Of Essay Writing

It is the eve of my trip to Italy and what am I doing? Well, besides updating this blog I am putting the finishing touches on my 3,000 research essay for "Crime Fiction" and packing. Here in the UK, they assign essays by word count instead of page count. So unlike the way students do it in America with increasing the period sizes, increasing margins, and other fun ways of increasing page count, the way students here increase word count? Cite, cite, cite. And you know that you've become a real British student when you have written 1,500 words which did not seem like a lot when it got assigned but then, you realize, "Damn, that's 5 pages double-spaced." Here, that's a practice essay.

And according to a number of American exchange students I have run into here: writing essays in the UK is more difficult. Having written 3 papers so far, one 1,500 words (5 pages) and two 3,000 words (10 pages), I have figured out a fun, almost non-painful way to go about writing research papers in the UK. Please remember that this is coming from a student who has never written a research paper for English but is now learning how to use MLA citation all over again, woot!

1) Get your "essay titles." Which are really just your essay prompts but the difference between these and prompts are that they are really the title of your essay. Unlike the US, they do not make you come up with a witty and suggestive title. And the prompts are usually about a sentence or two long. Case in point: "Discuss images of the female body in Victorian poetry" (I turned that paper in Monday).

2) Think of author/title of literature/subject that you will be discussing in your essay. Jot down some ideas on how you might go about answering the question. When in doubt, jot down ideas for all the prompts you think you might be able to answer, the one with the most notes next to them wins!

3) Go to the library ASAP and check out the relevant books, if there are any. Most of the time, towards the deadline, all of the books you need will probably be checked out. What to do? Article databases online, make friends with JSTOR and Web of Science. Look for articles that have some semblance to what you may be writing about. Sometimes, this may be just background information or they'll use a word that you may want to use in your essay, like "feminism" or "fruit." Take as many kind of relevant sources as you can, you can figure it out later whether or not you'll need them.

4) Skim, DO NOT READ THE WHOLE BOOK. One, it's a waste of time because you probably won't remember all of it. And two, you're going to have to cite around 10 sources within your paper so unless you start two weeks before (which will not happen if you're a college student), you will not have time to read all 10 articles and books. Writing down points that are interesting or the page numbers they are on helps as well, you can stick that into the essay later.

5) Now think of a thesis since you're supposed to think of a point to your essay after you've read everything. I know, it's backwards. I don't like it, I feel like I'm being influenced by someone else's reading of the text. But when in Rome...

6) Try to write and whenever relevant, add an official quote in. Towards the end, you'll probably be quoting arbitrarly since in my experience writing and talking to fellow British students, you're just writing what you know then sticking the quotes in there. Of course, you can always write your essay before you start reading and just read as you write, it really depends when you've formulated a thesis.

7) You know you've written a British essay when your paper is filled with more citation than original content. Learn to love the MLA format.

8) When you're done, run to the library and beat other students down for a computer to print (I suggest staring down the ones who are on Facebook in the library).

9) Print out two copies and run to the Departmental Office by 3PM the day it's due.

10) Take yourself out for a beer since you've just completed a British research paper. Now just hope that both of the people reading your paper will kind of understand what you're talking about.

But it's fine, at this point in my college career, I'm pretty much used to writing longer papers anyway (case in point, 5 pages is more complicated than a 10 page paper since I have so much to say now, which probably means I've been writing papers for way too long at this point).

Britishisms I learned:

• "full stop" = a period
• "marked blindly" = the two people that will be marking your essays will not know whose it is. It's more fair that way as well as kind of scary.
• You don't indent the very first paragraph
• Being an American is no excuse for not using British English in your paper
• 8 sources and up is common for a 3000 word essay, as exemplified by the fact that after finishing my first Warwick Uni essay for English, I had a grand total of 11 sources. Of course, a majority of people will also agree with me that half of those sources were arbitrary at best.