Month: October 2008

So I’m sure most of us have experienced times in our educational lives where we struggle to get everything done, including studying, writing papers, and just generally getting your assignments done. Writing essays generally require doing research before hand so you can actually get some good content into the body of your paper. However, when things pile up, you just have to deal with whatever takes priority, usually in the form of deadlines. This usually ends up having us leaving essays until the last minute where all the good books are gone and you just lack the energy to do a lot of extra research.

Today, I will tell you how to write an essay, specifically a position paper, assigned one month before in one day and 15 minutes.

First of all, take 15 minutes to write a skimpy outline about what you’re going to do in the essay and send it off to your TA or someone you consider has good editorial skills. Include keywords used in class and in the topic question and redundancy if necessary to give some meat to your outline. Bold stuff to make it seem like you have some important points and type it up so it formats itself and seems more thought out.

This serves a variety of purposes.

1. You actually get your brain to start thinking about the topic for the cramming session to come.
2. Your TA or friend can read and give you constructive feedback. This is usually in the form of “that’s a good start”, or “you really need to get to work” or “this is a joke”
3. You mislead yourself thinking that you actually got some work done but it only amplifies the panic you will feel when you look at the outline later when you actually start to write the essay.

Now for the actual writing of the essay. Start off by sounding very philosophical regardless of the topic or subject. This puts you into a state of deep thoughts. Use generalizations in the introduction (when you have no clue about your topic) so you can clarify and back them up in your body. Identify key people in history, hopefully they’re involved with your topic such as Charles Darwin in your essays about evolution but nonetheless, key people. This makes you feel credible and confidence is the key to finishing this assignment. Then state your position and stick to it. If you had time you could write a long-winded thesis that you could edit but at this point you got to fight for what you believe in with what time you have.

Put in a counter claim to your position/argument and spend about 3 sentences talking about it. This safeguards your essay, gives the marker a sense that you’ve really thought everything through, and basically gives you something to be wordy if you need it.

Throughout the body, define stuff. Regardless of the essay, you will almost always have to clarify and define stuff. This makes the marker realize you are looking at it critically and technically, while still analyzing the question from the bigger picture.

When in doubt, talk about development of our society. The future is all we care about. Talk about how your topic builds onto our society. You’re almost guaranteed to add some meat onto your essay with this, and hopefully some good content.

When you’re really stuck, appeal to emotions and use personal examples. Every marker that you will likely encounter for essays are humans. Basically every human has emotions. Appeal to them. People like to get emotional when reading. That’s what sells the work.

Last but not least, conclude with something that summarizes all the junk you’ve written and make it sound like you’ve made some profound discovery or development towards moving us further to a better future. Leave the technicalities for later, by this point you need a break from all that writing. And that’s how you write an essay in one day.

CHEERS!