Hello, my name is Nicholas Morton and I'm going to be giving you a talk here about
writing tips, some dos and don'ts, what are some good ways to write essays, what
are some tricks of the trade and ways to do it really effectively. I want to start
by thinking about what I consider to be the golden rule of history writing, and
that golden rule is clarity: your argument should always be clear, your
reader should never be in any doubt about what you're trying to say, as far
as I'm concerned I don't really mind if you write with the complexity of "The cat
is in the hat," provided your argument is clear. And this
leads me on to, very naturally, to another point which is, don't try and be
more complex in your writing style than you feel comfortable with. There's lots
of essays I get where students have tried to use more complicated words thinking
that that will substantially improve their grade, actually that isn't the case.
Often if you use words you're not comfortable with your meaning comes across rather
awkwardly, the sentences don't flow in quite the same way, it's a
little bit more vague than you'd really like to see, and so actually it can
negatively affect your grade, so try and write with as much clarity as you
possibly can. Similar vein, when it comes to sentence
structure, try and avoid writing in really long sentences. Again, this blurs
the clarity of your writing: sometimes when you write a sentence as maybe six
or seven lines long it's actually quite hard for your marker
to really get a grip on what you're trying to say or to follow your argument
all the way through those six or seven lines. Typically sentences should be very
short, and again, this aids clarity, making clear statements one after the other and
ultimately leading your reader through your argument. Okay,
other tricks: avoid writing in the first person. Remember that this is a
formal piece of writing, so words like "I, my, me", these kinds of things, or even
worse, "one", just don't write them, just don't write your argument "I
think this", "one thinks this", that's not what we're looking for here. In a formal
piece of writing, it should be much more impersonal and, in order to express
your own view, your argument should come across clearly,
but you can write it in other ways, saying things like, "The evidence discussed here
shows that..." or "From the above it is clear that...", or you can show your argument, that
it's your view, your argument, without using those personal pronouns using that
kind of approach. Likewise try and avoid informal language,
this is a formal piece of writing so slang, anything like that, again, try to avoid
and always explain yourself clearly. So, imagine that, I don't know, you're sitting
around with some friends and you want to explain a subject that says, I don't know,
why in football matches what was played out the way it was, or why some
other game was won or lost by a particular team. Imagine you're explaining it to
them and imagine they don't really understand the game that well, walk your
reader through your argument clearly just as you would in a social situation
being sensitive to what they will know and what they don't know, probably erring
on the side of caution with that, so explain yourself clearly, think about
what your audience can be expected to know. Another thing I come across
occasionally is students who think that it's a good idea to put in quotes
perhaps from a pop song or from a movie. I think that there's a sort of view out
there among some students this is quite a clever thing to do and I I have lost
count of the number of essays or exams where students have told me that "with
great power comes great responsibility" from Spider-Man, again just don't do it, just
don't. It doesn't work, it's not impressive,
stick to the academic lines, stick to an academic approach, and keep your eyes
focused on the evidence and the core debates that you're engaging with. A few
other things that I find really helpful when practising and
improving my writing and trying to write clearly and trying to write so my
arguments flow from one point to another, is when I write anything, pretty much,
from a book to an article, I will often write first something that I call a
concept draft, and a concept draft is... Let's just put it another way,
let's imagine you're writing an essay in the conventional way, so you're writing, you've
done two or three lines, and then there's a factor that you've forgotten or
there's a piece of evidence you just can't follow, there's a really great
quote that you know you've read and it's in there somewhere so you
go looking for it and you can't find it, so you break what you're doing, you
go rooting through your files, perhaps you have to nip off to the library and
go and find it, and you do find it, and 15 minutes later, an hour later, whenever it
may be, you sit down, you put in that bit of information, but you've lost the flow.
You've lost the thread of what you were saying, and you try and restart it
but actually it no longer works in quite the same way. You get back into it, you
write another five or six lines and again, you come across another roadblock,
you've got to go research something else, you've got to go and find
something else that you need to complete your essay. Now, writing your essay in
that way in some ways is the most obvious thing to do because as soon as
you hit something that you don't know about, you go to find that and you carry
on writing, but ultimately, the written style can, I've often found in my
experience, end up being a little bit clunky, in the sense that one passage
reads well and then it sort of doesn't quite flow with the next one which then
reads well for a bit but then doesn't quite flow well with the next one. So I
don't do that approach. Once I know what I want to say broadly, what I do is I
will write larger chunks. If I come across a piece of evidence that I don't
know about or if I come across a factor that I can't quite remember or a quote
that I can't quite put my hand on, I don't stop writing, so, write write write
write write, come across a roadblock, but I don't stop there – what I do is I put in
an "@" symbol, and I put a brief description of what it is that I'm
missing, so "@" symbol, input quote here from
a given historian, and then I carry on writing and so typically what I'll do is
I'll write my entire essay in just a few sittings, but it will be full of these @
symbols, these gaps that I couldn't quite remember a piece of evidence about, or I
wanted to go and check something. Now the point of this is that I've written the
whole thing and stylistically it flows quite well but
neither have I forgotten those places where I need to go and do a bit of extra
research, so I haven't been breaking my flow of consciousness, I haven't been
breaking the flow of my words, I've written the whole thing, it does work
stylistically, but all I have to do is do CTRL-F, find all those @ symbols where I
have got all those gaps in my essay, and then I can take a sort of shopping list
to the library or to my notes or whatever it is, and then I can find out
those bits of information I need without breaking my flow of consciousness. That's
what I do. It's just a thought, you might find it useful. So I hope these notes
have been helpful, please look at my next talk, we'll be looking at some other
tips to success in essay writing, thank you.