#our:guides

[stvdybuddies]

1. Familiarize yourself Really get to know the work that you will be analyzing. Whether it‘s a poem, short story, or play, make sure you read it over a number of times. It also doesn’t hurt to do some background research into the author and his/her writing styles. 

2. Annotate While reading, annotate the work and jot down some of the formal language you noticed. For example, the use of literary and formal features, themes, characters, tone etc.  Here is a link to some of the basic and most well-known literary devices:  https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/575/01/

3. Theme/Topic  Choose the theme that you want to focus on (this may be a general, universal theme or specific literary features). The theme/topic may also have been assigned by your teachers. 

Essay topics can range widely in specificity:

Romantic and familial love in Shakespeare sonnet #   

John Milton’s use of paradoxes and juxtaposition to create a stark contrast between Satan and God in Book one of "Paradise Lost"

4. Find supportive evidence Once you know your theme/topic, make sure you have enough supporting evidence to write a good essay. If not, you either want to go back and find more, or change to a more easily supported topic. 

For example, you don't want to write an essay on a poem's use of metaphors, when all you can find are examples of the use of imagery.

5. Outline Writing an outline really helps when writing any essay. I like to use a certain layout that I find is really effective in helping me structure my ideas:

Topic sentence: Evidence #: Literary Feature: Importance (of the literary feature):

6. Putting it all together Really take advantage of your outline when writing your essay! With all your ideas laid out, it’s really about putting your thoughts into coherent and fluent sentences. 

Tip: Make use of transition words, as well as complex, compound, and simple sentences, in order to make your essay really flow

7. Revise, revise, revise.  Nobody can write a perfect essay on the first try. Editing may include asking you friends to peer edit, or even your teacher/professor for suggestions.

8. Take a step back If you have the extra time, it helps to leave your essay for a while (a day), before coming back to it. Sometimes taking a step back can really go a long way.

[stvdybuddies]

Hi hi, I was wondering if either of you have any experiences with internships & wouldn't mind giving some general tips on them? thanks! (love your blog a lot btw)

Thank you so much! The following is our general advice (: We hope this helps! (we don’t know why it’s so pixelated, sorry)

[stvdybuddies]

1. Research! This is a key part of your essay-writing process and is your chance to really get to understand the topic you will be writing about. Always make sure that you are looking at credible resources; news sites such as CNN, BBC or The New York Times can often be good places to start! Remember to write down the information you find useful onto a word document. Start by grouping your information by the source you found it in, this way you won’t lose track when you are citing in your essay! Here are some sources that might be helpful:

NY Times Topics: this is a good place to go when you are struggling to think of topics for an open-ended research paper Solutions: database of  responses to social problems ProQuest: you may be able to find some good publications on your topic (: Easybib: many of your probably use this already to cite your sources

2. Sort! It may be helpful to color-code the groups of information so that you can keep track of where all the data is from (it will speed up the citing process). Also, don’t worry if you still don’t know how you want to organize your essay, this step may be able to help you out. 

Once you think you have all the data that you need, start organizing your research by grouping all the similar points into one general topic or idea. If you notice some outliers that don’t seem to fit anywhere, you can put them together and figure out where to put them later on.

3. Outline! With all your information sorted and divided, it is time to write-up an outline for your paper. The structure of your outline can differ depending on your teacher/professor and your paper topic. However, this is one of the most common outline structures:

Intro: basic info on your topic + thesis that covers what you will discussing Topic #1 Topic #2 . . Conclusion: overview of your points + discuss possible deeper implications

4. Draft! If you have written a structured and detailed outline, then writing the draft will be much easier. Flesh out the outline that you have prepared and just let your ideas flow. Don’t worry too much about wording or grammar the first time around, just try to get your ideas out onto the paper (well…document).

5. Revise! Yay! You’re almost done! Now, go over and edit your draft. Really pay attention to the flow, coherence, and organization of your ideas. This is also the time to look for any grammatical errors. 

Tip: make use of transition words and try to vary your sentence structures to really let the essay flow.

6. Final! It is always a good idea to have a friend help you look over your essay. They might notice things that you hadn’t picked up on! 

Tip: Try to write your essay early so that you can leave it for a few days and come back to it (sometimes this can really make a difference!)