Essay Writing. A Guide for Students in the Department of Theology & Religious Studies. at King s College London.

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1 Essay Writing A Guide for Students in the Department of Theology & Religious Studies at King s College London. Introduction Your essays contribute to the formation of your abilities as a student and many of them contribute to the assessment of your degree. They are therefore an important, integral part of your academic work, and it is consequently vital that you treat essay writing with the appropriate seriousness. What follows will provide a general guide to essay writing. It is essential that you familiarise yourself with the points made below as soon as possible. If you are uncertain about anything, the Department staff are here to help: do consult your personal and/or module tutor(s) about anything that is unclear to you. In addition to this document, please also consult the Department s Style and Referencing guide for guidance on how to add references in the appropriate academic fashion. General Essay Guidelines Introduction There are many ways to prepare and to write an essay. There are also various forms which may be used in referring to source material and in presenting an essay. The following does not attempt to establish one rigid format, but to make clear the essential ingredients which go into the making of an acceptable essay. You may work with these ingredients in your own way, but the ingredients themselves are not optional. Learning to write a good essay should be one of your first priorities at King s. What is an essay? Essentially, it is two things. It is an opportunity for you to study a particular topic in more depth than is possible for the content of a module. It is also an exercise in communication. You are communicating the results of your research on a particular topic to someone else. For this reason, your main priority as you approach the exercise is to write clearly, to make sure that what you put on paper is what you actually want to say and that it will tell the reader what you want him or her to know. What makes an essay good? Apart from clarity, a good essay is one that illustrates that you have thought about, understood, critically analysed and explained your topic. In other words, it is not merely descriptive of what you have read. Imagine you have been away for a year travelling. You have had countless experiences in many different places. But there have

2 been certain key aspects of the year that have somehow, at the end of the day, had a very profound effect on you, though why this is so might not be superficially obvious. Someone asks you to write to them about your year away, and to do so in 2000 words. You could write a simple descriptive travel piece. Or you could think more deeply about the whole year and select the more meaningful aspects of it, analyse why you think they are meaningful, and write a more insightful, and much more interesting and powerfully communicative, piece about it. The former would correspond to an ordinary essay and the latter to a good essay. NB: Given that assessors of essays are looking not just for regurgitation of the facts but for your analysis and understanding of them, be critical of what you read. Do not be afraid of disagreeing with the author of a book: what you read there is one point of view, not the only point of view. Choosing a question Your module teacher will have provided the questions you may write on. Make sure that you understand the question you have selected before beginning to write upon. If necessary, the teacher concerned or use his/her Office Hours in order to get clear precisely what is meant by the question set. A major factor in assessing essays is whether a student has answered the question tackled. Throughout the planning and writing of your essay, ask yourself Have I answered the question? Selecting resources Reading Lists: Use the bibliography provided by the module teacher. If the teacher s bibliography does not make it clear what sources are relevant to the essay ASK the teacher for advice. Be wary of wild searches on the Web for relevant material. You may find lots of sites that have relevant literature, but it could well be unreliable. Remember there is control over what goes into an academic journal and your teachers exercise control over what ends up in the King s library, but the Web has no editor. The Web can be very helpful. In particular: many classic, primary sources are now available on the Web; academic journals are now frequently published on the Web as well as in hard copy (they can thus be accessed from a King s workstation); the King s library has many e-books that can be accessed from its workstations. 3

3 Context is important! Starting with dictionaries and encyclopaedias etc., may enable you to tune into the debates about your topic, past and present. Watch for people with differing viewpoints: this will help you to get properly engaged and to understand the issues involved. Use primary literature (i.e. texts) as much as is possible. You will get credit for looking at the material that secondary sources discuss. Reading & Note Taking Try to understand your sources well: what are the authors approaches, angles, interpretations of the material, conclusions? If different authors differ, try to assess why and from what point of view they differ. Try to note the main questions they are asking and attempting to answer. This will help you to establish some of the main points about the topic. Put realistically strict time limits around this, however, and use the subject index in the book (if there is one) to trim your serious reading down to size. Good note-taking is hard work, and time-consuming, but worth it. Things relevant to your research, or things that will serve your revision for exams, should be condensed and paraphrased with real care. Always indicate the source and page numbers for future reference. This is both for your own convenience and to avoid unwitting plagiarism. NB: Do not mark or otherwise mutilate library material. Preparing an argument & an outline Take time to think about the material you are gathering. A good essay is not merely a collection of facts. It is a coherent explanation and/or argument. It is in the transition from research to writing that the angle you have chosen can be developed. For an essay to be properly planned, you will need to develop a detailed outline with a clear structure, which will allow the content of the essay to flow coherently. How much of this fuller outline/structure is actually explained to the reader is up to you, but it must be there to give your essay shape. It will also ensure that you do not include material you may have found in your research that is interesting but not actually relevant to answering the question you have chosen in the way you have chosen to do it. 4

4 Decide roughly how much space to allot to each part of your essay, and begin by assigning material from your notes to the various subsections. Always ask whether a given bit of information or a particular idea really furthers the aim of the essay. Writing the introduction It is essential to give your essay an introductory paragraph or two. The introduction should explain what you are about to do, and how you are going to go about doing it. It may also say why, though that is optional. This tells the reader what to expect, how you have chosen to deal with the topic of the essay, and how you are going to arrange the material (its structure, in other words). Avoid vague generalities. Only if your introduction is clear is it possible to know whether the essay has anything of value to say, or (eventually) to judge whether it succeeds in saying it. How much space you allow yourself in working up to these essentials will depend on the length and type of essay you are writing. In a short essay, keep the introduction short! The body of the essay should follow what you say you are going to do in the introduction. Reaching a conclusion A good conclusion will usually summarise the essay succinctly, highlighting its achievements. Check your conclusion against your introduction. Have you done what you said you would? If so, have you arrived at results that have justified the exercise? What are they? Do not introduce new questions, data or arguments into your conclusion, unless in doing so you are pointing the way to further research, or to the implications of what you have just done. In other words, do not at this point bring in what your paper has not offered or attempted to do. Layout An assessed essay should have a departmental cover sheet (downloadable here), where you insert your candidate number, module code and title, and the essay title. Please note that first marking is anonymous and your name should nowhere be included. 5

5 Please leave adequate margins (at least an inch on all sides) for the comments of your tutor. Do not use a font smaller than 12 point. Double-space the essay throughout. Print on one side of the paper only. Stay within the length parameters. You are welcome to write more than you actually submit, but not to submit 5% more than you are asked for. Over-length essays will lose you marks. The penalty kicks in after the 5% grace. Spelling, Punctuation, Grammar, Referencing & Style There is no excuse for the persistent misuse of the English language (or any other) in written work. If you need help, get it! When in doubt about how to spell a word, always consult a dictionary. We have also recommended a very good general manual below, which we expect you to use. The most common offences involve punctuation. Learn how to use (or not to use) commas to separate words and phrases, semi-colons and colons to separate clauses, etc. Use fullstops to avoid over-long sentences. When proof-reading, read your work out loud, following your punctuation, to discover how it sounds. Note that marks can be and are lost through inappropriate use of referencing, grammar, style and punctuation. Quotations & References Use long quotations sparingly, expressing things in your own words where possible. But remember if you are paraphrasing someone else s words you must acknowledge your source. Use footnotes, endnotes, or brackets to indicate your sources. References should include the author s name, the work or date, and the page number. Shortened quotations must not interrupt the syntax or the sense of the material being quoted; if you leave out some words you should indicate that you have done so by three dots. Establish an acceptable pattern of referencing and of reproducing quotations, and follow that pattern consistently. Make use of the Department s Style Sheet. 6

6 Bibliography Your bibliography should list all works consulted, even if they have not been quoted from in the essay. As a guide, it should generally include five or six quality resources for a short essay, with a corresponding increase for longer, formally assessed essays (the operative word is quality ). For each work listed in the bibliography, you must give author, translator (if any), the title of the work, place of publication, publisher and date. It should look something like this: For a book: Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics IV, 2. Translated by G.W. Bromiley. Edinburgh, T & T Clark, 1958 For an article: Martin, Francis. Feminist Theology: A Proposal in Communion 20.2, Summer 1993, pp For further information on bibliographies and referencing see the Department s Style Sheet. Typing & Proof-reading All essays must be typed, and please make sure they are carefully proofread and corrected. Assessment Tutors and examiners look for: a) evidence that the subject has been properly researched b) clarity of thought and expression c) sensible organisation of information and ideas d) appropriate presentation. Formative essays which do not meet the minimum standards set out above may be rejected by the tutor, or returned to the student for revision. Assessed essays will receive a significantly lowered mark, in keeping with the degree of the offence. Essays submitted to your tutor help to prepare you for your examinations. Develop good habits from the beginning. NB: There are three copies of The Little, Brown Handbook in the Maughan Library (on a limited loan basis) for ready reference, covering all of the above in detail, and much more besides. Students with limited writing or essay skills are strongly advised to purchase a personal copy of The Little, Brown Compact Handbook (Harper Collins 1995) and to use it regularly. 7