I have already mentioned the need to trust yourself. This point cannot be under emphasised. Trust is key!
It is absolutely imperative you trust yourself as you write. Do not continually second-guess yourself. Get your thoughts out of your head and down on 'paper', so more thoughts can come.
You need to not only trust yourself in the moment but trust that your 'future self' will make good decisions with what your 'current self' is outputting.
One of the wonderful things I enjoy about writing in this day and age is having the ability to easily edit what I write. This creates a freedom to write something that your future self, be it a few seconds or a few days later, can polish up.
One of the most potentially helpful pieces of advice I would offer to those struggling with essay writing - especially those trying to get started on an essay - would be to just write something.
Your future self will be more informed and be more than able to objectively read what you're writing now (several times over if necessary) and can be trusted in knowing what to do with what you've written.
With the structure established, I like to then bash out some content: well-formed thoughts; semi-formed thoughts; ideas about where I might go with the essay (brainstorming, essentially); key concepts I want to include; questions I might have, and areas I suspect I might need to investigate. Essentially, anything that comes to mind - I just jot it down.
As I dump these thoughts into the body of my essay, I am demonstrating that I fully trust my future self's ability to know what to do with this material. I know now from experience that some of what I am writing will be deleted, other parts corrected or redirected, and almost all of it refined to some degree.
If we were to use the analogy of building a human body, the skeleton is representative of the essay structure (see earlier post). This brainstorming stage I am talking about is like then putting some meat on the bones. You might think of a first draft stage as the first layers of skin.
As we add some of this early content, a few things happen:
Firstly, we see the essay starting to take shape. Where we are going with it starts to become clearer, and we begin to see the potential commitments we are making.
Secondly, we start getting some of the thoughts that have begun to form from reading the essay question written down, and thus out of our head. As discussed earlier, this creates room for more thoughts to come, without the fear (and very real reality) that we might forget something worthwhile that has already occurred to us.
And thirdly, we begin to feel we have made some meaningful inroads, getting a few hundred words down that will either be used or represent thinking that will be expanded into many more valuable words.
The net effect for most people is a reduction of stress about completing the essay, and a fair idea about what the next steps of writing are likely to involve. You should also find this reduces any general anxiety you might have about writing future essays, as you now have a bit of an idea about what you're doing. The tendency to procrastinate, which is usually subconsciously caused by not knowing how to proceed, should also be largely resolved now too.
Next Post: An Example
March 2018 (Updated January 2021)