How to Write Better Essays

It’s more than likely that most of these oversights come about

through poor organisation. If we start working on our essay just days

before it is due to be handed in, we’re likely to cut corners as we take

notes and gather our material. At this point it’s all too easy to blend

the author ’s ideas in with our own, thereby overlooking the need to

cite the source. Organising our time, as we did in Chapters 17 and 18,

is the most effective way of minimising this danger.

But there are other things we can do, too. In Chapter 12 we exam-

ined the importance of actively processing the ideas we read and note,

not only taking out structures, but criticising and evaluating the ideas

we read. This, too, can minimise the chances of an oversight. Not only

does it reduce the amount you’re likely to borrow, but more important,

you will integrate the ideas into your own thinking, imposing your own

distinctive organisation and structure on them.

However, as we saw in Stage 1, this, in turn, depends upon inter-

preting the question in the first place. Having analysed the implications

of the question and revealed not only what you know, but the ques-

tions you want answered in the texts, you can avoid being dictated to

by your authors. Armed with your own ideas, you’re less likely to adopt

their ideas wholesale.

Even so, as you note down material from your sources, you can still

take simple, practical steps to avoid oversights. The most important of

these is just to mark out clearly in your notes the ideas you borrow, to

distinguish them from your own. For example, it will help if you can

put the material you borrow from your sources in a different colour, if

not on different sheets of paper, or even in different computer files.

For similar reasons, and to save you time when you come to search

for the details of a reference, record at the top of the page the title of

the text, the author ’s name, the page numbers and the date of publi-

cation. This will not only save you the nightmarish stress that comes

from trying to track down a single reference to a quotation, or an idea,

that you took down hastily, but it will also serve to remind you that

you are working with a source. This is often all we need to take more

care to separate our ideas from those of our source, and to record accu-

rately what we borrow.

In the next chapter

Now that you know how to avoid plagiarism and how to decide which

of your sources you need to cite, you can turn to the techniques

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