Active essay writing: ten steps to success!
Dr Heather Taylor
What is the idea?
This chapter presents one approach to using the Active Essay Writing Programme (Taylor et al., 2019); an innovative approach we devised at the University of Sussex to support students in planning, preparing, and presenting original, insightful, and well-presented essays.
Why this idea?
From our experience, most students arrive at university with little-to-no understanding of how to approach essay assignments. If left unchecked, this can lead to them feeling overwhelmed and, in-turn, submitting incoherent and uninspired essays that do not accurately reflect their true potential. The Active Essay Writing Programme was designed to address these issues and make the task of completing essays more manageable and enjoyable for students.
How could others implement this idea?
To guide your students through this ten-step programme, you will need to create an example essay question that you can collaboratively answer with them. This will provide them with the opportunity to develop and subsequently apply the acquired skills to their own essay assignments.
Step 1: Deconstruct the essay question
The first issue students sometimes face when approaching essay assignments is not fully understanding the question. This can result in them writing (potentially good) essays on completely the wrong topic! The first step is to therefore deconstruct the example essay question with your students, breaking it down into its component parts to ensure understanding and overcome any confusion.
Step 2: Generate ideas
Students are often under the misconception that before they can answer an essay question, they must read everything ever written on the topic. Their attempts to do this creates more confusion than it solves and, in turn, can result in submissions that are largely incoherent regurgitation of academic texts. Instead, we encourage our students to ‘think first’ to help them develop a focused strategy for identifying relevant literature to support their essays. To demonstrate this, ask your students to generate ideas, arguments and counterarguments that might help to answer the example essay question and add these to a mind map.
Step 3: Find evidence
After developing their own mind maps, students will need to see if evidence exists to support their ideas. To demonstrate this process, select some ideas from the example mind map and search for relevant reliable evidence. If no evidence exists for certain ideas, important learning has still taken place; we know that these ideas are unsupported and should therefore not make it into an essay, and, in doing so, greater insight into the topic has been acquired.
Step 4: Critically evaluate the evidence
The type, style, and depth of critical evaluation will differ by discipline and your students’ level of study. In consideration of this, critically evaluate some of the sources identified for the example essay with your students to model the skills i