How to Write Better Essays

viewpoint and convince the reader that your viewpoint or perspective

is credible’.^1 This doesn’t appear to be a strategy designed to produce

imaginative thinkers with minds capable of suspending judgement as

they think beyond their own biases and preconceptions, so why adopt

such a restricted and defensive strategy to essay writing?

As we’ve already seen, one answer, which makes this approach more

understandable, is that many students come to university bringing with

them a submissive attitude to authority, which encourages them to

believe that to get good grades they must trade facts for marks and

write the descriptive essay, even though they are asked to discuss and

explore issues that have no right answers. At Harvard, students are

warned, ‘When you write an essay or research paper, you are never

simply transferring information from one place to another, or showing

that you have mastered a certain amount of material.’^2

Therefore, to overcome this, students are told they must have an

opinion of their own, which they must defend in their essays. However,

this is just one side of academic work. The analogy of a hill will serve

to make the point. One side, the more difficult inductive part, involves

climbing the hill – analysing the problems and concepts involved, syn-

thesising and discussing evidence and arguments from a range of

sources, and finally, after careful measured thought, coming to your

evaluation. The other side, the deductive part, going downhill, is far

easier, because it is less open. Here you merely have to defend your

view, drawing only upon the material you need to prove it. This is

simpler, convergent, less imaginative. It uses a more limited range of

abilities.

Predictably, then, when we emphasise just this one side, more often

than not, opinion becomes the crude substitute for evaluation. We side-

step the careful process of analysis, synthesis and discussion done in

a context in which judgement is suspended. We merely declare an

opinion, which we then set about to defend.

A debate is not a discussion

In effect we abandon discussion in favour of the narrow intellectual

demands of a debate. A discussion calls for an open, not a closed, mind.

We suspend judgement, hanging a question over everything as we

analyse the concepts and problems involved, explore the full weight of

the evidence, empathise with others, synthesise ideas and evidence

from different sources, and discuss conflicting arguments. In short, we

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