Writing your essays

Recommendations on writing an essay

1. Consider the prompt and your approach to the essay. What unique perspective can you bring to the discussion?

2. Write your thesis or several theses to test drive your thoughts.

3. Read, read, read. Gather source materials. Find sources which will support your thesis AND sources which will argue against your thesis. These counter-sources will become foils for your refutation in your essay.

4. Create a quotations/sources document, (separate from your essay). It should contain the following:

a. citations (quotes), data, ideas, perspectives with parenthetical citation

b. bibliographic entries. Write the complete reference in the format you are using (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.)

c. write out the author's introductory info which qualifies her/him to become a source for your paper

See below for example.

5. As you write your paper, cut and paste your citations/quotes into your paper.

6. Copy & paste and rewrite the appropriate introduction to your author and quote.

7. Copy & paste your reference material into your bibliographic section.

8. Proofread. Edit. Rewrite.

Example of Quotations Doc in APA

"The Singularity will allow us to overcome age-old human problems and vastly amplify human creativity" (Kurzweil, 2005, p. 21).

"As intelligence saturates the matter and energy available to it, it turns dumb matter into smart matter" (Kurzweil, 2005, p. 364).

"Most significant would be the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, although nonbiological intelligence will quickly come to predominate" (Kurzweil, 2005, p. 397).

Kurzweil, R. (2005). The singularity is near: When humans transcend biology. New York: NY, Viking Press.

Ray Kurweil is a genius. He invented may machines such as the flat-bed scanner, text-to-voice synthesizer, music synthesizer and optical character recognition. He is also a writer who wrote this book, a New York Times best seller and The Age of Spiritual Machines and other best sellers. He also became the Director of Engineering at Google in 2012.