Tips For Writing Essay Exams

Tips For Writing Essay Exams You should be writing notes during the 2nd and 3rd to document your findings. You also need to update your notes after every reading to consolidate your understanding of the text. Once you’ve written the whole essay, read over it again. You will save yourself literally days over the course of your university career. They allow you to reference as you write, and you can create and reformat your bibliography and citations at the touch of a button. Finally, make sure you formulate every claim in the strongest possible terms. What might be the immediate negative reaction of someone reading your central claim? How can you defend yourself against that response? Ideally you want to be able to split your burdens of proof into a few different points. Write out that response, then tell me why it doesn’t defeat your argument, or at least why it only mitigates it. This is the stuff that actually makes up your argument. If you perform poorly at this, you might as well pack up and go home. Next, think about what you need to prove in order to make that claim. You might think you’re too good for Point, Evidence, Explain. How are you going to relate your argument to the existing literature? Make sure you know their arguments reasonably well and have armed yourself with flexible quotes from their work. If you can, familiarise yourself with the people who think they’re wrong and awful. Figure out if there are arguments which are unresolved and see if you can make a contribution towards resolving them. Look at every premise you’ve used and claim you’ve made. Be aware whilst you’re reading that all arguments and authors are fallible. Think about the text you’re reading and think how you might respond to it. This is the single easiest way to get more marks. If I see an argument citing an author whom nobody else has mentioned, and it’s a decent argument, it will make my day. Start your intro with the central claim of your essay. If I’m reading it, I want to know within literally five seconds what you’re trying to convince me of. Ninety nine percent of the structure of your essay is exactly the same as you learned in secondary school. And even if the essay title isn't in the form of a question, make sure that you have something clear that you want to say. Don't just talk in general terms about the subject area. Make sure you have a clear point that you want to communicate in your essay. Don’t make your opponent look like they have no arguments, or take the weakest version of their argument. Think about the strongest possible response to the claim you’ve put forward, then beat that. If you’re making a claim, you need to tell me why that claim is correct. Think of a potential response to your argument, perhaps from an author you’re arguing against. Hello, my name is Robin Banerjee and I'm a senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sussex. I teach many first year, second year and third year students so if you come into the Psychology department I'm sure I'll see lots of you while you're here. They might ask you to ‘critically assess’ some claim or concept, or ask you a simple question which you’ll have to answer in a complex way. They’ll make a statement and tell you to discuss it. They might ask you to compare and contrast two different ideas, or say which of two theories is the more accurate. You don’t want to get penalised because you didn’t reference your readings properly after you’ve put in all that effort to make sure that your arguments are founded in the literature. You have a big test coming up, and you know it’s going to include an essay question that will account for a large percentage of your grade for the semester.