essays

How not to go over your word limit

Recently, I wrote about beating writer’s block and taking control of your Internal Editor.

But some of us don’t have that problem.  At times, writing takes place effortlessly.  Before you know it, you’re hundreds – if not thousands – of words over your word limit.

photo by Schockwellenreiter

Word limits are there for a reason.  If 1,500 words are required for an essay, it will be marked down if you submit double that.

Inability to edit an essay is just as dangerous as a writer’s block.  It’s when your Internal Editor has gone on holiday, or when you’ve told him to sod off completely.  Bad move.  Get the Editor back, sharpish.  If the essay has gone way over the word limit and you don’t think you can cut anything out of the essay, you’re wrong.  Plain and simple.

Here are a few ways you can claw things back:

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11 ways to take control of your Internal Editor

Our thoughts are fluid and continuous, but essay style is perceived as a particular state that should generally be adhered to. In writing, you have to ignore the rules to get the best results. Once you’ve coaxed the words out of your head and experienced all sorts of crazy comments, only then should you craft what you’ve got into the strict essay style.

We all have an Internal Editor inside our head. The Editor doesn’t like what we write. And we don’t like it when our work is criticised.

photo by thorinside

That’s why writing can be so difficult. All the jarring moments where a word won’t fit; time spent searching for a word that’s on the tip of your tongue and just won’t come out; worrying that you haven’t explained yourself properly.

The Internal Editor has the cheek to pick you up on these findings straight away. How would you feel if someone was stood behind you, tutting or laughing each time they disapproved of your work? The Internal Editor does that. It’s your job to ignore the tuts and laughs until the Editor stops bothering you.

You have many ways of doing this. The most direct way is ‘JUST WRITE’. But the Editor likes to play on your confidence too, so you need to find other ways of working before this can work at the click of your fingers.

So before fitting all the words in your essay together, it’s essential to work in varying ways to find how you handle your work best. Try these suggestions:

  1. List important points and keywords that you want to focus on. Already, it’ll give you some platforms to begin from.
  2. Write in a stream of consciousness. Let it take you all over the place. Don’t stop and think about it, just let your mind create all sorts of weird and wonderful associations about the essay.
  3. Have a conversation. Imagine you’re talking to someone else and write the conversation up. You could be speaking to your lecturer, to one of the main people your essay is about, to a critic whose work you agree with. What do they think? What opinions do you think they would have about the question(s) you’re trying to answer?
  4. Begin with concluding remarks. If you already have an opinion, get that written down first. Then you can work backwards and look to support your belief/hypothesis/plan.
  5. Attempt an Abstract. How would you sum up your work in a couple of paragraphs if it was already finished?
  6. Don’t just type into a word processor. Use a pen and paper, write on an e-mail screen, write it in Facebook, go from A4 pad to post-it notes. Everything concentrates your mind in a different way.
  7. Create a mind map. Visualise the topics, the line of questioning, the key arguments, the facts, the things other academics have thought about it. Branch off until you have all sorts of avenues you can explore further.
  8. Find quotes that interest you on the subject and work around them. Get your inspiration from others!
  9. Make a short plan of themes in your essay (e.g. introduction, study of words, criticism of structure, analysis of other theories, back stories, further arguments toward your ideas/opinions, conclusion). A structure is a clear indication of what you want to write, even if it isn’t the essay itself. Structures are far less intimidating than staring at a blank page.
  10. Initially treat the essay as notes. If you’re better at noting down information, treat your first drafts as an exercise in note-taking. Your internal editor probably doesn’t disturb you so much when you’re writing notes from a book or a lecture…
  11. Don’t think about word count, don’t think about quality, don’t think about punctuation, don’t think about ANYTHING! As I said above, the most direct Writing Block is to just write and see where it takes you. The editing comes after the writing, not before and not during.

In time, the Internal Editor will discover you’re not going to listen to their complaints until the moment you ask to hear them. That’s when you’re in control and your Internal Editor is working for you; not the other way around.

Good luck shutting the voice up!

Brilliant Beginnings, Marvellous Middles, Excellent Endings

When a piece of work presents itself to you, what are your reactions throughout the creative process? Unless you’re a consistent master, at least one of these problems will have cropped up along the way:

  • You just can’t start on it. You just dwell on it and ignore it for days;
  • You begin enthusiastically, you reach your conclusions convincingly, yet the bulk in between those two posts feels like a drag;
  • You get the majority out of the work out the way, but never fully close the door on it. The end never comes.

Let’s take each point individually and go through five ways you can improve each section:

Finding a brilliant beginning

photo by Clearly Ambiguous

1. Stop worrying about it – The more you build up starting, the worse it’ll feel. In no time, you scare yourself into never wanting to look at another piece of work again. Your fears just get in the way of progress. The more you deal with getting the work started, the easier it will be to crack on with the rest of the project.

2. Just start! – No matter how little you’ve planned, and regardless of how little you think you know, just start writing. At this stage, you don’t need to be convincing and you don’t need to treat the work like a final draft. Even if you discard 90% of what you write later, that 10% you keep could be where all the drive and magic comes from.

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5 Study Traps I’ve Fallen Into Myself

My time at university was not without its fair share of study traps.  Today, I list the five biggest issues for me while I was working toward my degree:

Trapped (photo by winjohn)

1. Not making the time / Ignore my own time-management advice

Before I entered Higher Education, time-management was not one of my fortés.  Fortunately, I made a 180-degree turn at uni and was always proud that I could manage my time well.  Lots of free time, loads of fun to be had that didn’t get in the way of study…things were good.

Nevertheless, there were occasions when I relaxed too much and stopped focusing on my time.

That was a huge mistake.

Without the momentum pushing me along, it was as if time no longer mattered.  It did, of course, because deadlines would creep up and nights out started to feel like guilty pleasures.

Luckily, I didn’t go much further than this, because the jolt of realisation was enough to shock me into getting back on top of my plans.  It wasn’t a comfortable feeling, though.

2. Complete the easier & more fun tasks before anything else

I bet we all like to do this from time to time.  You’ve got a list of jobs to be done…some will take about two minutes and others should be a bit of a laugh.  Once you’ve completed those, it’ll look like you’ve completed so much work.  So you launch into those tasks and ignore the more pressing ones.

I liked to do this kind of thing.  It made me feel as if I was achieving a great deal, but it ended up leaving all the crappy tasks to be done.  Worse than that, they all had to be done together, so there was no light relief at the end!

It’s no use putting the less enjoyable stuff off for later…and later…and later…

To be honest, this was one trap I fell into a few too many times.  Even now I might feel the initial buzz of finishing the better work first so it’s all off my list and giving me a fuzzy feeling inside.

Terrible, isn’t it?

3. Put too much importance on trivial matters

It’s probably a bit of an ego thing.  From time to time, there would be a short test or a piece of work for a seminar, worth no marks and not requiring more than a brief amount of consideration.  But if it worked with my way of thinking, I would go into overdrive and spend way too much time on preparation.

This was usually because I already knew about the things the tutors were trying to get us to understand.  To go mental on a project with no real reward at the end, based on something that I didn’t need to learn any more about, was like a double whammy of pointlessness.

To an extent, this trap is a combination of the first two traps.  I wasn’t spending my time productively because I was dealing with the fun stuff to the detriment of everything else.

When I realised this was going on, I decided to craft essays that were important to get good marks in and immerse myself in writing something quite different.  If certain ideas gave me so much passion and interest, it was time to take it to my essays and presentations.

When you find something hitting you so positively, make it a focus of your more important work.  That way, you’ll be driven and the work will be a lot easier to handle.  Also, the marks you get should reflect your passion.

The most pointed example of this is when I wrote an essay that argued how a well-known critic of the Industrial Revolution was actually praising the revolution for what it had achieved.  It was a cheeky little essay and I didn’t believe it in the slightest, but I enjoyed the subject and wanted to deliberately take things one step beyond the obvious.  It was one of my highest marked pieces of work from my time at uni.

Trival matters may spark your interest, which is a great thing, but the best bet is to develop those sparks into something that you can get some recognition from.  It’s a shame to put your heart and passion into a 15 minute seminar conversation that will be forgotten about as soon as it’s over.

4. Ignore the course notes & tutors plans

I kick myself for not having focused enough on some of my tutor’s booklets.

At the beginning of some modules, we would all be presented with a book of notes and questions and various helpful pointers for the weeks ahead.  While most of us would make use of these books in seminars, they gently gathered dust the rest of the time.  If I was writing an essay, I would rush to the library for texts and check the Internet for other scholarly essays.  All the while, the booklet, with it’s ready information, would sit on a shelf, unloved.

Some of the books didn’t even get the luxury of a shelf…

You go to their lectures and listen to what they’re saying then (hopefully!), but as for the notes that you can read up in your own time?  They just get briefly glanced at, but not much else.

But these books are a pointer for you to see where the tutors are coming from.  If you want an idea of what questions your lecturers are going to set for exams, it’s important to see how they have set out their tips at the start of the module.  It may become apparent that they regularly refer to particular texts and take a certain set of ideas as a specific starting point all the time.  Of course, it’s up to you to develop your own opinions and ideas, but it’s a lot easier to do that if you know what kind of direction the tutor is headed.

5. Let temptation get in the way

I call this ‘Internal Peer Pressure’.  It’s like there’s someone inside, coaxing you to go out each night and ignore the work.  Your mind starts whispering, “There’s no time like the present…get everyone over for a laugh.  You can get the work done tomorrow instead”.  You see a magazine you bought earlier and want to read it.  And since you’re only reading a magazine, you might as well listen to the new music you’ve got.

Suddenly, you find so many wonderful things that you could be doing instead of the work on your desk.

Now, I must admit, I frequently enjoyed a lot of my study.  Nevertheless, it didn’t stop other temptations pulling me away on a regular basis.  It’s so easy at university.  Always stuff going on, never a quiet moment (even when it appears quiet, you know there’s some fun just around the corner).  It’s so good, it’s a nightmare!

My way of dealing with this trap was to turn it around.  It’s a simple trick, but it requires a lot of willpower.  If you can manage it, tell yourself that you certainly will do those wonderfully tempting things…but only as a reward for doing your initial studying.

When you’ve finished what you need to do, the rest of the night is yours.  You’re bound to enjoy it a lot more without the threat of work in the background.  And you’ll be partying guilt free!