A Practical Guide (For Sane People) For Writing College Essays

now here's a bit of a strange thing that i've noticed and here's a video for that strange thing that i've noticed which is that most arts degree students actually hate writing essays that to me is just like completely completely mind-blowing because think about it if you are courageous enough to consider the humanities as your major uh if you're a lip major if you are a history major or if you're kind of like i don't know what what you're studying art history major you do realize that the bulk of your coursework is actually going to be uh essay writing right you do realize that your degree is probably going to end up being a useless degree anyway you're going to end up working at starbucks anyway yet most people hate essay writing in arts degrees which absolutely fascinates me and as a curious person i dove a little deeper and i investigated into this you know also from my own experience of hating essay writing from my own personal experience of absolutely um loathing the experience of writing a research essay why is that the case the history of this channel is basically the history of a series of complaints that are directed toward the education system because i frankly think there are much better ways of doing things there are much better ways to exercise this faculty of thinking and i think frankly universities are not teaching us the very important thing or the very important skill of thinking for ourselves because if you ask a random college student how do you write an essay or how do you write a research paper a college research paper chances are they're going to go through 20 other papers and they're going to you know it's basically them going through all of these papers and just you know doing this kind of like collage of all of these papers and at the end at the end they're gonna end up with this giant frankenstein of thoughts that are not even theirs which is uh which is a shame because that's not a process of exercising your thoughts that's the process of you making a collage so in this video let's talk about how to write an essay like a proper person like a normal person because chances are universities are terrible terrible at teaching you how to write an essay properly how to think properly so let's start with a redefinition of the word essay you know there's a very interesting root uh to the word essay actually came from a french word essie meaning to try a very famous french author um michelle de montaigne he actually wrote an entire book of essays and these essays are not your university research essays these essays are actually pretty scattered you know they're scatter or they were scattered contemplation contemplations of this one guy and um after going through a lot of in his life he just decided hey i'm gonna retreat back into the back into my hometown uh at my little farm and i'm gonna just write about whatever and that became a forum for people who are very introspective and that became a form for people who want to exercise their thinking right because writing itself figuring things out itself that itself is an act of thinking and writing an essay is sort of like you trying as you're trying to essay you're trying to devise something new you're trying to think about something new you're trying to make sense of something that didn't make sense before that's the root of the word essay but yet if you write a research paper that's a collage of other people's thoughts that's not really you exercising this faculty to try you're not exactly trying right you're not exactly trying to push your thinking beyond its balance right so for me it's a tragedy that universities are so bad at defining what an essay actually is uh so they tell students to research this research that write me an essay on this subject write me an essay on that subject without really you know being crystal clear about this at one point which is that to write an essay you have to be willing to think to try to think to try to think about to try to think of something new entirely different and the process itself we don't care about what kind of result you get from the essay but the process of investigating into it that's what matters yes schools are so good at placing a very heavy emphasis on the result and the process really you know suffers just people just kind of ignore the entire process of thinking and they just want to get straight to the result that's how you end up with these collages that at the end are just not essays they are merely should i say you know just laced together you know other people's thoughts you know just combined together into a in into a pot of uh uh that you call a that you call a research essay insert yourself into a position of being an ignorant person because you always start start from a position of ignorance right you always start from this position position of like i don't know anything about a subject i want to know more about the subject and then you go research and then you are very open-minded right and then you're very much um interested in a subject as to construct an entire essay about it so that's how you should think about it and now i think it is high time that we take a break from the video before i give you four tips on how to survive a college essay without losing your mind and here is a shout out to today's video sponsor skillshare skillshare is a platform for all kinds of curious people to learn things that are interesting from photography to writing to illustrating beautiful pictures speaking of writing and speaking of exercising ways to think i recently bumped into a very interesting course by emily gold on how to keep a journal for 10 days which is going to serve as kind of like a template for a future video that i'm going to make so if you're suffering from a writer's block if you're suffering from this you know syndrome like you can't really write anything down you're afraid of writing you don't want to sit down to write an essay or write a creative piece this right here might just be a challenge for you to snap you out of that besides the challenge there's so many other courses on skillshare you could watch in our spare time instead of watching netflix and as a viewer of this channel as someone that's willing to put up with my rambles there is a premium membership offer in the description down below just click it and the first thousand students will receive a discount on their premium membership thank you skillshare for sponsoring today's video back to my rambles so after redefining what an essay is here are should i say four overarching principles or four tips on how to write better essays and keep in mind i'm not going to teach you like the teal structure on a boring stuff you learn you've learned in high school but this is gonna be like four principles or the four should i say anchors at least for me four guiding four guidelines for how to approach essays in a healthier manner without banging your head against the wall and the first direction or the first should i say principle is that actually the more complicated your essay sounds the dumber it is this is something that's really hard for some first-year university students to stomach or first your humanity students to stomach because they want to sound impressive they want to wow their professors so to employ so they tend to employ all of these complicated terms very academic terms very specific terms without realizing that their professors are probably laughing at them so my philosophy is that if you want to write a good essay clarity of thought matters more than how complicated your sentences are clarity of thought you know writing is a form of communication if you can't get across what you mean you've failed as a writer if you can't get across your thinking process in a very straightforward manner you're going to look dumb to your professor the reason why a lot of students hate essay writing isn't because they don't have enough they don't have that many that many words to choose from they don't have a wide enough vocabulary it's because they don't even know how to use them properly right any fool can string together a sentence full of these complicated and very very smart sounding words you know that's easy for a foolish person to do what's truly rare is for a person to um go through the process of thinking so much as to ask to devise a simpler way a very simplistic way of explaining a subject it's kind of like richard feynman the fineman technique if you can teach the subject to someone that's not exactly an expert in the field you know you've learned it you know from front to back but for stupid people because they've got nothing to say on the subject they have to use all of these fancy stuff to dress up their words so clarity of thought is more important in your essay than all the complicated words that you're going to use and occasionally there's going to be that one term that you just absolutely have to use to get your point across i get that but most of the time use a simpler word most of the time don't use all of these ridiculous sounding words just to make yourself um sound 20 some 20 smarter because to your professor you're going to sound like a dumb ass professor just kind of knows that you haven't done enough research into the subject to construct a clear enough argument uh clarity matters more than pretty sentences second guideline is that you need to define your scope of your research which is just one of the most important things ever you know most people they dive into an essay without even knowing what the hell they're writing about they're just kind of like going for it they're just kind of like researching every single little thing and at the end again end up with this collage of random facts which is um scattered all over the place they're talking about penguins in one paragraph and giraffes in another paragraph so you don't want that before you dive into the research before you want to map out the territory before you want to actually enter the field you need to be very specific about what your target is you can't target something you know a heat-seeking missile it can't target a target without finding a target first be very specific and don't be afraid to narrow your scope because the more narrow a scope is the easier it is for you to kind of exercise that clarity of thought that i talked about in a previous tip because if your scope is all over the place it's very challenging it's going to be really challenging for you to actually construct something that's cohesive and clear and straight to the point in your arguments and after you've defined your very narrow scope number three you need to start constructing a pile of garbage and i'm not kidding when i say a pile of garbage a pile of garbage is an academic object where it's literally a dumping ground full of research papers you want to dig through your library's archive you need to find at least 20 papers on this very narrow scope and don't you don't have to read all of these right you just have to have them there you just have to dump it in the file and this is in a sense your breeding ground for new ideas because academic research is all about learning about what's been done and coming up with something that's that probably hasn't been done before and the process of reading all of these papers you need to go through this sifting process right because one paper here just might not work so you read 20 of this paper oh my god this paper is more relevant so i'm going to read 80 of it this paper right here it's okay so i'm going to read 50 of it so take a very selective process which is going to be really easy to do if you have a scope right that's why this is a streamlined process first you need to define a scope and then you need to construct this pile of garbage and with the scoping mind it's easier for you to sit through all of the be very selective and don't be afraid to check out stuff you don't need don't read all of them but you need the volume there to support your width of your subject right and we're not even talking about the depth but you need that entire you need the scope first you need a lot of papers and with a defined scope you're able to judge you know this is good that's bad that's good that's useful and after you've read all of these in a very kind of like skinny fashion let's move on to tip number four tip number four for me is the most important crucially important the most important step to writing a good essay which is um to take a walk barbara oakley in her book a mind for numbers which i which i have read back when i was a physics student she talked about two modes of thinking one mode of thinking is diffused thinking another mode of thinking is focused thinking i would even argue as a literature student or as an art student you don't actually need much focused thinking because focus thinking is really reserved for like really nerdy right really complicated algorithms and really complicated mathematical should i say mathematical subjects but as kind of like a arts major you need a lot of right brain thinking and this is what a lot of people are not getting in their degree and that's why that's that's what's driving them nuts with all of these papers in your arsenal in your pile of garbage after you've read most of them after you've got the psych after you've got all these concepts in your head you know you're ready to merge them into something you're ready to practice thinking and you can't practice thinking in front of your desk because that's just stupid most students make the mistake of like writing an essay straight after they've done auto reading and that is just going to turn out to be another collage instead go take a walk think about this stuff and this thinking process isn't exactly conscious it's kind of like you making connections that you weren't aware of before and this is crucial absolutely crucial for for some of these very non-linear subjects like literature for example history for example uh philosophy even you wanna give yourself the space to contemplate you wanna give yourself what all the greatest thinkers have had you know space to think without clarifying your thoughts without you know this process of trying to devise something new you're going to end up with um just another mediocre paper that's not that interesting to write and that's not interesting to report on either as you're walking through the woods as you're walking through your little journey little voyage realistically you want to look for that one key idea or key concept or that key connection that you need you know from all these papers that you've read you need to look for that one key connection that's going to branch off into your arguments and that's going to branch off into your supporting supporting evidence and for something that's so intuitive and so grand you know there's one key concept that you need to construct an entire essay you can't reach that by just sitting at your desk it's very difficult to reach it you need the space to think you need the space to let your brain wander and make those spontaneous and very organic connections and after you've had that walk after you've collected notes sit back down at your desk and start writing that essay and here's the last thing that i'm going to tell you view the writing essay process as an exploration don't view it as it means to an end because the end is stupid the end is a great that you probably won't care about in in about a year view the means as the means in itself right you want to go through this process you want to clarify your thinking then again clarification of thinking is uh the bulk of writing the essay if you are just glossing through the writing process because you don't like it that's you missing out on a point of your entire degree that's you constructing these ridiculous collages no one's going to read don't be afraid to pursue threads of thinking that are kind of like ridiculous at first don't be afraid to poke into something that you're not exactly sure about don't be afraid to venture into territories that are at first a little ridiculous because you know that process itself that's the process of thinking that's what you're trying to get out of your degree and i hope after you've finished watching this video uh you've walked away with a deeper understanding of what an essay actually is and you've walked away with a few tips for writing essays and again expect more rants on the education system and for now i am going to finish this video happy writing happy studying and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: R.C. Waldun

Views: 19,122

Rating: 4.9536176 out of 5

Keywords: writing tips, essay writing, how to write an essay fast, write essay, how to write a paper, essay tips, research paper, college essay, how to write an essay introduction, why you hate writing, how to write an essay step by step

Id: iKhCKagfGoU

Length: 14min 52sec (892 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021