. what we can take from this going forward, what are future challenges, stuff like that. tie everything together, basically
finally, just copy and paste your formatted sources, which are already in alphabetical order, and that’s your bibliography!
obviously this is just for writing a first draft. you still wanna edit from here and make sure it all flows. a helpful step for editing is to look at your document on a different device or using a different font so your eyes aren’t skimming past any of the text and you can look at it with fresher eyes. this isn’t a definitive guide or anything, but this is how i do it for polisci papers, so i hope that it can work for other people too!
