How to write an essay ...

‘Writing as thinking’ and ‘writing as assembly job’

Once you’ve produced a rough plan for your essay and done some targeted reading, you’ve already done quite a bit of thinking. Now you can begin to make a start on assembling. Collect your reading matter for the essay and spread it around you. Locate any notes that you’ve made, your annotated photocopies, and your books and articles bristling with Post-its. See which of them you can fit under the headings or subheadings in your essay plan. Revise your plan if necessary.

Another thing you can do is this. If you have some flip-chart paper stick your plan in the middle of a sheet and your Post-its and notes around it, and draw lines to show which of them are relevant to particular sections of your essay. Now stand back and look at the result. For some sections you may have more notes than you can use: think about which ones to select. (Yes, it can be very painful to discard material that you have worked hard on. Could you attach it to your essay as an appendix? Or might it come in handy when you’re revising for exams?)

If for other sections you find yourself short of material, you have to plug or bridge the gap – or revise your plan again. From the scanning you did earlier, you may know which books or articles contain material that you could use for this purpose, and where exactly to find it. If not, identify the relevant key terms and scan for them to locate the material you need. When you come across it, take some time to think about its significance and how to use it.

Now it’s time to get down to some serious writing: the assembly job. You can work on sections in any order. You may want to get some or all sections written in note form, and then polish the whole thing later. It’s up to you: there is no one right way of doing it. But don’t under any circumstances spend a lot of time on writing the perfect introduction before you can see where the essay as a whole is going.