TBT #89: How to Write an Essay Just Like Me

I’m done with school forever. Give that a second to sink in. It’s not just a matter of a summer vacation or even a year off: I’m done with school forever. I’m not going off to ‘find myself’ or otherwise screw around for a while before returning to the warm knowing embrace of academia: I’m done with school forever. Barring extreme acts of absurdity, never again will I write an academic research paper, stay up all night studying for an exam or sleep through all my classes. Because I’m done with school forever.

I’ve learned a lot in 17 years of academic study. For example: did you know that the Nova Scotian colony’s reasons for not joining the American Revolution were numerous and varied? Or that sports metaphors have become an increasingly more common part of government discussions on war and warfare precisely because assuming everything is a game between equally-matched opponents is really the only way to sell the concept to contemporary audiences? Or that environmentalism is invariably tied to feminism and that you cannot have one without the other though no one is entirely sure why? (Yet.) Or that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was largely about phallic symbols, with each and every snake representing a penis? Or that Charlemange was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in A.D 800?

All of these things are true! Or most of them are. I’m not sure on that last one as it is just a historical fact. I don’t need to know it. If I, for some reason, needed that information, I could just look it up. Like, let’s say I was in a business meeting where we were discussing the cost-benefit analysis of a new line of widgets and, for whatever reason, the marketing material necessary to securing profits in this sector required extensive knowledge of Charlemange, including what year he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. I’d just look it up on a web site somewhere. And then I’d ask what the the hell we were selling. And then I’d demand to know when I became involved in business and marketing. I’d be so confused.

Most of the important things I have learned in the last four years. I am hard on university sometimes, often comparing being in school to what I imagine being trapped in a coffin would be like. There is no way out save to keep pounding and pounding at the lid until the lid breaks open. But, really, I cannot deny that university has given me critical thinking skills. This is actually what they told me university would give me, way back when, and I scoffed because I thought the term critical thinking skills was very vague. “What does it mean?” I wondered. Because it could both be skills that help you criticize things or thinking skills that are just really really important. Like critically important. Though those sorts of skills would probably be like how to walk without falling over and talk your way out of a tense situation. And maybe how to throw a good stiff roundhouse kick. Knowing what to look for when examining primary source documents for bias or slant towards certain historical narratives does not qualify as critical in that sense.

So it was the first one. The one about being able to think about things critically. Like a critic does! As far as I can tell, myself and most of the people I see on a day-to-day basis are very very skilled at this. When we sit near a window, we criticize people for wearing fur-lined things or visor hats and thus looking stupid. When we hear someone say that their favourite movie is, say, The Matrix Reloaded or The Butterfly Effect, we instantly know that that person is not as smart as we are. When I overhear a cellphone conversation in the library wherein a young woman talks about her desire to get totally wasted this weekend while at the same time lamenting the last weekend where she did the same and vomited all over herself in a taxi cab while simultaneously hitting on the driver I sit back, smug and knowingly, assured that I am a superior person, as I spent last weekend watching What Not to Wear and doing laundry.

Critical Thinking Skills are clearly the best thing university gives us, but it still remains a rather vague term. I’ve been thinking over the last week about the specific things my 4-years at the University of King’s College have taught me. After compiling a list of literally dozens of lessons learned (including “Don’t try to date close friends!” which was later, after careful consideration, crossed out) I was able to whittle that list to about a half-dozen truly important things that I have learned in university.

Today, I’ll discuss one of those things. I may discuss the others later, as I have to update every day starting tomorrow anyway and I’m damn sure going to be short on content ideas. Today’s subject is How to Write an Essay, and it stands as a sequel of sorts. I hope this article attracts just as many accolades and just as much ire as that one did!

The tips contained herein are for entertainment purposes only. I do not under any circumstances recommend that people try to be more like me. It is not as awesome as it looks. Regardless, these are The Best Things for April 30, 2006.

How to write an essay really quickly but still awesomely

This is a really valuable skill. I likely had an advantage over other people coming into first year, as I went to a high school that forced us to write research papers and other essays as early as Grade 11, whereas apparently other people had English classes that were little more than reading comprehension studies. And History classes that were little more than good practice for future Trivial Pursuit games. This is sad and something I could feel passionate about some day. But regardless, thanks to a pretty awesome high school, I knew how to write papers, but not quickly.

Over the last four-years, my paper writing has gotten so efficient that no longer are my essays done the night-before. They’re done the day-of. I think everybody experiences some of this throughout university, particularly when it comes to the length of papers. Whereas 4000 words used to make me very nervous indeed, now I can look at a 4500-word assignment, scoff, take my shades off all dramatically, and rock that paper like a hurricane.

Here are the best tips I have for essay-writing. Be advised that these are not exactly tips that will get you an A+: it’s more likely they’ll put you somewhere in the B+/A- range, with some higher grades depending on how drunk the professor is when grading it.

• Be forceful:
  In first year, my essays would begin like this:

  The Akkadian and Biblical accounts of creation are separate and independent stories. Though they do bear a passing resemblance in terminology and phrasing, at their cores they are two very different stories. As they are stories of creation – the world coming into being – they are obviously predominantly about divinities, centred around a God, or in the case of the Akkadians, Gods.

  You can see the problems here already. First, the first line and the second line say the exact same thing. Would you believe that they’re both separate and independent and very different stories? Does that not blow your mind? And what is that bullshit about divinities? Something about the divine is centred around a God or Gods? Unheard of! These things do not need to be explained, and in explaining them I give off the impression that I don’t know a damn thing about what I am talking about . This is bad. Even worse is that I explained that a story of creation is a story about “the world coming into being.” Just in case, I guess, the person marking the essay read “story of creation” and immediately thought “what the fuck is that?”

  This year, my essays began like this:

  Though the subject of the letters between Abigail and John Adams would ostensibly seem to be women’s rights – the title, “Abigail and John Adams Debate Women’s Rights, 1776”, indicates as much – the real conclusion in John Adams’ writing is not so much about women specifically as it is about the role of democracy in the new Republic.

  Sometimes, they even began like this:

  Yes, animals deserve moral consideration. The truth behind such a statement seems staggeringly self-evident.

  The difference between these openings and the one from first-year is that there’s the general underlying subtext that I, the writer, do not give a shit about this question you have asked me to write an essay about. The key, and I know this seems kind of ridiculous, is to given off a kind of confidence in your writing that conveys the fact that you find the very asking of this question utterly absurd, as the answer is so obvious that only someone with NO working knowledge of the subject would struggle with it.

  With my essays, I try to give off the impression that they’re something I slapped together for the professor as a favour, simply because he or she seemed like a nice guy. Like I was busy hanging about in my lab simultaneously working on cracking the human genome and composing an aria that would, if played just right, reveal musical bliss, when suddenly I was struck with a little pang of guilt and decided to spend 10 minutes writing this essay. The truth being, of course, that I am nowhere near an expert on the subject I am writing on and I have no choice BUT to write the paper, but for whatever reason the tone derived from these attitudes works. It forces you to write succinctly, to omit needless words, to write in the awesome active voice as opposed to the pussy passive voice. Put simply: it works.

• Be sneaky:
  Research is a pain in the ass and decidedly difficult. Were those of us in university actual scholars and academics, we would take the time to read a great wealth of material on any given subject before coming to our thesis and writing an essay. But we are students and we have no time! Thus, make the research work for you. There’s so much academic writing out there that someone is BOUND to agree with you. Definitely cite as much as possible, as this is easy and kind of necessary when you’re already writing in such a way that makes you sound like a total asshole.

  But be careful with your words. Since I’m writing quickly I definitely don’t have time to cite everything. Thus, sneakiness enters in. If you write “Most research into this subject has supported this hypothesis” then you’ve made a declarative statement. You’ve said that more than 50% of researchers, more or less, have said this. You could be proved wrong. So be sneaky: “Research into this subject has in many cases supported this hypothesis.” Not only does this say pretty much the same thing, you’ve pretty much taken away any possibility of it being wrong. As long as one guy has supported the damn hypothesis, you’re home free.

  It’s stealthy. Be stealthy. Pretend you’re sneaking around when writing an essay. Not only is it fun, it’s functional.

• Be lame:
  You’ve got to do something to keep things light and fun. Otherwise your flow may be compromised and suddenly it will be 4:30 a.m. and your essay will be way-late. Above all, take it easy. Play games. Sometimes I liked to see how many adverbs I could use in one paper. Both because it is fun to make normal words into adverbs and also because I thought “Too many Adverbs!” would be a funny comment to see in red pen on an essay. You can also try to overuse words that are generally underused, like paean or elocutionist. Or look for quotes that have typos or grammatical errors in them, and then include them in your essay with a gleeful [sic].

  Use dashes liberally, as the best thing a class on grammar and punctuation will ever teach you is that there is not really a wrong way to use a dash. You can put them anywhere — anywhere and everywhere! — and it’ll still be correct. Even more useful and fun is the phrase “That is to say.” It’s excellent if you find yourself running out of things to write about, or have a momentary stall. You can use it to continue writing even if you’ve hit a roadblock with your subject. That is to say, you can restate what you said in your last sentence, when thinking of the next subject you want to write about. And, lastly, follow at least some of the traditions. If you ever find yourself describing two things in an essay, make sure to mention that those two things are dichotomous because, well, they probably are. I would generally advise against using big words just for the sake of using them, but dichotomy and dichotomous are so ingrained in university essay-writing that you should feel naked without them.

In the end, it all comes back to confidence. Writing is an egotistical enterprise regardless of how you feel. If you were a humble person, you’d just let someone else do it.

And it dawns on me, as I write this ridiculous collection of tips and tricks, that I kind of regret that I probably won’t have the opportunity to write an essay again. It’s never been something I particularly enjoyed, but taken as a consistent factor in my life that I constantly worked to better myself at (And I mean better in terms of time, efficiency and ultimate hilarity, rather than final grades, of which I know very little about) it does feel like an end of an era. I only hope that some poor misguided kid will read this and waste his education like I did.

See you tomorrow!
Matt