1. What We’re Looking for When We’re Grading
When we look at essays, what we are trying to see is evidence that you’ve come to class and engaged with course material. This means citing course readings and showing that you’ve understood them and can give your own take rather than just summarizing them. If you submit a well-written essay, but it has nothing to do with the course (possibly because you’re recycling work you did for another class) you won’t receive a high grade. Usually graders will look at the intro paragraph, the conclusion and your bibliography in order to get a first feeling of how you’re doing. So, if you make it clear there that you have something substantive to say and you can support it with assigned class readings or examples we’ve discussed, you’re already at an advantage.
An A grade paper will have a clear argument and outline that is easy to follow even by skimming, will use quotes from class readings and possibly add other materials from your own general education. It will do more than repeat class discussion, revealing that you have engaged critically with the class.
2. Basic Features of Good Essay Submissions
A good essay is both interesting and pleasant to read. In general, the more you read for pleasure, the better your style and vocabulary will be. Try to read novels, non-fiction or long form journalism for your own pleasure at least a couple of hours a week. Here are a few general things you can do to write better essays:
- Avoid typos and misspellings. As a New School student, you have free access to Microsoft Office, and you can use the spell check in Word to help you catch any mistakes you’re making while writing. In addition, if you really feel insecure about your writing it might make sense to invest in a Grammarly subscription, which costs around 12$ per month for academic writing.
- Use paragraphs to section your essay. This will make it easier for your readers to follow your train of thought and will force you to clarify your argument. Every paragraph should be a little room in the house of the essay – it has its own function in a coherent whole. You can check if you’re achieving this by giving every paragraph an imaginary title.
- Make sure it’s clear what you’re arguing. Write as simply as possible. In the intro, say what you’re going to say. Ideally, you will be able to summarize in one or two sentences what the essay is about. Why should people care about what you have to say? In the body paragraphs, say what you’ve announced in the intro you’re going to say. Be specific and concise – don’t overgeneralize and use arguments that pertain exactly to what you’re claiming. Usually, there will be a question or a hypothesis (a claim) and arguments to answer or support it. In your conclusion, summarize. Repeat once more what you’ve said and add any comments you have about it. Is there a related question that you couldn’t answer on these few pages? Does your conclusion have any interesting implications for the bigger picture of your topic?
Note: Admittedly, this is a pretty standard and kind of dry way of writing but try to get down this technique before constructing more experimental outlines. Being good at writing this way will help you through university and any jobs relying on written communication.
- Use passive voice instead of using “I” and “me” a lot – it gives away immediately that you are not familiar with academic style. Don’t write things like “when I first read this book, I was immediately struck by…”. Instead, write “it is striking that this book…”. Similarly, show, don’t tell applies to university essays. Don’t tell your graders you thought hard about the readings. Show us by writing something interesting!
- Edit your writing. It’s like cleaning up your room before people come over. You can read the essay aloud to yourself to get a sense of how it sounds.
- Don’t forget about formalities, like quoting and referencing diligently, having a neat bibliography, adding a title and formatting your document. Make sure the line spacing and font are the same throughout the document and the text color is uniform. Use one quotation style. If you get down how to do one of the more common styles (Chicago, MLA, Harvard) well, you’re going to be all set for undergrad. If you want to make your life easier, you can search up an article on Google Scholar and download its citation with a click, or if you think you will continue to graduate school, learn how to use a citation manager like EndNote or Zotero.
3. The basic features of good essay submissions
One of the most frustrating things to read as a grader are unsubstantiated, broad claims. You can safeguard by taking out the most extreme and general things you say or tone them down, but here are a few things that will put your TA in a bad mood immediately:
“Most people would agree…”
“Many would say…”
“In our society…”
“In today’s world…”
“I feel like…”
“Probably…”
“In some sense…”
You get the idea. Graders don’t care about your feelings (when it comes to evaluating your essay at least) but want to see analytical work that you’ve done. If you have an opinion but you’re not sure if you can turn it into an argument, try mapping out the reasons you feel this way about the issue. An argument consists of a premise and a conclusion, which can be connected in different ways. Here’s a couple standard forms an argument can take. Can you substitute in your thoughts?
- Causal arguments argue that A causes B.
- Arguments of analogy argue that A is like B.
- Arguments of sampling or representation argue that because A is X, the larger entity B is X as well.
4. Resources
For clarification of concepts and terms or further information on authors and schools of thought, you can search The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: www.plato.stanford.edu
a) Essay writing tips:
https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/strategies-essay-writing (directory for answers to any more specific questions you might have)
https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/essay-structure
https://www.timsquirrell.com/blog/how-to-write-undergraduate-essays (this one is long but really good)
http://web.mit.edu/holton/www/edin/write/writehome.html (argument construction)
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/writing_in_literature_detailed_discussion/building_an_argument.html (argument specificity)
b) Word and Grammarly
https://cuit.columbia.edu/cuit/software-downloads
https://www.grammarly.com/premium
c) Citation managers
EndNote: https://endnote.com/downloads/ (not free)
Zotero: https://www.zotero.org (free)
d) Citation style guides
Harvard: https://www.mendeley.com/guides/harvard-citation-guide
Chicago: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-1.html
e) Finding peer reviewed sources
www.scholar.google.com (this is your best friend to find research articles on any topic)
www.researchgate.net (these last two are social networks where lots of working academics upload their writing for free. You need to sign up to use them though)