Stage One: Getting ideas
For an essay, your aim is to persuade or inform your readers about the topic, so you want to end up with ideas that will persuade or inform. Where do you start? Should you find out about the topic by doing research first? But how do you know what you need to research? Like so much of writing, it’s a chicken-and egg sort of thing. The thing is not to worry about whether you’ve got a chicken or an egg. You need both and it doesn’t matter which you start with. The place to start is to put down everything you already know or think about the topic. Once you get that in a line, you’ll see where to go next. Don’t worry yet about your theme or your structure. You’re not writing an essay yet—you’re just exploring. The more you explore, the more ideas you’ll get, and the more ideas you have, the better your essay will be.
Writing an essay takes several different kinds of skills, but the first one is easy. We can all write a list. Start the list by writing down the most important word or phrase (the key word) from the assignment, then putting down every thought that comes to you about it.
Making a cluster diagram
A cluster diagram is really just another kind of list, but instead of listing straight down the page, you list in clusters around a key word. Think of the spokes of a wheel radiating out from the hub. Something about the physical layout of a cluster diagram often makes it easier for ideas to start flowing. You can jump around from cluster to cluster, adding a thought here and a thought there.
Researching
When you write an essay, you’re usually expected to find out what other people have already thought about the subject. Your own ideas are important too, but they should be built on a foundation of what’s gone before. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Since most essays rely on this kind of foundation, you need to know how to do it properly. I’ll take a moment here to talk about how to research (otherwise known as independent investigation). Research is about getting some hard information on your subject: actual facts, actual figures. The sad thing about research is that usually only a small percentage of it ends up in your final draft. But like the hidden nine-tenths of an iceberg, it’s got to be there to hold up the bit you can see. You often research several times during the writing process. The first time you mightn’t know exactly what you’ll be writing about, so research will be fairly broad-based. As the essay starts to take shape, you’ll have narrowed the topic down. At that stage you might research again to find specific details.
First you have to find your source of information. You might look at books, journals, videos, newspapers, on the Internet, on CD-ROM. You go to reference books like dictionaries and encyclopedias. You might also do your own research: interviewing people, conducting an experiment, doing a survey. In the case of my topic, reading the novels themselves is research (the novels are ‘primary sources’), and so is finding anything that critics or reviewers might have said about them (these are ‘secondary sources’).
A word about acknowledgement
Because you’re piggy-backing on other people’s work, you have to let your reader know that—to give credit where credit is due. You can do this either in the text of the essay, in footnotes or in a list of sources at the end. Once you’ve found your source, you can’t just lift slabs of it and plonk them into your essay. You have to transform the information by putting it into your own words and shaping it for your own purposes. An essential first step in this process is taking notes. If you can summarise a piece of information in a short note, it means you’ve understood it and made it your own. Later, when you write it out in a sentence, it will be your own sentence, organised for your own purposes.
How to take notes
Before you start taking notes, put a heading that tells you exactly what the source is. This means you can find it again quickly if you need to and you can acknowledge it. In the case of a book, you should note the name of the author, the title of the book, the date and place of publication, and the page or chapter number. The call number (the library number on the spine) is also useful. (It’s tempting to skip this step, and I often have. The price is high, though—frustrating hours spent flipping through half-a-dozen books looking for one particular paragraph so you can acknowledge the source of your information or find some more detail.) With the net, make sure to bookmark interesting or relevant pages visited.
- Use the table of contents and the index to go straight to the relevant parts.
- Skim-read to save time once you’ve got to the relevant parts.
- Write down the main words of the idea with just enough connecting words for your note to make sense.
- Put only one point per line.
- Sometimes turning the information into a diagram is the best way to make notes.
- Put your notes under headings so you can see the information in bundles. Often, the research is already organised under headings: you can just copy those.
- If you can’t see how to reduce a big lump of research to a few snappy lines, try the ‘MDE’ trick: find its Main idea, then its Details, then any Examples.
- Develop a shorthand that works for you—shorten words (for example, char. for character), use graphics (for example, sideways arrows to show cause and effect, up and down arrows to show things increasing or decreasing).
The cheat’s note-taking
People often ‘take notes’ by highlighting or underlining the relevant parts of a book or article. This is certainly easier than making your own notes, but it’s not nearly as useful. The moment when you work out how to summarise an idea in your own words is the moment when that idea becomes yours. Just running a highlighter across someone else’s words doesn’t do that—the idea stays in their words, in their brain. It hasn’t been digested by you.
Freewriting is just a fancy word for talking onto the page—a way of thinking aloud about the topic in an unstructured way. It’s like the ‘free association’ exercises that psychologists use: it’s just nonstop writing. The reason freewriting works is that you can let your brain off the leash for a while and send it out to find ideas. Ideas are shy little things and they won’t come if you try to bully them, or if you keep criticising them. The important thing with freewriting is not to stop and think. Just keep the ideas flowing out the end of your pen onto the page. It’s true that your essay needs to be thought-out and planned, and it will be. But this isn’t the essay—this is just another way of getting ideas for the essay. There’s a time to question whether these ideas are useful. But that time isn’t now. Now is the time to invite in any ideas that may happen by.
