How to Write Better Essays

answers that have to be traded for marks. Examiners should be more

concerned with the way we have analysed the issues, discussed them,

played devil’s advocate, used evidence to support our arguments, and

come to a measured evaluation that’s backed up by our discussion.

In the Sociology Department at the University of Harvard, students

on one first year course are left in no doubt that the course’s main

objective is to develop a particular range of abilities and skills that are

central to sociology as a discipline:

This course is intended to help students to develop an understanding of

and ability to do social science analysis – to appreciate what a research

problem is, how to pose it, what alternative answers might be, how to

evaluate relevant evidence, and generally to understand the logic of estab-

lishing knowledge about how society works.... The emphasis in the

course is on developing writing skills, the ability to formulate and design

research projects, and the ability to critically evaluate empirical work in

the social sciences.^2

As this shows, most university departments now realise that you don’t

learn how to think like a scientist or a historian by simply learning

scientific or historical facts. In literature courses, recognition of this

has led universities to allow students to take their set texts into the

examination room. This has largely done away with that horrifying, yet

futile, annual spectacle of thousands of candidates frantically memo-

rising huge tracts of text for the exam, all of which they will certainly

forget within three weeks of taking it.

In the next chapter

With this in mind, we have to create a new pattern of study in line with

these changed assumptions. In the next chapter we will look at the

importance of this and what we can do to bring it about.

Notes

1 Eric Eve, A Guide for Perplexed Students, 4: Tutorial Essays (Oxford:

University of Oxford, 2000), pp. 3–4.

Available at: http://www.hmc.ox.ac.uk/

2 Mary Waters, Sociology, 128: Paradigms of Social Inquiry(Cambridge, Mass.:

University of Harvard, 2000).

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