Organize your essay well. Think about the best way to organize your essay before you write. Start by deciding what are the most important things to say on your topic. Cover the topic as fully as you can in the space you have, but do not just list a number of unrelated facts. Present your material so that it easy for your readers to understand. Don't expect them to fill in missing assumptions. Provide a clear line of thought for the reader to follow. For a longer essay, label each section with a heading, which will make your organization easy for the reader to see. You have only a limited number of words, so use those words as effectively as you can to be informative and clear.
Support your claims. Wherever possible, include your own independent thoughts and conclusions, but be sure they are well supported. Don't just state your opinion on an issue. Explain your reasons for believing it. Provide an argument that will persuade your readers that your conclusion is right.
Consider how your readers will interpret it. Think about what your readers don't know. Don't assume they know everything you know. For this class, you can assume that your audience knows something about Psychology, but are not experts in Cognitive Psychology. Explain things in a way that will make sense to them, given their background. If you can, have someone else read it and give you feedback.
Some sources are better than others. For the paper (Psych 891sc), the required reading may include sources that will be very useful for your topic, but the majority of each essay should be based on a variety of sources above and beyond the required reading. If you are looking for information on scientific findings, you should rely mainly on papers in scientific journals and books written by researchers. Articles in newspapaers and news magazines are often less accurate in reporting scientific results.
Use your own words. Write the entire paper in your own words. Do not take sentences or sentence fragments from your sources. Be very careful when you take notes on your sources so that you always know what you wrote and what was written by someone else.
Include full references for all your sources. You should have short references embedded in your text to make it clear exactly where every piece of information comes from. There should also be a full reference list at the end of your paper giving the full information about each of your sources, including authors, date, title, journal or book, page numbers, etc. If in doubt about how to format your references, just use APA format.