How to Write Better Essays

does that mean they are not valid? Generally, I feel a strong pressure to

reflect back the opinions and prejudices of the course team: maybe this

is not justified, but that’s how it feels. I am reminded of what Henry

Beeching wrote in the 19th century concerning the Master of Balliol:

‘I am Master of this College: What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.’^1

Of course, most students know that they should be eschewing this

assumption that their paramount concern is to impress the examiner

by exchanging facts, in the form of references, for marks. But plagia-

rism seems vague and all-encompassing: like the medieval crime of

witchcraft, just about anything seems to qualify. Inevitably, then, they

play it safe and give a reference for anything that might seem to deserve

it: out of fear they are driven into this regressive, primitive form of

learning. In Chapter 30 we will look at the problem of plagiarism and

how you can avoid it without just becoming a recycler of what others

have said.

Creating a new pattern of study

In the next chapter we will set about creating a new, more flexible

pattern of study that will equip you to tackle the different chal-

lenges presented by essay writing at university. But the success of this

will depend upon how much you’re willing to accept the need to

change.

We only ever really learn when we have a genuine need. If we retain

the assumption that education is exclusively about knowing things,

there will be no need to change. The new flexibility and skills in reading,

note-taking and writing will only be tacked on to our present pattern

of study as we go about studying in the way we’ve always studied. And

in time, of course, they will be silently dropped, because in the light of

our unchanged assumptions, they are irrelevant.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that the real joy and challenge of

education lies not in how much we can remember, but in what we

learn to do with our minds. Out of this come students who can gen-

uinely think for themselves, capable of real innovation that pushes

back the frontiers of knowledge. As B. F. Skinner describes it, edu-

cation is that which ‘survives when what has been learnt has been

forgotten’.^2

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