Better English Writing - Geddes Grosset Webster’s Word Power 2014
Essays
Writing for learning
Whether you are at school, college, university or any other type of learning institution, you will have to write essays at some point in your course. It’s one of the most common ways of assessing learners.
In this section, we will help you to use your research to plan and write clear, concise and highquality essays.
The process of writing an essay
There is a process involved in writing an essay. This process doesn’t have to be linear, where each stage is only done once. You can repeat different parts of the process and revise your work until you are happy with it.
Here’s an example of a process you could use:
✵ Analyse the question or title of your essay. What is it asking for? How are you going to answer it? Many teachers and tutors say that this is where many students fall down - they don’t stay relevant to their theme because they don’t keep looking back at what the question is asking for.
✵ Brainstorm your ideas. People often find it very stressful when they are faced with writing an essay because they don’t know where to start. Don’t panic. Instead, get some paper and write down all your ideas about the title, what your structure might be and where you might look for evidence. If it helps, do this with a friend or colleague. Don’t try to sort anything out at this stage. That can come later.
✵ Research. Read around the question/title and make relevant notes. Don’t waste time on irrelevant reading or too much detail. Keep the length of the essay in mind. Focus. Take notes (in your own words) and keep full reference details (including page numbers of direct quotes) of all the material you have looked at and think you will use.
✵ Plan your structure. You need to do this to help you answer the question and develop a clear argument, so keep referring back to the question to make sure that your structure is relevant.
✵ Write the first draft. Remember to write in plain English.
✵ Include full references and a bibliography.
✵ Revise and edit your work. Refer back to Chapter 2 (see revising and editing your work) if you’re not sure where to start.
✵ Identify any missing information. Editing usually reveals where there are gaps in your writing.
✵ Cut out anything you don’t need. Editing also reveals repetition and unnecessary detail.
✵ Write the final draft.
Planning your essay
You need to plan your essay. This will help you to organise your thoughts, and will stop you from wandering off the point, getting lost and writing lots of irrelevant and unnecessary words.
Planning will help you to write a powerful introduction, develop your argument and summarise its main points effectively and concisely in the conclusion.
Imagine that you have been given the following essay title from your history tutor:
Account for the failure of American policy in Vietnam from 1956-73.
You have analysed the title, brainstormed your ideas and carried out your research. Now it’s time to plan your essay. Here’s one example of how you can do this.
You’ll probably have gathered a lot of information, so drawing a mind map can help you to empty your head of that information, and organise it into logical chunks.
✵ Get a piece of paper and write down all your ideas - don’t worry about perfect writing at this point - just get the content down.
✵ Get a clean piece of paper. Put the topic box in the middle of the page.
✵ Now think about the main ideas of your report - what are they?
✵ Draw lines from the topic box to these main ideas.
✵ Now add information where you think it sits within these main ideas.
✵ Make links between the main ideas.
Structuring your essay
Giving your essay a structure like the one below will help you to answer the question and create a tight and consistent argument:
✵ Introduction
✵ Development
✵ Conclusion
Here’s an example of how we could use this structure for our essay title above.
Introduction
✵ This essay is going to account for the failure of American policy in Vietnam.
✵ America strong and powerful - so why did it go wrong? Reasons: ineffective military approach; poor morale; media coverage; atrocities; cost in lives and material resources; communism no longer a threat in 1973.
✵ Essay to analyse each of these factors in turn to account for failure of American policy.
✵ First, need to analyse why America joined the war.
Development
Background to war - why USA joined in first place.
✵ ’Domino effect’ - spread of communism in south-east Asia.
✵ North Vietnam communist.
✵ USA supported South Vietnam to prevent spread of communism.
Military tactics - failure
✵ US troops inexperienced.
✵ Mainly young white working-class or black boys (many white middle-class boys escaped to college or Canada).
✵ Troops didn’t want to be there and didn’t understand why they were there - 8000 miles from home fighting for what? Therefore low morale, drug taking, killing officers, deserting.
✵ Compare to the Vietcong - hardened, experienced guerrilla fighters - who had been fighting for independence since Japanese left at end of the Second World War. Desperate to kick Americans out of their country at any cost.
✵ US high-tech military tactics didn’t work against Vietcong guerrilla warfare.
✵ US tactics alienated South Vietnamese, and they helped Vietcong in some cases.
Media coverage
✵ A TV in most American living rooms - coverage of the war reached most Americans.
✵ Public witnessed the horror of the war and US failures.
✵ Resulted in propaganda, including protest songs.
✵ Martin Luther King preached against war.
✵ All this swung public opinion against war.
This was not helped by:
US atrocities
✵ For example, massacre at My Lai of hundreds of unarmed civilians in South Vietnam.
✵ Other war crimes reported to public at home.
✵ This caused outrage and undermined the moral authority of USA to continue war.
Cost in terms of material and human resources
✵ Tens of thousands of American troops killed and hundreds of thousands of troops wounded.
✵ Huge numbers of Vietnamese killed.
✵ President Johnson had to cancel his Great Society programme - huge financial cost to USA that wasn’t sustainable.
Better relationships between America, Russia and China
✵ Cold war starting to thaw.
✵ Communism not such a threat.
✵ What was the point?
Conclusion
✵ Summarise these factors succinctly and concisely - end with quote ’For the American public, Vietnam had been a terrible lesson on the limits of their power - why, exactly, had these young men been sent to their deaths? No one seemed able to answer this question.’ (Quote from National Qualifications Curriculum Support: The origins and development of the Cold War, 1945-85 (Learning and Teaching Scotland, 2008).
Writing the introduction
The introduction should:
✵ set the question or title in its wider context by giving background information about the central issue
✵ explain the main ideas of your argument and how you are going to answer the question
✵ make a link to the first point in the ’Development’ section.
Here’s an example of an introduction that covers these points.
Account for the failure of American policy in Vietnam from 1956-73
America enter ed the war in Vietnam to stop the spread of communism, promote democracy and support its allies. It had access to great power and resources and the latest military technology, so what went wrong, and why did it pull out of Vietnam in 1973?
There are a number of factors that account for the failure of American policy in Vietnam from 1956-73. First, America’s high-tech military approach was not appropriate for dealing with the guerrilla tactics used by the Vietcong, and its troops were young and inexperienced, and didn’t understand what or why they were fighting. The Vietcong, on the other hand, were experienced, war-hardened and determined to drive the Americans out.
Second, extensive media coverage brought the full horror and failures of the war into people’s living rooms like never before, and turned American public opinion against it.
Third, atrocities such as the massacre at My Lai undermined the moral authority of the US to continue the war.
Fourth, the cost of the war in terms of material and human resources was huge.
Finally, the political background had changed during the years 1956-73, and by the time Nixon came to power relations between America, Russia and China were much friendlier. Communism wasn’t the threat it had been in the 1950s and 1960s, so by 1973 most Americans didn’t understand the point of the war.
This essay will analyse each of these factors in turn.
But to account for the failure of American policy in Vietnam, we first have to analyse why America joined the war in the first place.
Developing the argument
The middle part of your essay must develop the arguments you set out in your introduction, and it must support your final conclusions.
This is where a good structure is really useful. This will help you to stay relevant to your theme while you expand on and explain your ideas and provide relevant references and examples to support them.
You should write clearly and concisely. You can still write in plain English, although an academic style is more likely to use the third person (he, she or it) instead of the second person (you and we), and some institutions may insist upon third person.
For example:
America entered the war in Vietnam in the winter of 1955. Its goals were to stop the spread of communism, encourage democracy and support its allies.
Remember to write critically, not descriptively. One of the biggest criticisms that teachers and tutors have of their students is that they just regurgitate the facts, rather than analysing and evaluating those facts. Don’t just say that something happened - say why or how it happened and back it up with evidence.
For example:
America’s intervention was set against an increasing concern about the spread of communism in south-east Asia. The Americans were convinced that they should actively support countries like South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma to prevent this from happening. As President Eisenhower said at a press conference on 7 April 1954, ’You have a row of dominoes set up. You knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is a certainty, that it will go over very quickly.’
Make sure that you link each idea or point to the next one, so that your argument flows logically and smoothly.
Writing the conclusion
The conclusion should:
✵ recap on and answer the essay title
✵ summarise and evaluate the main arguments
✵ highlight the most important aspect or aspects covered.
Here’s an example:
To conclude, American policy in Vietnam failed because of ineffective military tactics; the strength of public opinion due to negative media coverage of US failures and atrocities; the huge cost in terms of money and human life and the emergence of detente between America, Russia and China. Military tactics failed because no matter how advanced the American technology, they could not beat the guerrilla tactics or motivation of the Vietcong, who were on home terrain and had years of fighting experience. Compare this to the American troops, who were young and inexperienced, and did not want to fight in a war they did not understand. To begin with, the American public backed what they saw as a war against communism, but media exposure of the US failures and atrocities and protest by public figures and popular musicians swung public opinion the other way. The sheer cost in terms of life and money was not sustainable in the long term. But perhaps the most compelling reason for failure was that by 1973, the reason for the war no longer existed because of the easing relations between America, China and the USSR. This was a particularly humiliating failure because ’For the American public, Vietnam had been a terrible lesson on the limits of their power - why, exactly, had these young men been sent to their deaths? No one seemed able to answer this question.’
(The origins and development of the Cold War, 1945-85 [2008])