Hello my name is Nicholas Morton and I'm a lecturer at Nottingham Trent, this is the
first of a series of talks looking at what is an essay, how do we do well when
writing out an essay answer. In this first talk we're gonna be thinking about
the main question: what am I supposed to do with an essay question when it lands
on my desk? What's the basic starting point that I should adopt when
engaging with an essay question? I'm going to begin to think about this by
raising a fairly trivial example, let's say that we've all gone to the cinema,
there's 20 of us, for example, and we've all gone to the cinema, we've watched a
film and then we've come out, we've seen the film and a friend turns to us and
says, "so what did you think of the film did you like it?" Now, there are a number
of ways we could answer that. What we could do, is we could say, well, okay, the
film started this way, the following events happened and then the film
concluded in this way. At that point our friend would probably turn to us and
say "well actually that wasn't quite what I was looking for, I asked you whether you liked it
or not." Another way we could deal with it is to say, "okay well I don't really have
an opinion on whether the film was any good or not, but I've got a friend who
does and they thought this." Again, our friend might say to us, "well, again,
that wasn't what I was asking." Or we could say, I liked the film, I didn't like
the film, the film was okay, whatever you think — but here are the reasons why. Okay.
Now, obviously writing an essay is rather different from giving your
opinion on a film, but the principles are the same: in an essay you are not being
asked to tell the story of the events being described. Let's say that the
question being asked is: "Why did Henry Tudor win the Battle of Bosworth Field?",
you're not being asked to tell me the story of the Battle of Bosworth Field.
In a similar vein, you're not being asked to say what other historians think about
the Battle of Bosworth Field. What you're being asked to do, is to put together a
professional, well-researched thesis in which you offer a direct answer to
the question, stating your reasons in an evidence-based argument for that answer.
So yeah, there is a difference between my analogy in writing an essay, one is
obviously very professional, the other is informal but the principles are the same,
you have to provide a well-reasoned answer to the question. Now, in the
later talks I'm going to go into how you might do that, but there is one basic
principle I want to start with in terms of how you produce a really
well-reasoned, really well-argued professional answer to the question, and that is that
you have to know about the subject material really well. If you ask your
opinion and whether you liked a film that you've seen you've got to have
watched the film before you can deliver a verdict, you're not going to fool
someone by pretending you've seen it and then having a go at giving your view,
you've got to know your stuff and the same thing with an essay. The best
starting point for writing an essay is to conduct a great deal of reading, so in
terms of the question on Henry Tudor you've got to read up the primary
sources, what did they say about the Battle of Bosworth Field; the secondary
sources, what do the historian say about it, you've got to engage with these
sources, have a view. Can I trust the primary sources? What do
I think about the views that historians have said? And all these sorts of
questions and within that you will develop your own stance on the question
until you reach a point where you think, you know what, I actually have a really
well-rounded professional thesis on this question, I know what the answer is and I
have a clear answer in mind and I can explain why I've reached that conclusion.
So that's your starting point for answering an essay question, I hope you
found that useful. Please do watch later talks, thank you.