Guidelines for Writing a Good Essay

Your essay must focus on an interesting topic or problem: Write about something that really interests you or that you care about. A topic doesn’t have to be a “point” you are making. It can also be a problem or question you explore from various angles in an evolving argument that ultimately draws the issues together to resolve a conflict or contradiction. Sometimes good papers do not clearly resolve a problem at all but instead (having the same effect as a conclusion) elevate their issues to a higher-level open problem or question (e.g., reenvisioning a technological media problem as a sociocultural or philosophical problem).

Your essay must have an argument: A classic mistake of beginner students is to submit an essay that is really a collection of “notes about” or “various thoughts on” a topic. You need not only a topic or problem but an argument about it, even if the argument is not a direct one but instead takes twists and turns to explore various views before coming to your conclusion.

A good argument is both a logical act (you are following a line of thought) and a communication act (you are expressing that line of thought so that your audience can understand and be persuaded by it). Communicating an argument well starts with awareness of your audience and what it takes for them to follow you.

Assume (about your audience):

• That your reader is not just your instructor or TA with an “insider’s” understanding of the course, but is instead someone you don’t know who needs orientation about the context, assumptions, and stakes you are dealing with.
• For the purpose of a scholarly paper, also assume that your audience members are well-educated and have expertise in their own areas, but do not know everything you do about your particular topic.

Therefore (to communicate your argument to your audience):

Your readers needs you to  frame or “scaffold” your topic or problem (so that they can understand the context of discussion, the relevant backstory, your approach or persective, and why it is all important). To frame issues for a scholarly paper, the relevant contexts might include not just general public ones (e.g., what is happening in the world or nation) but also scholarly or professonal ones (e.g., “A general trend today in media studies [or any other discipline, area, method, etc.] is …”).

Your audience needs help following your particular path through issues (rather than feeling lost amid your various notes and random thoughts). That means that for readers to follow your argument from point A to Z , you need to lead them through points B, C, D, etc. even if it seems blindingly obvious to you what the connections are between everything. Including phrases that indicate logical relations or transitions between points is especially helpful in guiding readers–phrases such as “thus,” “similarly,” “however,” “for example,” “in sum,” “a consequence of the above is that,” “contrary to the above,” etc.

Your audience needs appropriate evidence or examples to understand and be persuaded by your argument.  For instance, if you are making a general or commonly believed point, you may not need any evidence or further explanation. But if you are making your main point or a difficult point, then that is the time to quote something, refer to a fact, provide an example, cite a publication, etc. An argument is often most compelling and interesting if you analyze at least one such item in some detail to show how it exemplifies your general point.

Also, be open to the facing a surprise or challenge in your argument:

Be prepared to put a kink in any totally predictable argument, because if the problem you are dealing with is important and something you care about, there will always be such a kink in the form of an open question, a conflict of values, or a contradiction. For example, good essays often include a pivotal turning point, question, challenge, or complicating problem in mid-flow. Here’s an example (in outline form):

1. Thesis argument (“Today we live in an age of information, audio-visual entertainment, and other multimedia materials that require us to ‘closely read’ such materials if we hope to be literate consumers….”)
2. Turning point or challenge (“But unlike the texts that literary scholars such as the American ‘New Critics’ trained students to ‘close read’ in the mid twentieth century, some of the new information and multimedia carry hidden structures and codes that cannot be “read,” or even seen, in any ordinary way. How can we be ‘close readers’ of such materials today?”)
3. Resolution (“If we look more deeply into the issue, we can see that literacy now requires an understanding of the underlying structures and history of information that are analogous to those of print literature. These new structures are different but also similar, in the way that ‘code’ is like but not the same as text ….”)

P.S. Your essay must  have a title that is specific to your topic or argument: For example, do not simply title your paper “Essay #1” or “Essay on Media” (or any other generic topic). Instead, include something in the title that cues the reader to  your particular topic or argument about it–e.g., “Media in the 21st Century: Comparing Oral, Writing, and ‘Meme’ Cultures.”

 Notes and citations for essays: Essays or reports should include notes with citations in MLA style (though other styles are fine as long as you are consistent). (See the Purdue Online Writing Lab’s “MLA Formatting and Style Guide”. A handy tool for automatically generating citations in various styles is ZoteroBib.) If required or you feel it would be helpful, you can also include a “Works Cited” list or bibliography at the end. For reasons of academic integrity, be sure to cite all works that you quote or otherwise use. (See Prof. Liu’s Intellectual Property & Academic Integrity Guidelines.) It is always better, and costs you nothing, to acknowledge sources or influences on your work.

 Notes and citations for creative writing: If your assignment gives you an option to write in a creative-writing mode (e.g., the Essay 1 assignment in Prof. Liu’s English 25) but also asks you to cite any relevant references from the readings you have been doing, then the following are some options:

• Option: Add footnotes that point out relations between your creative piece and reference sources (e.g., “See Marshall McLuhan’s ‘The Medium is the Message’ –specifically, McLuhan’s argument about ‘extensions of man’–for the significance of this statement by the character in my story”).
• Option: Add a short paragraph at the end titled something like “Context” or “Background” in which you explain the relevant context (intellectual, social, historical, technological, media historical, etc.) for your paper. That context statement would be the place to refer to sources.
• Option: After your creative piece, you could add a bibliography of relevant  sources (which may include works that are not directly quoted or cited). A variant of this strategy is to create an “annotated bibliography” that for each source includes a short summary of what a source is about. The last sentence of such an annotation could be an explanation of the relevance to your creative piece. (Here is a guide and examples of annotated bibliographies.)