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Essay writing
Many of the assignments you will write as a student of linguistics will be dataanalysis
questions. In order to get the right answers for these questions, you
may not need to write very much, and what you have to write is likely to be constrained
by the questions you are asked. In answering such problems, it is often
a direct disadvantage to launch yourself into connected prose: if you say more
than you are asked for, you may start divulging your ignorance. It may even be
the case that you are not asked for further comment because your teachers
know that you have not yet reached the stage where you can be expected to give
suitably informed further comment.
At some stage, though, you will have to write a real essay, a task which seems
all the more scary because you have rarely been asked for sustained argument
in this subject area before. What is more, your notion of an ‘essay’ may derive
from high school or from notions that have been inculcated in different subject
areas: anthropology, history, literary studies, philosophy. You may feel that you
do not quite know what is expected in linguistics, and you may suspect that it
is not quite what is expected in some of these other areas.
There are innumerable books and self-help packages, as well as tertiary-level
courses, whose aim is to teach you ‘to write’. That is not my aim here. Those
programmes may or may not have something to offer you – the best of them
will definitely have something to offer whether you are a beginning beginner or
a famous and published author. Here my focus is on matters which might be
specifically required in linguistics.
Youwere probably taught in school to plan an essay. If you were any good at
writing essays, you probably found such advice tedious and tendentious: you did
not need to draw a plan, you had it all in your head; the best way to discover your
plan was to read the finished essay and see what plan you had in fact used. So a