How to Write a Mini-Essay

mini essays are one of the best tools for learning they're an outlook for you to read and reflect on the ideas but also a way for you to practice your writing every single day it's like the Swiss army knife of your personal education and this is something I talked about in depth in a previous video so I don't want to bore you with the same old details here but one common question arose from it how do you actually start writing the mini essays how do you structure them where did you even begin after about 10 months I've written probably hundreds at this point so I've had at least the room to explore maybe what works and what doesn't but even with that said there's no way to do it and this video is not to box you into this one siiz fits all approach because I understand that what is fun and effective to me might be boring to you or just not work plus we have different goals for me mini essays are a tool to achieve something but what you're trying to achieve could be completely different for me and obviously that means a different approach is needed my end goal is to improve my writing and actually produce something that's worth reading so of course I Tred to keep the mini essays clear informative and entertaining but that might not be the same for you you might not care at all about that so here I'd like to offer a few General pointers that can be useful everywhere no matter what you're doing I also want to offer a range of styles and structures so you can hopefully weigh each one up and see which one fits you the best I will also mention some prompts for starting the essay because that's usually the trickiest part to get the first sentence down but just before we get into the writing style there's a few important rules we have to stick by and you might think whoo What the hell he just told us that there's no one way to write them and that's true but even creativity benefits from some level of restriction for example no matter what an artist paints whether it's abstract or classical they still have to follow the laws of color theory they can't break free from that and discard them entirely and just because authors can write whatever they want they still have to obey some laws of syntax and grammar these limits exist for a good reason and it's not like we thrive in spite of them we Thrive because of them in the case of the mini essays we have rules not only to keep them useful but also rewarding to write because as soon as they become boring we lose that passion and that motivation to continue the first rule is to keep each mini essay about one idea only this Narrows your focus down and it prevents you from getting lost in this stormy mess of ideas and that sounds weird to hear because you and me both know that Connections in learning are amazing that it's amazing to link ideas and piece them together but Min essays are not the time and place for that at least if you're trying to do it within the essay itself because remember at the end of the day mini essays are just notes written in detail they're not really a final project that has you tackling many different angles to a single problem that's why I recommend keeping each mini essay about one idea and then saving the connections for bigger write ups maybe essays articles video scripts anything that gives you the room to really flesh out the ideas and expand upon them of course you're still going to want to link ideas but you don't have to do that within the essay you can do it in between essays so let's say you have a mini essay about one of Aristotle's ideas if you want to link that to another philosophical idea you write a separate mini essay on it and then just link the two with a a hyperlink feature for example this keeps each note distinct and straightforward and believe me that's going to save you so much hustle the next rule is to keep them short and I know it's obvious right but they're called mini essays for a reason and the short length is exactly what makes them so powerful I'm reading on writing well by Williams inser and as you can see from the index tabs there's a lot to talk about there's a lot of Amazing Ideas in this book and can you imagine if I wrote a fullon essay about every single note I've marked down here I don't want to do that I'm okay thank you of course I like to be thorough and I like to write long notes but I mean there's a point where it gets ridiculous and actually one of my biggest struggles in Reading is limiting the amount I write because I feel the The Urge of completion as if I have to write thousands and thousands and thousands of words just to properly finish the book did I learn a lot by doing that yeah sure I mean of course I did but it cost me in happiness I turned learning into a SLO this was supposed to be a hobby that I found peace in not another form of school that stressed me out now for me many essays are the perfect middle balance they're not short enough to be considered just rough notes but they're not long enough to be full-on writing projects they take way too long they're short enough to write in only 10 or 20 minutes which keeps the whole experience fresh and realistic in the long term but at the same time they're long enough to help you flesh out the ideas to understand them more and of course to practice your writing the magic is in the balance and of course it's up to you to maintain that as a rule of thumb I try and keep my mini essays between 100 and 500 words now of course it's is not the end of the world if you go over that but it's a good range to stay within there's a great prompt I love for helping you keep them short and I think I read this in how to take smart notes and the idea was to write the mini essay and keep it short enough so that you can see everything on your computer screen without having to scroll down having that restriction helps you train your Clarity and it stops you from from waffling as we say in the UK the final rule is to keep your mini essays organized with a system of tags folders references whatever suits you the best these essays exist to serve you you you don't want them to make your life harder keeping them organized not only helps you avoid becoming insane but it's actually really useful because I find that when I'm writing say the scripts of these videos or an article or a newsletter entry I find notes from months ago that actually resurfaced to help me and the only reason I could find them was cuz I had a system of organization that made sense so just like that with a quick search I can find these little gems of information that come back to help me it's like a personal writing assistant that saves me hours of work it's great in obsidian which is the software I use personally I have a system of tags indexes and links which help me find what I need exactly when I need it now this is a whole process in itself so if you're interested in setting up your own I have another video detailing it I also want to stress just how important it is to note down any references as in where did you get this idea from if you've ever had to write a thesis or a dissertation you already know this now I thought this was crazy when I first found this out but I know that some people out there write their entire dissertation without sighting anything and they only do that at the end and I think are you okay do you hate yourself this means that once they finish writing they have to go back to the start and somehow remember where every single idea came from every single book every single Paper every single article and you know good luck with that now of course it's not that tragic when it comes to mini essays but you can see what I'm getting at you don't want to shoot your future self in the foot just because you didn't reference stuff in the present maybe one day you revisit an idea and you want to know where it came from and read a bit more but you can't do that if you didn't reference the source and in that situation you're forced to then scour the internet do guessing games and find where it came from that's a huge waste of time and effort and with just 10 seconds of care in the present you can save that from ever happening so please unless you're a masochist and you love to torture yourself write down the sources and just as a little bonus draw it's amazing to link mini essays together that are similar this helps you like create a chain of reasoning and you can see how your thoughts developed along the way and through doing that you come up with new and interesting questions and who knows maybe those connections will eventually come together in a book of yours or a longer piece of writing those are the rules covered and now it's time to look at the general structure here we'll explore a few different styles as well and hopefully they can inspire you in your own notetaking and maybe you can even adapt them to serve you the best but just before that I'm happy to say that this video is sponsored by skillshare this is great timing because I finished College summmer here and there's more time to just do what I love which is to learn at my own pace of course I'm trying to improve my writing and I know most of all my fiction skill is lacking so I found a class on skillshare called storytelling one1 to help me get better at that and after 40 minutes of absorbing the ideas and taking notes I had built myself a strong Foundation the best takeaway for me is that too much description is actually bad for your writing it makes it clunky and oversaturated this class got rid of that misconception for me it taught me to be a bit more brief and to use the the longer descriptions a bit more sparsely so that when they do show up there's a bigger impact and Beyond the writing classes there's way more to look forward to skillshare is the largest on online Hub of learning it has classes for all types of creative Hobbies from painting to photography cooking even video editing and these classes are taught by experts in the industries people with Decades of experience so if you're like me and you have a bit more time on your hands this summer i' check these classes out and that's whether you want to improve at a skill you already have or maybe find a new expression for your creativity the first 500 people to join skillshare with a link in the description will get a one month free trial so do check that out today first up is the basic three-part structure which is intro body conclusion this is like your factory default note you can use this when you're stuck for direction or you can take it and kind of morph it to fit the note best but just because it's simple that doesn't make it a cheap copout and it's not worse than maybe a more Nuance structure it still tests your writing skills and it still has the potential to be not only elegant but fun and best of all the principles you learn in this three- part structure appli to almost every other format of writing so if you train them here you have a good foundation for then going on to do something else else the tallest trees have the deepest roots and this daily practice is a chance for you to build those roots the first part of this structure is the intro or in other words the hook this is where you pull your reader attention but you also present the premise of the Min I imagine it as rolling a red carpet out for the rest of the essay to do its job and the better your intro is the easier it is for the body text to then shine it doesn't have to be long either usually a sentence or two is good enough there's two main goals I have when writing an intro first I try to present what the mini essay is going to be about with as much clarity is possible because remember one day an audience is going to read this or maybe your future self and you don't want to keep them in the dark for too long a lot of writers make this mistake and I know I was guilty of it in the past I would try way too hard to be edgy and mysterious and that would mean that my intro was vague and it would take way too long for that main idea to reveal itself and as you expect readers get confused they get bored and they just quit so be clear and do it fast because once ARA knows roughly what's coming they have a reason to stay my second goal is to generate some curiosity or some tension being clear is good but that doesn't mean being painfully blunt to the point where it's boring think about your favorite TV shows and books they are clear enough to follow of course but they also like to tease you with these hidden details these things that you don't know it creates a mystery and that keeps you watching and nothing is more satisfying than trying to solve this mystery and piecing together the bigger picture you probably want that balance in your mini essays too Clarity but also curiosity there's so many different options for creating a successful intro and I want to show you some examples from my own notes that maybe inspire you the first and probably simplest way to start is to just slap the reader in the face with this Bor statement if the topic of your mini essay is interesting enough on its own then you probably don't need these fancy rhetoric techniques to Hype up the reader sometimes the idea speaks for itself maybe it's Unique it's interesting or it's provocative this is what I did in a mini essay about how video games kind of simulate traditionally masculine activities to me at face value that idea is unique it's interesting it excites me to read on so all I had to do to start the essay was to State the point that's it the second thing you can do is to use emotional language to tuget the reader feelings we're people we're emotional and good writers know that and they're going to use emotion to keep you engaged at every turn the best stories ever written are only the best because they capture The Human Experience in a way that no one else could so if your note involves anything to do with people which is usually the case you can start this off by pushing them straight into the drama and using this emotional language to get them to feel something for example in this note that discusses evil I open up with some dramatic imagery I talk of this desperate situation where someone has lost everything and even though it's extreme we can all relate to the feeling of hopelessness a bit and even though with this the premise is not clear straight away the reader has some idea of what to expect and of course the drama creates curiosity and they read on just remember to not reveal the main point too late otherwise wise we lose that Clarity we mentioned and this note is a negative example it's kind of depressing but you can use any emotion Under the Sun whether it's good or bad you can use fear love hatred security Freedom belonging all of these things that make us feel something they're yours to take and build upon the third thing you can do is open up with a question one that the reader wants the answer to now this one's super straightforward because it takes both boxes for clarity and curiosity it's clear because unless you're straight up lying the reader can expect an answer to to the question or at least an attempt to get there and of course it builds curiosity because it's a question we don't know the answer to it and we want to read on to find out what it is for example in a Greek tragedy called Agamemnon written by aulus which is somewhere there it talks about how Agamemnon actually killed and sacrificed his daughter just to be able to invade Troy in this note I wonder how Agamemnon the king could do such a thing like yes okay in the story he had to sacrifice so that the winds could clear and he could invade Troy yeah that's pragmatic but I still thought how could a father kill his daughter over that that was the point I was discussing and this is quite an obvious question and I'm sure it's something that other people have wondered so of course it makes sense to start your essay with the question how could he do such a thing in this way you're relating to the same thoughts that the reader has they might ask the exact same question and now they see it and get to find out why the fourth hook involves you throwing the reader into the middle of a story within the first sentence you take a reader and you put them straight into the middle of the action and they have no choice but to read on and see what happens and if you're thinking stories why are we talking about stories this is non-fiction and you're right but we can still use the power of a story to get our message across even when it comes to non-fiction I'm going to talk about this hook a bit later because it applies to the the broader storytelling approach which we'll see in a bit so the hooks have helped you start the essay but now it's time to write the body text and this is the bulk of the essay where you get to really flesh out the idea you do your best to explain to add detail and to guide The Reader through the thought process if you understand an idea well then this step shouldn't be a problem to you you can just talk about it in a way that you understand and hopefully that is going to reflect on the pages but it's not always that easy it can be tricky because sometimes you're left struggling to express something clearly even if you feel like maybe deep down you understand it you're left with an empty page thinking how the hell do I say this my favorite way to avoid a situation involves a 10-second prompt that's really easy I look away from the screen and then turn back to it as if I'm seeing for the first time I try and step into the reader shoes and completely remove all the hindsight I had as the writer I then read it from start to finish to see if it makes sense and if each sentence flows to the next in a way that's understandable most of the time I'll discover that I made a mistake maybe I left out a detail that the reader needs or maybe I've written a sentence in a way that's too vague or maybe there's a whole chunk of text that is kind of useless and I can just delete without a worry because this prompt is so quick to apply you can really edit on the go and it keeps the whole process fluid and of course the end result is a piece of text that is logical but also clear and easy to read which is what we want not only as writers but as readers too I want to offer some examples from my own notes but please keep in mind that there's no one way to do this and I don't want to present my notes as if they're the gospel of minay writing but still if you want a rough idea on how they might unfold then have a look at this note on minimalism this note explains a way we can shop while avoiding clutter and consumerism so you can see in my intro I've raised an interesting idea that minimalism is not just about getting rid of stuff but it's also about having a healthy approach to shopping and to gaining new things I also give some background just to set the scene and make it a bit clearer for the reader and as I said before the intro is an amazing place to pave the way for the rest of your text in this note I mentioned three principles I would then go on to talk about and it's that straightforward not only has that made the reader curious of what's to come but I've also given myself a blueprint for what to write about it's a win-win in the body text I elaborate on each principle which is exactly what the readers EXP I write just enough to answer the question and get my point across but not too much that I'm beginning to ramble in a way it's like the body text is answering the promise of the intro that's a good way to see it third comes the conclusion which is where you wrap up everything in this neat package no matter what you choose to write in whatever style it may be the ability to make a powerful conclusion is priceless I'm sure you've read a great novel where the author ended a chapter so perfectly that it forces you almost to stop to just put the book down and think damn what did I just read that's a powerful conclusion that's what sticks with your reader and we can take it from the other end where it gets a bit nasty imagine you've just written the most amazing article you've had excellent arguments and you've been persuasive throughout the whole thing if you don't know how or when to put an end to your article then all of that momentum you built in the body text is going to start to fizzle away all because your conclusion was either too late to come or it just sucked and of course a sloppy conclusion is going to be the last thing a reader remembers as they walk away and you don't want to leave that kind of impression now in the case of the mini essay you don't have to write this award-winning final blow that's not the point but you can still take all of the details and condense them into this final message one that hopefully resonates with the reader and sticks with them and at the very least it acts as a neat summary of the point which is helpful in its own right now to be honest I don't feel the need to write a formal conclusion in its own separate paragraph like you would have done in school maybe usually my conclusions are just a sentence or two that pin the big idea down for example this is a note about how reading fiction is a form of self-reflection the intro and the body text are pretty standard like we discussed the last line is the conclusion and with just a brief sentence I can distill the message of the mini essay and Hammer it home it could be better but it does the job and when it comes to a simple mini essay that's all you need just a quick Interruption I have a newsletter and there I talk about of course Reading Writing learning but also some insights on things that are not discussed necessarily on this channel mini essays book reviews and of course all these other little titbits and stories that can help you you get to where you want to be it's totally free of course so I'd love if you subscribe with the link down below and I'll see you there so that's the basic three-part structure covered and it may be simple but it gives you so much room to have a play around with and find the style that clicks with you the most but there's another type of note that I've kept separate for now because of how unique it is it's my favorite style because as I mentioned before I'm not great at writing fiction and this gives me the perfect Outlet to practice that I'd even argue that it gets your point across better than a traditional note does because of how powerful storytelling can be I call these story notes because they use a story to communicate an idea the story is the vehicle of your message these stories can be anything they can be totally made up they can be retold from somewhere else or they can be your own personal experience since gilgames and since the epic poetry of the Greeks thousands of years ago we've used stories to carry ideas through time and to communicate the deepest reflections of humanity come from fiction probably because we as humans relate to real experiences better than the raw information it's trying to get across you learn more about ambition by reading McBeth and not the Wikipedia page on ambition so to use stories to my advantage I first think what is the point I'm trying to get across and here your choice of story matters it has to make sense your story has to amplify the message not distract the readers or confuse them that's why it's so important to understand the point you're trying to communicate before you choose a story so the natural next step is to think about any stories you could use maybe you've experienced something that is relevant here or maybe you remember something from a TV show or a book you've read that you can almost retell here in my own mini essays I've used stories from the Greek tragedies to Breaking Bad to my childhood memory or to even what happened yesterday it can be anything and of course I'll offer some examples to give you an idea of what you could do because this is quite a unique format and it can be tricky to get started do you remember the intro Hook from earlier where you throw your reader into the thick of a story this is where it gets to shine now you're not writing a novel here it's a mini essay so it makes sense to get straight to the point and push your reader in into the action immediately and as with any good story you continue to build some tension until the climax the big reveal and that might be where your message becomes clear where the big idea is visible and if this sounds like unfamiliar territory to you which I totally understand there's a way to almost blend the story style with the traditional informative style that we used to and this is where you write a note that's almost a hybrid of the two it starts with the story and once that gets his job done you switch to a non-fiction style in the second half and this is where you given the room to discuss the message of the story and the big idea I understand this all sounds a bit vague so it's best to just show you an example Thomas so is a famous American Economist and social commentator and he has a memoir and in that Memoir he talks about a period in his early life where money was hard and he had to apply to job after job all while getting rejected and during the search because of his poverty he fell behind on rent payments and even started skimping out on food just to be able to stay afloat but then it occurred to him that he could sell his own suit to a porn shop for some extra cash and it worked straight away with some of that extra cash he went to a local fast food place and he got himself a kishe and an orange soda and he described it as the most delicious meal we'd ever had just because good food was scarce to him beforehand now I found the message of this story interesting so I made a note called scarcity leads to gratitude now Soul's story was perfect and I could have borrowed it and retold it it was a great example but I thought you know maybe I'll test Myself by making up a new story I took the idea from his Memoir and I made up my own story about a desperate hiker who' run out of water so you can see in the first half of the mini essay he's starting to panic and that Panic grows and grows until he's instantly relieved when he sees a spring he runs up to the spring he dips his head in and it's the best water he's ever tasted and that's essentially the same message scarcity leads to gratitude but then the story ends and in the second half I switch to the informative style and I essentially just discuss the message of that story this just helps me pin down the idea and elaborate on the point without having to stay in the fictional Universe I have another story note about the Dilemma of King Solomon which this time is a retelling of an existing story now King Solomon is believed to be wise and Powerful so he's given this dispute to solve there's two mothers both claiming to be the mother of a baby and no one knows who's telling the truth so they come to him the fake mother doubts the king's wisdom and she thinks she can trick him the real mother unfortunately believes the same thing she thinks that the fake one is going to trick the king and she's going to lose her baby but both of them underestimate King Solomon cuz he has a cunning plan instead of giving the baby to one mother King Solomon says how about we cut the baby in half and give one half to each mother of course the real mother doesn't want her baby to die and she's willing to surrender it to the fake mother if that means keeping it alive however the fake mother doesn't really care if the baby lives or dies all she wants in that situation is to deprive the real mother because she's envious of her now King Solomon recognizes the difference in their attitude and he spots the fake mother the baby is then safely reunited with the real mother now this note is more heavy on the story element but you can see towards the end I switch from fiction to non-fiction and I start discussing the ideas as we go I explained to the Envy of the fake mother and why she was okay with the baby being killed I talked about the extreme Envy she felt the urge to deprive someone of something just for the sake of spiting them all while avoiding the blame herself and the big idea of the story was to show how Envy works in the most extreme case of course because of the shock Factor the story carries the message very well and it's impactful and of course the elaboration lets the reader understand a bit more so through those examples you can see just how great a story is for conveying a point and however you choose to do it there is a successful way so I hope that video has given you some sort of foundation to go off and start writing your own mini essays in a way that speaks to you there's a lot of things to experiment with so go out there and see what works for you best of luck and of course thank you so much for watching and to skillshare for sponsoring the video

Channel: Odysseas

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Length: 23min 58sec (1438 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2024