Friday, August 14, 2020
Am I A Jerk For Refusing To Write Two Essays In Order To Attend My Sisters Wedding, And Other Advice Column Questions
Am I A Jerk For Refusing To Write Two Essays In Order To Attend My Sister's Wedding, And Other Advice Column Questions If you can, familiarise yourself with the people who think theyâre wrong and awful. Figure out if there are arguments which are unresolved and see if you can make a contribution towards resolving them. They might ask you to âcritically assessâ some claim or concept, or ask you a simple question which youâll have to answer in a complex way. Theyâll 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. Curiosity drives an individual to search for an understanding of issues. When such interest becomes engraved in an individual, it molds students into independent individuals who find the truth while learning. Try reading your essay aloud, as this will slow you down, make you focus on each word, and show you when your sentences are too long. Ideally leave a day between finishing your essay and proofreading it. You won't be so close to your work, so you will see your errors more easily. Be ruthless at this stage â" if the information isn't directly answering the question, cut it out! You will get many more marks for showing you can answer the question in a controlled and focused way than you will for an unordered list of everything you know about a topic. Next, think about what you need to prove in order to make that claim. 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. Start your intro with the central claim of your essay. If Iâm reading it, I want to know within literally five seconds what youâre trying to convince me of. Ninety nine percent of the structure of your essay is exactly the same as you learned in secondary school. You might think youâre 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. You donât want to get penalised because you didnât reference your readings properly after youâve put in all that effort to make sure that your arguments are founded in the literature. If the reading list is really short, youâll need to go beyond it. Look through the reference lists of the papers and books youâve just read. Mark out a few of the most promising-looking readings. 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. Donât 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 youâve put forward, then beat that. Write out that response, then tell me why it doesnât 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. If youâre 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 youâre arguing against. You might have had enough of your work by now, and be hoping to just hand it in! However, it's worth taking some time to check it over. Markers often comment that more time spent on editing and proofreading could have really made a difference to the final mark.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.