The essay is an art with a long and powerful tradition, and recognizable qualities. The most important element of the essay is your thinking, your voice. Unless you write honestly, with the conviction that comes when using your own voice, you are not writing an essay. There are different kinds of essays. The one most commonly assigned in college writing is the Thesis-Support Essay addressing a central question or issue and and supporting a thesis--the answer to the question or your position on the issue. Sometimes you explain or defend your thesis with reasons and evidence gained from your own personal experience; often you are expected to include new thinking and evidence gained from your reading or other kinds of research. Generally, you will be assigned, or will need to settle on, a specific method or form, almost always including an introduction, body, conclusion. To learn more about thesis-support essays, visit the Essay Room
Sometimes--ordinarily in the humanities or the arts but even in math and science--you might be invited to write an informal essay, one more exploratory and reflective, developing not 'top down' by supporting a thesis by reasons and examples but rather 'bottom up' by starting with experiences and finding some story-line or trail of explanation. Many essays actually combine elements of both these kinds of essays. The ESC Rationale Essay, for example, defends a thesis something like "My degree program answers my personal, professional, and educational goals and follows ESC's general and disciplinary guidelines for the academic degree I am seeking." The essay also ordinarily details some of your learning autobiography and narrates the story of the research and exploration that contributed to your degree program design. Beware though! One of the most common errors of student writers is to write a story or string together a chain of events, and think they have written the kind of essay their instructor has assigned. Ordinarily your voice and ideas, a frame beyond the story itself, must direct any essay, including a narrative essay. For a detailed description of informal essay writing at another site link [here] For a detailed description of how to write thesis-support essays go to this place at the Complex [here] or link to another site [here]
Research Paper
Ordinarily this assignment is really to write an essay, but a Research Essay, which just means an essay that has been expanded by your research. This assignment gets some students in trouble because they think a research paper is just a matter of following a procedure: go to the library, find sources, make notes on notecards, put your notes in order, and write a paper with footnotes and bibliography. A real research paper must start with your own interests and thinking, with subjects and questions you think are important. It's wise to begin the research paper process by writing down your own initial thinking and knowledge around your subject and the kinds of questions you think might be important to ask. But a research paper must also involve a real, often time-consuming search of any sources that might provide information and ideas once you have identified a tentative research question: People. A computer data base. Books and journals in your neighborhood and university libraries. The internet. Even your own surveys or experiments. Your research essay must document where you got all the information and ideas you didn't have before your started your research--your sources--especially your sources for anything that readers might question or disagree with. Usually you document by in-text citations of all research information and by a list of works cited at the close of the paper. For a thorough tutorial on how to write a research paper, from start to finish, go to the [Research Room] in the Writers' Complex.
Summary -- Reaction Paper
Ordinarily, if your instructor asks you to write a summary of something you've read, it is to help you to clarify what you read and to enable the instructor to determine whether you've understood it. Because this kind of assignment is limited to presenting others' ideas, an instructor will often combine it with a reaction assignment, to find out what your opinion is. In a reaction paper, usually after you have stated the author's main ideas and main supporting evidence, you state your own responses to those ideas, backing them up with your own evidence and thinking. In many cases your instructor is expecting a particular kind of reaction, for example, a statement of whether you agree or disagree with the text and your reasons. Find out the specific expectations. See model summaries and summary-reaction papers in our File Cabinet.
Suggestions for Writing Summaries
The following is a reading-writing process that works for many students when summarizing thesis-support articles. You can adapt it for longer and different kinds of texts and to your own process, with guidance from your professor.
1. Clarify the assignment. Know what process of thought is typically expected in [summary] papers. If they are not provided, ask for a model of what is expected and/or for guidelines, especially how long the summary should be in relation to the original.
Read:
2. Read the article all the way through without marking it, looking for the question the author is addressing and the answer the author is developing in response to the question (the thesis or main point).
3. After you finish, write down one sentence that captures the main point of the article. Ordinarily you should be able to begin it with, "It is true that...." If you have trouble with this, write down the central question or issue the article addresses. It is usually easier to see the thesis after you do this.
4. Look back at the article to see if you can find the thesis stated explicitly. Does this correspond to what you wrote? If not, look at the article again or reread if necessary until you feel fairly certain about the main point.
5. Now read the article again, marking the main points supporting the thesis and noting how the main points are tied together logically. The basic argument of thesis-support writing might be described as something like "This is true because and because and because and .... But another argument will be functioning as well. Look for the bare bones of this argument (such patterns as 'and/and/and/and' or 'and/but/but/nevertheless/so' or 'since/since/since/therefore' or 'based on this evidence/this evidence/this evidence'...and so on).
Write:
6. Begin by citing the title, author, and source of the article.
7. State the thesis in your own words and then, in your own words, as succinctly as possible describe each major point that supports the thesis, explaining the bare bones of the argument. Do not insert your own opinion anywhere.
8.Read your first draft outloud. Check for important omissions and unnecessary information and details. Check to see if it all makes sense. Check for length. If you did not follow the first step, you can use the general guideline that a summary should be no longer than one-fourth the length of the original. Cross out unnecessary words and note loosely constructed sentences.
9. Revise in response to your notes on the first draft, tightening your writing.
10. Once you believe your summary is pretty much together, ask someone to read it critically. See if your reader understands the basic points of the article after reading your summary.
11. After making changes based on your reader's critique, edit and proofread.
12. Give yourself time before handing in your paper to look at it fresh, again checking for errors, especially making sure that you have incorporated steps #5 and #6.
Suggestions for Writing Reaction Papers
1. Clarify the assignment. Know what kind of thinking is typically expected in a [Reaction] paper. Ask for specific models or guidelines if they are not provided. Does your professor want a formal reaction paper, using the thesis-support form? Or is a more informal reaction expected? If informal, should you write an informal essay or just do journal writing?
2. Under Construction
Journal
Journal writing assignments are both the hardest kind of writing and the easiest: Easiest because almost always when instructors ask you to write something in journal form, they are not looking for "polished" writing--error-free, finished, or completely developed. They are looking for rambling, "messy" thinking--your process--as you study what it is they've asked you to study. Often the journal assignments are very open-ended. That's why they're sometimes the hardest kind of writing: sometimes you don't get much direction.
If you're having trouble getting started, just start writing, fast. If your inner voice is saying "I can't do this. I can't. I can't." write "I can't do this. I can't. I can't." And keep recording what that voice is saying, write, write, write. Don't worry about punctuation, spelling, whether or not what you're saying makes sense. Don't stop. Don't go back and look at what you just wrote. (That voice--the editorial voice--is forbidden in free writing.) Keep writing and keep refocusing on the subject assigned. More and more ideas will come out onto the page.
Usually instructors are really looking for two things:
Try out the methods or approaches or vocabulary of their discipline in your own thinking---really think through what you're studying, joining your voice, your terms and vocabulary to the voice, the terms, the vocabulary of the material you are studying. o Some useful questions are: What was this really about? What does it make me think of? What examples from my own life support or disprove what is being said-- in class? --in what I'm reading? What questions do I have? What seems strange? unclear? That should get you started on using the vocabulary of the course.
Reflect on your own learning. In academic discourse lingo that's called "meta-cognition"--thinking about thinking, getting outside of what you've written, outside the process you've just been through so you can think about it, evaluate it in a different voice. o Try the "double-entry" technique. After you have a lot of non-stop writing, read back over everything you have written... and on the facing page in your journal--or in the margin if you've written on both sides of the paper-- write comments about your own writing, right next to it. Make as many observations about what you find as you can, role-playing as various readers--as your teacher, a parent, friend, radio commentator, psychoanalyst, whoever you'd like to imagine commenting. And, of course, read as yourself, or as one of your selves, noting what seems interesting about what you've written.
This kind of paper is frequently assigned at Empire State College. It often replaces an exam. Usually, you are expected to use your writing to show that you have understood all the readings included in the assignment, and you are expected to synthesize the readings, to bring them together, in some interesting way around a central question. One key to successful synthesis papers is to bring your own voice and ideas into the paper sufficiently to actually direct the flow of the paper. If you find yourself just pasting together summaries of the readings in some kind of order, stop! You should find yourself, instead, identifying some interesting question that has grown out of your reading (you instructor may actually specify the question) and answering it. Your answer will usually become the thesis statement that directs the paper. You will use your reading, then, to develop your thesis--showing your reader what you mean by it and why you believe it is true. Tip: Knowledgeable students often include more than the required readings in the bibliographies of their papers. Check out papers in the File Cabinet to see how you might own this kind of assignment: to review a relatively developed synthesis paper see, for example, "The Traditional Family is Disappearing;" to review a less developed synthesis paper see "Investment Productivity and Standard of Living ."
