Essay-Writing Advice

Here follows some advice about essay writing. I’ve envisaged this as a rough set of principles for success, to be used questioningly and critically and also as a way to gain a bit of insight into university-level expectations of written assignments. It’s not perfect and is very much my advice, and so not everyone will agree with what I say. But there might be some useful bits and pieces to consider. Click the links below to be taken into the advice itself. Some context for why I’ve written it can be found at the bottom of this page.

1. Researching
2. Structuring
3. Drafting
4. Polishing
5. Checking

Who is this advice for?
It’s for anyone who might benefit from it. Primarily it’s aimed at university students based in Arts and Humanities subjects, but it might conceivably also be used by sixth-form students and by secondary school teachers in giving advice to their pupils, or by university students working in other disciplines. There might be people writing essays in other contexts, not in schools or universities, who stumble across the advice, too, and find it useful. The guide assumes you’re not using Generative AI, however, despite the fact that there clearly is a time and place for using GAI in essay-writing assignments. I leave advice on this front to those who are better informed. Please do use my guide as you see fit—and, if you have time, consider letting me know that you’re using it (or, indeed, adapting it to the needs of GAI-inflected teaching and learning).

I offer advice about researching, structuring, drafting, polishing, and checking essays. I phrase things in this way—verbs with ‘-ing’ endings, i.e. present participles—to convey the sense that all these elements of essay writing are processes: manners of writing that take time; habits you acquire and get better at; skills to cultivate. Different students with different learning needs will approach things in the ways that work best for them—not everyone studies in the same way, writes to the same schedule, or can check their work without assistance of some kind. Those who know you and your work well will be able to guide you better than I can. My advice is not meant to be prescriptive or dogmatic: it’s a work in progress, with which you can disagree. Ignore what I have to say if you don’t concur with it, or consider contacting me to suggest improvements (for which I will be very grateful). Likewise, if you think the advice I’ve provided here is useful then do let me know, too; it’s always nice to have a sense of what’s constructive.

But: don’t just passively take my word for it. Read other essay-writing guides. Listen to other people. Do your own thinking and your own research. This, more than any advice I can give, is what really matters.

My Credentials
I’m a Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham, where I teach undergraduate students (most of them in their late teens and early twenties, along with older students in other stages of life) and postgraduate students (i.e. students pursuing a second or third degree programme). When you teach, you mark. In universities this means grading student assessments but it also means checking and quality approving the marking done by colleagues, both in the same university (as a second or third marker) and in other institutions (as an external examiner or educational consultant). I’ve marked student essays in university settings for nearly 20 years, ranging from undergraduate pieces at 1,000 up to 12,000 words, and postgraduate work at 4,000 words all the way up to MAs by Research at 40,000 and PhDs at 80,000, with many differently sized assessments in between. The advice I give in this guide relates in the first instance to essays of 4,000 words in length, but can in principle be adapted to essays of any large or small size.