3. How to write better essays

It’s been very difficult to fit in any summer reading so far this year – I have 4 jobs and a translation dissertation to work on – but I was browsing in the university bookshop the other day and couldn’t resist How to write better essays (2nd edition) by Bryan Greetham (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). I’m always on the lookout for excellent books I can recommend to my students, fully conscious that the time we spend together in the classroom talking about academic writing (and doing a paltry number of exercises) is never enough.

The book is organised around 5 stages of writing:

1. Interpretation of the question
2. Research
3. Planning
4. Writing
5. Revision

I really like the fact that he devotes no fewer than 10 chapters to interpreting the question. On the 8-week insessional writing courses I teach in the autumn and spring terms, ONE 2-hour session deals with this (and of course we have to fly through it). He presents a 3-step technique for analysing a concept and discusses the importance of flexibility, i.e. using the right strategy to achieve the right outcome. I have already decided to rewrite some of my teaching sessions to incorporate some of what I’ve read.

He also provides outstanding advice on note-taking, probably the best I’ve ever read. He advocates training students to use a combination of linear and pattern notes: typically, linear notes for analysis and structure, pattern notes for criticism and evaluation. This also encourages students to read texts more than once, for different purposes.

I found his analogies quite useful. Here is an example: ‘Reading someone else’s work is like entering an unfamiliar city: you can get lost easily, you’re dependent upon others to give you directions and, even worse, you really don’t know why you’re there in the first place, unless somebody tells you’ (Greetham, 2008, p. 148). Such a vivid situation is undoubtedly far more comprehensible to students than the standard advice ‘Make your ideas clear to your reader.’

For some reason, Greetham is highly critical of teachers who ask their students to write thesis statements – ! – and this threw me for a loop at first. But after reading his examples carefully, it seems that he and I just have different definitions of what a thesis statement is. He seems to see it as the student’s (presumably uninformed) opinion, tacked onto the introduction just for the sake of it, ‘an opinion of their own which they must defend’ (Greetham, 2008, p. 185), whereas I define it as the overall argument of the paper, which the student has selected after careful consideration of the evidence. I think this section could be slightly confusing for students, likely to contradict the advice on thesis statements they are receiving from their instructors. It is the first time I’ve ever seen such an ‘attack’ on thesis statements – I wasn’t aware that instructors disagreed over what the thesis should express, so this was a helpful insight: we must always clarify our use of terminology! Writing instructors are obliged to show students plenty of contextualised examples of what they mean by thesis statements – deductive and inductive, direct and implied. In my experience, the thesis statement is one of the most difficult components for a novice writer to grasp, yet once they do grasp it, the organisation of their ideas improves immensely.