essays

Why Your Essay Is Still Useful & Important After Handing It In

An essay is for life, not just for the semester.

Yes, you thought you could put that essay at the back of your mind, especially now it’s been marked and you didn’t get the marks you were hoping for.

But the last thing you should do is shelve that work and forget it ever happened.

Those pieces of paper contain your own work. Your sweat and toil. So if you could have done better, or want to do better, then you need to pay attention to your previous labour and what has become of it. For an insight on your essays, look at these 7 tips:

  1. Digest the feedback from your tutor – It’s for your own good. Don’t just moan and tut at your grade. Don’t make excuses or tell yourself that the tutor doesn’t know what they’re on about. Now is your chance to see what you could have done better, or read where you didn’t apply yourself. Put your pride to one side and take in the comments. I gained a lot of valuable help by doing this throughout my degree.
  2. Keep an open mind and take it easy – While it’s important to take in your feedback, it’s not so important to obsess over your actual marks. The more you worry, the harder it becomes to push forward with your academic development. What you need to do is take a relaxed approach to the results. Were you strong in one area and weak in another? Was a particular sentence or theory highlighted with a positive comment? You shouldn’t just make note of areas for improvement, you also need to focus on when you did the right things. With a bit of balance, you’ll find it a lot easier to cope with the less effective parts of your work.
  3. Read your essay again and see what you think – When you take a fresh view of your work from your own perspective, are you happy that you handed the work in? Are you so impressed with certain passages that you think you can’t have possibly written them yourself? Do you want to give yourself a First, or a Third? Be as honest as you can. You will either come to a greater understanding of why you received the mark you did, or you will wonder why you’ve not been uncovered as the greatest writer in the world. If it’s the latter, then you need to take your head from the clouds and get a better understanding of what’s needed in an essay (and read the next tip!).
  4. Have a one-to-one meeting with your tutor for more in-depth feedback – If you can do it, arrange to spend some time with the tutor who marked your piece and see what they would suggest about improving your style, your ideas, and whatever they believe you can improve to pick your mark up. Some tutors actively encourage this, while others keep quiet and need a bit of encouragement themselves. If you can get them out of their shell, you may find out a lot more than anyone else on your course. Don’t give up, because a little bit of extra effort can make a big difference.
  5. Reasonably question your result/feedback – If you still can’t understand what on earth’s going on and you seriously believe your masterpiece has been marked far too low, why not ask for further information and clarification? But be reasonable. Don’t fly off the handle and don’t be cocky about things in the hope of making a point. Your reasons for asking why you got a particular result and feedback are more for you to get a grasp of what you missed and to understand the actual marking process a bit better. You can write the wittiest comments and funniest lines, but if it doesn’t cut the academic mustard, you’ll still not get the best marks possible.
  6. Enjoy your good grades, but keep striving for more – That is to say, don’t be lazy! If your marks improve and the essays grow in quality, that doesn’t mean you’re home and dry. I took my eye off the ball for one of my course modules and ended up with a rather poor mark for the last essay on the module. The rest had been corkers, so I stopped thinking about it as clearly as I should have been. Never wise!
  7. Make notes – Next time you’ve got an essay to write, will you remember what you learned from past feedback? To get the most from past essays, note down what you want/need to improve, make a plan of how you can enhance your essay’s structure based on previous, more muddled writings.

jump (photo by gozdeo)

Top 10 Tips for Tougher Times – on Scholastici.us

Last week, Gideon at Scholastici.us had a busy Week of Hell.  From time to time, we all have bad moments when the work doesn’t seem to end and you get surprise exams and essays sprung upon you.  In response to Gideon’s news and tips on how to cope, I was typing away a comment on the site that became a bit more detailed than I’d imagined it would.  So instead, it is now up as a guest post on Scholastici.us:

Top 10 Tips for Tougher Times – Scholastici.us

You should check Gideon’s site out if you haven’t before.  It’s full of awesome tips on your academic productivity and aimed directly at those studying.  That probably includes you if you’re reading this!

Writing Essays – Don’t Fool Yourself

Studying Late

I’ve seen it so many times.

I’d ask my mates if they wanted to go out and do something. One would say, “I’ve got an essay due in tomorrow by 10 o’clock.”

“How much have you done so far?” I’d ask.

“Well, I’ve got some of the quotes I want to use, and I’ve photocopied half a chapter from one of the books in the library on the subject, so all I need to do is write the essay tonight.”

“So you’re going to sit down and write an essay from scratch in the 15 or so hours you’ve got before it needs to be handed in? Are you even going to get any sleep?”

“I doubt it! I’ve got an essay to do, remember!?”

I shouldn’t have always been so surprised. This type of conversation happened regularly. With lots of different people. Rather than work steadily through an essay over the time period set, they were using a dangerous ‘last minute’ method so the ‘punishment’ lasted as little time as possible.

I don’t know why this method of working won’t go away, because:

  • It’s not useful
  • Your grades will suffer as a result
  • A high dose of stress is never a good thing
  • It gets in the way of reality. Everything stops for this essay.

Don’t kid yourself that this is a good way to work. In fact, don’t kid yourself that it takes away the stress in the long run.

Say you have an essay to complete that requires approximately 1500 words. Let’s add that you have about a month before it’s due in. That’s 30 days to play with.

Here’s what you can do with that time:

  • Make a few very brief notes on what you think your answer would be. Total time shouldn’t be more than about 20 minutes. It’s just to get your mind working.
  • Get down the library just before or after a lecture (so it’s just another part of your day, rather than a forced need to be somewhere). See what books are there, take out any relevant books and photocopy any snippets you think will be helpful. Total time will depend, but you’d be doing this at some point anyway, so you might as well get it out of the way quick, while it’s fresh in your head (and before everybody else has taken the books out that you wanted…)
  • After digesting your research, see if it’s changed your viewpoint to answering the essay questions? If so, spend another 20 minutes or so roughly sketching how you would now see the finished essay.

Hopefully these elements can be done in the first few days of being given your assignment. It should already put you in a commanding position. Next:

  • Try to write an introduction and a conclusion. It doesn’t need to be perfect, because you can make any changes later down the line. Total time = 1-2 hours (possibly quicker if you already have a strong arguement/opinion in your head already).
  • Now you’ve got a clear path, take the research notes you’ve made and look for quotes, passages, names and references that can help strengthen or prove what you’re trying to argue. Total time depends on how much background research you’ve got, but it won’t be too long and you can even do it in quick bursts of 10-15 minutes when you’ve got a few free moments.
  • If necessary, go back to the library and find more good quotes and references. This is optional and you may feel you already have enough to go on.

With all this sorted, you can now work bit by bit on the last thing:

  • WRITING!

Some people work well with a word limit. Whether you set 150 words a day, or 500 words, just try a few short jabs and you should quickly be on the way to a full work.

Other people work better on time limits. Rather than spend a stressful 10-20 hours writing an essay just before it’s due in, it’s good to give yourself lots of sessions, somewhere around 30-60 minutes each time. Once you get over the worry that you’ll be obsessing over your essay all the time – exactly what you’re aiming not to do – you should realise after a few sessions that the work is naturally progressing. With your initial concern over, it shouldn’t be a problem for your future essays.

At some point, with your arguments written up and about the right word count, you’ll need to focus on making what you’ve written as good as possible.

But just think, you wouldn’t have had that chance if you only used one shot at writing the essay in a tired and hurried state.

So instead of using a huge and inappropriate 15 hour writing binge at the last minute, split it into little chunks over the whole time you’ve got.

And if your style works best when doing it all in one go, PLEASE don’t do it at the last minute. Try to make your binge much further away from the deadline. That way, you can still spend an extra hour or two ironing out the creases.

It’ll be worth it for your grades AND for your sanity!

Literature