How to Write Better Essays

at the end of this section of your essay, when you’ve dealt with all the

implications. Alternatively, it may come at the end of the essay, if this

is more appropriate. As we will see when we examine the role of the

conclusion, this is often the most appropriate stage in which to bring

the various strands together and reach a measured evaluation based

on the strength of the arguments and evidence you’ve considered in

the essay as a whole.

3 The evidence

Given what we have just said about the development, the evidence

should present few problems. Obviously, if the development of our

argument is clear, the relevance of our evidence should be equally clear.

We will have a much better idea of the sort of evidence we need, to

support and illustrate our arguments in the paragraph.

The problems come when we revert to the assumptions that

tell us the only thing worth anything in education is knowledge

and facts. Then we can become obsessed with impressing the exam-

iners with our knowledge by presenting a wealth of facts irre-

spective of whether they’re relevant or not. The paragraph becomes

overloaded, the facts are out of proportion with what they ought to

be to support and illustrate our argument, and examiners become

confused about what we’re trying to do. They will assume that either

they have missed something, or the structure of our essay has broken

down.

Nevertheless, in virtue there can also be vice. There are some stu-

dents who, realising that they should not be taking authorities on trust,

that they should be analysing, criticising and evaluating them, jump

from a statement of the problem in the topic sentence to evaluation,

without any attempt to analyse and discuss the issues. As a result,

because there has been no development, the evaluation is usually

neither measured nor thoughtfully considered.

In effect they’ve convinced themselves that the only thing of any

value is opinion – their opinion. As a result they fill up each paragraph

with a series of unsupported claims, for which they provide neither

analysis, nor argument, nor, in our present context, any evidence. In

most examiners’ minds this extreme of unsubstantiated opinion is

probably worse than the other: blind acceptance and description of so-

called right answers.

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