Laurie Bauer - WordPress.com — Get a Free Blog Here

183 ESSAY WRITING
theses, it is probably not: there you might need to define some basic terms, to
set out the background to the problem to be treated, to justify a discussion of
the topic, or to indicate that there is a genuine problem to be solved. While any
of these may be useful in an essay, undergraduate essays are usually so constrained
in topic and in length that there is little room for this kind of material.
What you should certainly not do, either in the introduction or in the
conclusion, is try to relate your discussion to ‘life, the universe and everything’.
Your essay topic should be specific, and your introduction and conclusion
should relate to that specific topic.
Writing and rewriting
How good an essay do you want to write? If you really do not care, then the first
thing you put down on paper is presumably good enough. If you do care, then
the first thing you put down on paper is rarely good enough.
Different people work in different ways to do their writing, and there is no
simple correct way for you to work. Some spend a long time in initial preparation,
getting a quite detailed plan of what they will say (and even how) before
they start writing. Others start writing, and then go back as they realise that
gaps have arisen. Some combination of the two approaches is probably a norm.
But whichever way is your dominant approach (and it may vary from one essay
to the next), you still need to work over your essay.
At a minimum you should proof-read your essay carefully. Have you inserted
the relevant phonetic symbols if you do not have phonetic fonts? 1 Have you
missed the word not out of one of your vital quotations? Have you used correct
notation for the linguistic concepts? Have you spelt words central to your
theme correctly? Does each sentence make sense and is it grammatical? Do all
language names (including English) begin with a capital letter?
Some writers expect to spend at least twice as long in rewriting as they did
in writing. They will be checking things such as:
• Is there any unnecessary repetition?
• Is everything that is said relevant to the argument?
• Is what is said said in the most useful place in the argument?
• Are the main stages in the argument or presentation clearly signposted?
• Where something has been quoted, is it advantageous to quote it rather
than to refer to it?
1 Fonts with phonetic symbols for Macintosh and Windows computers can be obtained from
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~rogers/fonts.html and from http://www.sil.org/linguistics/computing.html#fonts.
The latter site also gives details about obtaining commercial
fonts for the IPA and for things like drawing trees.