essaywritingtips

[essaywritingtips]

References and Citations

Here are a few small tips to do with referencing and citing in your essays:

DISCLAIMER- My tips and tricks worked great for me, my tutors and my university, however, they may not work for you, always check with your tutors etc. and if you're struggling ask for support!

1. Once you find a source you’re sure you’ll use, note down the full reference (Harvard style, APA, whatever you’ve been told to use) before you write anything about it in your essay, you’ll thank yourself later.

2. Have a separate document to store your references. You can arrange this alphabetically automatically in Microsoft Word by highlighting them, using the AZ button, sort by Paragraphs and Ascending. Then just copy and paste at the end of your essay. (This will also help you check your essay word count, often references don’t count towards the word count so keeping them separate until the end keeps you on top of how far through your essay you are.)

3. While writing your essay, if you know you’ll be citing a particular author a lot in one paragraph, copy the citation so that you just have to hit ctrl + p instead of typing out (Dinkley, Rodgers and Blake, 2019) over and over, which is especially helpful if you’ll be citing a few different sources for one point.

[essaywritingtips]

INTRODUCTIONS & CONCLUSIONS

Intros and conclusions are the worst!! But I made a simple way to get started on these.

DISCLAIMER- My tips and tricks worked great for me, my tutors and my university, however, they may not work for you, always check with your tutors etc. and if you're struggling ask for support!

1. Save the intro and conclusion for last. How can you conclude something you've not finished? Also, how can you introduce something you haven't written yet? Trust me, it's so much easier to do these last.

2. Your introduction and conclusion should each be about 10% of your word count, so if your essay is 2000 words, then your intro and conclusion should be about 200 words each. Which means, technically, the hard part of your essay just became 20% shorter, RESULT!

INTRO

3. Paragraph one of your intro should be an introduction to the topic of the essay, give some definitions of key concepts and some background information such as facts.

4. Paragraph two of your intro should be an outline of the essay. One sentence on what the essay will discuss, for example

"This essay will assess..." Then basically rewrite the essay question here.

Then look at every paragraph of the main body of your essay and list what the main point of each paragraph.

"This essay will look into the idea of BLANK. It will move onto a description of the events which took place in 0000, followed by a discussion of the consequences this had on BLANK."

CONCLUSION

5. Paragraph 1 of your conclusion should basically be a rewrite of paragraph 2 of your introduction. Yeah, you read that right. Follow the same formula, a brief reference to the essay question and a list of all the key points you've made throughout the essay.

6. Paragraph 2 of your conclusion- What conclusion can be drawn from your essay? By this point you should, hopefully, know at least enough about the topic to pull some kind of conclusion! Basically you can write "this essay has found that there are inconsistencies in..." or "gaps in the research regarding..." or "this essay has proven that without BlANK, BLANK cannot work effectively."

Maybe give recommendations, if appropiate, "further research into this topic is required, potentially focusing on INSERT DEMOGRAPHIC, as there is a gap in the literature regarding this demographic."

And that's it, a not perfect, but great stepping stone on your way to writing some brilliant essays.

Feel free to ask questions or send some of your own tips my way!!!