Oxford Uni Essay Writing Workshop!!

Grint right so we can start recording so hello everyone welcome my name is Matt Williams I am the access fellow of Jesus College at the University of Oxford's Jesus College is one of the 30 undergraduate colleges at Oxford University it's often known as the Welsh College because it was founded by Welshman in accordance with the wishes of the Queen of England Queen Elizabeth the first back in 1571 that's when william shakespeare was just a 7 year old boy we're about to celebrate our four hundred and fiftieth birthday next year so looking forward to that I teach politics at Oxford but I'm also what's known as an access fellow meaning that I'm responsible for encouraging people especially those who are currently underrepresented Oxford to make strong applications that's why we've set up this webinar and it's why we've set up this essay writing competition because we want to share some of our love of essay writing and some of the skills that we've developed in Oxford over 900 years so that's the the basic point of these sessions and I'm thrilled to see so many of you here what I'm going to do is I'm going to share my screen so that you can see some slides and I'm gonna use these slides as the basis for our discussion but as I mentioned you must feel free at any moment to submit questions or comments and I'll keep an eye out for anything you might wish to say and there'll be an opportunity at the end for some questions as well ok anyway let's sir let's dive in so as I mentioned I'm Matt and here's my email address should you wish to contact me after this session you're most welcome to do so it can be on anything such as essay writing or Oxford or universities or politics or so that the official title of this webinar is them how essays saved the world several times over history of the craft and how to write better essays and save the world yourself now this is slightly sort of hyperbolic title is quite sort of in-your-face and the point of that is that I want people to fall in love with essays because essays have almost certainly affected the way you live whether you're conscious of it or not and I get the impression that lots of people are a little bit jaded by essay writing they write a lot of essays for school and they start to think of them as a bit of a chore and they fall out of love with them but these are incredible powerful things essays and we ought to respect them and we ought to try and find a way to enjoy writing them because you have the capacity to change the world yourself and that's ultimately what we do at university is we give people skills to solve just terribly intractable problems so currently in Oxford professor Sarah Gilbert is trying to come up with a vaccine for corona virus and she is a perhaps particularly prominent example of what we try and develop in our students which is that ability to take a problem that lots of people have struggled with and come up with a solution to it and the essay is the mechanism by which we convince other people that we have that solution it's a it's a bit of a sales tactic it's we're telling people we've sold this you should agree with us so it's a genuinely sort of empowering and wonderful thing and I'd like everyone to fool a bit more in love with essays so where the essays come from what is the history of the essay well there's all sorts of dispute about this in fact there are many essays written about essays as you can predict what is typically agreed however is that the first major collection of essays comes from it a man called Michel de Montaigne he was a Frenchman and he was writing in the 16th century he's considered to be one of the architects of what became known as the Enlightenment this period of scientific and humanistic development in in societies around the world and in particular in parts of Europe towards developing ideas and problem-solving and applying reason and evidence to fix the various issues that we faced around us what Montaigne did that was so unusual was that he didn't just regurgitate what other people had told him to think but he came up with his own ideas and that's where the word essay comes from it's a derivative of a French verb meaning to try or to attempt and that is one of the essences of an essay is that it's your attempt is you're you're you trying to come up with a solution to a problem that is not easy to solve indeed many of the essays we try and write our own problems that can never be solved fully they will always be open to debate but you're trying you're attempting and that's the point of an essay you the writer are giving us some sort of plausible solution to the problem what quite a lot of people think essays are for is a way of just showing off how much stuff you know and how many other people's ideas you can cram into a particular piece of writing but ultimately it's about you it's a quite a selfish act it's about you explaining what you think is going on and it is put so perfectly by Montaigne he was in intellectual terms a very selfish man in the sense that he just always told everyone what he thought and his essays are really wonderful and very readable as well if you go on Project Gutenberg which is a website which is Gutenberg org you can read the entire of his essays in English and they're absolutely wonderful they they changed the world themselves in part because they absolutely transformed the way that William Shakespeare thought about things and it and it informed his way of writing they also affected other amazingly important scientists and humanists during the early enlightenment people like Francis Bacon Christopher Wren Isaac Newton Robert Hooke so this sort of approach to using logic reason and evidence to make your case was utterly transformative and ended the era of authority where academics basically did what they were told and created this era of liberalism where academics just said what they thought and that's kind of where we still are now and anyway here's that here's an excerpt for one of his essays on prognostications they yet remain amongst us some practices of divination from the stars from spirits from the shapes and complexions of men from dreams and the like and notable example of the world curiosity of our nature to grasp that and anticipate future things as if we had not enough to do to digest the present I mean that's a great point right so we have the Simba's armed with pathological curiosity about what's going on around us even though just staying alive and constantly doing our day-to-day tasks it's pretty much engrossing for many of us I think this speaks quite a lot to what's going on right now with lockdown insofar as we're as a species bizarrely curious about our place in the universe and what we should be doing and who we are and all these sort of huge questions when actually just even getting through most days can be pretty tiring and difficult so it's a really excellent set of work so I highly recommend you have a look at it anyway so that's these if you like the father of essay-writing Montaigne so if you really do hate writing essays for school then you should blame them but hoping you won't hey is he writing by the end of this so let's just rattle through some frequently asked questions about essays that I that I encounter a lot or perhaps more accurately awkward questions that I get awkward asked a lot because awkward questions are much more funny and interesting and the reason I'm asked what a lot of questions about essays is because I'm a tutor in Oxford I've been teaching there for over a decade and I've read literally thousands of essays now important point I still don't know how to write excellent essays I'm one of those crafts like woodworking or music where you will never be fully satisfied with your abilities you can always be better I'm writing a book at the moment and no doubt that's gonna be sort of criticized quite heavily by my readers and that's okay so don't worry about sort of obtaining perfection because that's not likely to happen but anyway if you like the reason why I'm offering you these thoughts on what's often asked of me is because I've got quite a lot of experience of reading lots of essays so first of all really important awkward question what is the point why do we force children around the world to learn a skill I see writing that you never really use in the real world so when you go out into work it into the labour market it's not very likely that your boss will say I really want you try me an essay on the wives of and really eight because it's not very likely to make them much money if you do if you do that so what is the point in learning how to write essays well because it is a it is a fundamentally useful skill of managing doubt doubt is all around us there's so much stuff that we're actually not very sure about in our lives and people that are good at essay writing are the sort of people that are good at solving those uncertainties of coming up with some workable solution around something that we're not sure about so take for example if you're in it if you're working in a business and you want to think well not the problem here the doubt is how do we make this business bigger and stronger then you would be the sort of person that could come up with a report come up with some innovations to help grow that business if you become a lawyer then the doubt is how can I secure the best outcome for my clients if you're a doctor the doubt could be who should we give this critical intervention to given that we've only got let's say one one organ and there's multiple patients that need it there's always uncertainty in doubt in our lives and the SAE skills you up to be able to manage that doubt in a way that other people will find persuasive so that's why we teach you this skill not because writing essays is something you're likely to do much as an adult's but because the skills you develop in writing essays will be extremely marketable and useful and those people that can manage doubt effectively become the most powerful people in the world so that's why we teach you how to write essays we're not sadists we're not Psychopaths but like torturing young people into doing something that they find inherently unpleasant we're doing it because it's absolutely in your best interest it will make you more powerful and who doesn't want to be more powerful and why is writing an essay so difficult is another question I'm commonly commonly confronted with and there's lots of potential answers to this but I think one of the primary reasons why I see writing is difficult is because it's so personal it is something where you are being asked what you think about a particular problem and therefore you're almost baring your soul and that can be quite difficult it's quite a good to know what you think now a point I'm gonna make later in the in the session is that you don't necessarily need to be speaking honestly in an essay the key thing is showing off your skill of persuasion but it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to believe what you're saying so I think one of the core difficulties of essay writing can be we Joost if you don't worry so much about what you've believed all the time but what you can persuade someone on anyway what's the best and what's the worst essay you've ever read well I've been privileged to read loads of absolutely fantastic essays most of the essays I read are brilliant and the best ones are the ones that really change my outlook on the world they take a problem that I've been wondering about myself and they give me an wholly fresh insight on it they give me some ideas that I had never dreamt of putting together so for example when we ran this essay competition last year a young lady year 8 student wrote an essay about why footballers have paid more than nurses and she challenged the mindset that in that footballers are in fact paid more than nurses because she said that's a category error what you're talking about is why our male Premiership football players paid more than nurses but if you look at footballers more carefully it actually includes people that are in much less secure employment many of whom are women who are underpaid relative to men and she just made this terrific argument that actually footballers aren't paid more than nurses and it's just a mistake led by our perception of what a footballer is it was brilliant and I'd never thought of that and it changed my perspective ever since then it was it was wonderful and so she won the essay competition um the worst essay I mean I'm not I'm not really that critical of essays very often so I don't read many essays that I think of really really bad but I suppose the ones that are most disappointing are the ones where someone's made zero effort so for example they've just copied and pasted something that someone else has said that just seems so lazy and disappointing that someone wouldn't even want to try it wouldn't even want to try and express themselves it's just massively disappointing but like I say that's very rare I don't read many bad essays at all and what's the ultimate objective and the ultimate objective is to enhance your skills to make yourself a superhero to make yourself more powerful to take the doubt in the world and the universe around us and to take control of it yourself that's the ultimate objective and writing good essays will just give you so many skills and it doesn't matter whether your ambitions are to become a doctor or an asterisk sister a mathematician or an English teacher or whatever in all of those professions the capacity to argue effectively is essential and how can I get the best possible marks it's a difficult question and we're going to be going through some of the top tips later in this session but fundamentally you're trying to convince someone that you've got the right solution to the case so maybe you should try thinking about writing an essay as being a bit like a lawyer in a courtroom you've got a client and your client is desperately looking to you to try and stop them from going to prison so you have to try and convince the judge and the jury that your client is innocent of whatever they've been accused of and you're doing a similar thing in an essay you've got their client you've got a particular argument and you're trying to fight for them you're trying to make sure that that argument wins the day and if you do that in a way that it's easy for your readers to understand because it's nice and clearly structured and it's persuasive and it's thoughtful then you'll probably get some excellent marks okay but I'm gonna go through more specific examples about how you can achieve that later in this session okay so where should we start the photo here is a collection of essays written by Harold Wilson Harold Wilson was Prime Minister of Britain in the 1960s in the 1970s and he was an undergraduate student at Jesus College and so we've got all of his essays because in those days in the 1930s when he was a student in Oxford people used to write all that there are scenes in exercise books like this and we've got all of his exercise books in our archives so I've read many of the Harold Wilson's essays and marked them as if they were modern essays and they're pretty good but what you see here is a former Prime Minister's essays when he was a student affair philosophy politics and economics in the nineteen thirties anyway where should you start with your essay writing and well first of all you need to think about what question you want to select and how you should select the best questions to show up your abilities it's not an easy thing to do to select questions there's quite a lot of gut instinct involved as well and so far as this there are certain things that you'll find automatically appealing because you're more interested in them or your more emotionally connected to them or there could be lots of reasons you might just be more knowledgeable about a certain subject but do try and pick a question that will best show up your skills that's ultimately what you're doing you're trying to show off your ability to solve a problem and to argue a case remember that what I was saying about you being a bit like a lawyer and court you need to try and picture that and think of a question that can best show up your ability to argue and so it might not be actually something that you're most knowledgeable about but it might be something that you think you can show off your ability to to solve problems again so what I've shown you here is a couple of examples of questions from a University of Oxford website called explore oxp lor e org and explore has some fantastic questions very sort of mind stretching questions and lots and lots of information that can help you try and come up with a solution to those questions but what the questions all have in common is that they're not they're not really easily resolvable they're going to be contestable until the end of time and that's exactly the sort of problems that we deal with in essay writing they're just intractable problems okay so for example is knowledge dangerous there's no right answer to that that could be could go anyway do humans need religion and are humans ruining the earth these are all sort of ultimately contestable questions okay and that's the duty of them and that's why coming up with good essays will make you very Pat okay so the next question that you think can show off your skills and then you need to think about how you can go into researching this so a good way to do your research is to lead in with a hypothesis whether with a thought in mind in other words let's say you're taking the question is knowledge dangerous don't start reading until you've had a thought until you've thought about what your answer might be so you should start reading already with the idea that knowledge is dangerous or it isn't dangerous or it is dangerous but only to an extent the reason that you start reading with a theory in your head is because then it makes your reading much more targeted and focused and it also makes you more critical because if someone tries to say something that goes against your theory you're going to be trying to question why they would say that and whether or not you think they're valid the problem if you go into reading without any argument in mind is that you'll just be buffeted by what everyone else has to say and it'll just make you more and more confused it's not to say that you should be sticking doggedly to your theory if someone comes up with something that you read that is really mind-blowing in convincing then for goodness sake adapt your theory or even abandon it completely but at least you've got a final more focused approach to your research and reading if you've got a theory in mind before you touch any of the books okay so start with a theory start with a question that will focus your research in your reading but be open-minded don't just stick to your guns don't overreach reading in many ways is the easy part of essay writing because you can always read something else but when you actually need to come down to writing that's the bit that can be quite difficult so don't sort of just keep reading because then you'll just run out of time and mix up your sources these days you don't need to just read in order to obtain fantastic information as I mentioned I'm half blind and so doing lots of reading is it's very very tiring for me so I mix it up I listen to podcasts i download lectures from youtube I use what's called iTunes University or iTunes U which is available through the Apple Store there are lots of sources these days which can be used that don't entail just reading so it's a good idea to mix up the sources so that you don't become too fatigued by any one particular technique okay here's a picture of Oxford salmon camp isn't it is that the map down but hope you go there see so now I'm gonna go through some of my tips as to how to write a killer essay and bear in mind as I said earlier I still I'm trying to work it out myself so I'm not necessarily an expert but I have read a lot of lessons so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go through these three questions that are outlined earlier and just explain how you can write a particularly strong and convincing essay to any of these three so the questions where are humans ruining the earth is knowledge dangerous and these humans need religion so first of all you need to start well in an essay now what on earth does that mean well ultimately the point of the essay is for you to try remember comes from a French word to try try and resolve this puzzle so a good introduction provides an answer you need to answer the question the whole question and nothing but the question imagine in this instance that you're a politician and you've been asked a question on the news it's really frustrating if the politician ducks and weaves and doesn't really get to grips of the question so what you want to do is to avoid that completely your essay should start with a really resolute and clear response to the question so if someone's asked you a human's ruining the earth or opening line could be something like yes humans are ruining the earth it really is as straightforward as that absolutely clear and resolute or no humans are not ruling it or they are running the earth but to a particular extent in other words just respond directly to the question and perhaps the best way of doing that in your introductory paragraph is to just use the question wording itself so you just repurpose the the question in order to frame your answer is knowledge dangerous knowledge is dangerous could be your opening line nice easy I know doesn't sound terribly sophisticated but it is absolutely clear and it's very easy there for your readers to take it on board and the sophistication can come later in the essay when it comes to an introduction you're just trying to provide everyone with an on-ramp onto your onto your motorway if you like you're trying to help everyone just get up to speed with what you're trying to say and clarity is very much the best way forward okay so nice and clear answer the question make sure you answer the whole question and make sure you answer nothing but question another very common problem with with essay writing is that people start to veer off the point they might start answering a question that they'd rather been asked just as the politician might go on television or they just lose focus and discipline and they start going off off the point either approach means you're not answering the question and that means you're not contributing to the marks when examiner's write essay questions they do so very carefully and deliberately and if someone starts to just move off the point they're not contributing to their own marks so anything any sentence in an essay of yours that doesn't contribute to answering the question is not contributing to the marks and you should just get rid of it okay need to be quite strict with yourself is this sentence I'm writing here answering the question if yes keep it in if no get rid of it okay it's a nice strong start resolute be clear use the question worthy would be my advice next up this is my son Teddy you know our dining room at Jesus College at Christmas time where am i showing you a picture of him well because I think it's a good idea when you're trying to analyze the question you're confronted with to think a bit more like a toddler in other words be really perceptive and curious and ask lots and lots of questions why why why why why why is your most powerful question and it's something that Teddy asks me all the time about everything why is the sky blue why am I not allowed to sit on the floor why can't I eat chocolate for breakfast you know there's sort of questions that toddlers ask and they're great questions right so try and unleash or in a toddler because that that inner inner child will make you stronger not weaker because that inner child is endlessly curious and perceptive it doesn't take anything for granted if I give Teddy something that he's not familiar with he just tears it apart metaphorically speaking and sometimes literally he tears him apart in the sense that he would look at it and you look at all of its tiny details and you would have done exactly the same but if you get older you start to look at the world through through some certain lenses that you've put in front of your eyes as a result of of your training at school there's nothing wrong with that your teachers are trying to make you stronger but they're preparing you for exams and sometimes preparing to write the best essay zhing entails a little bit of regression a little bit of some going back to that some curious toddlers stage and imagining you're in a sandbox and just exploring the world around you so what do I mean concretely by this well let's take the question is knowledge dangerous now if I was to even try and ask that to my son teddy is knowledge dangerous well he would have so many follow-up questions before he could even try and answer this he would sort of say what is knowledge and what is dangerous and what is is you know he would absolutely you ripped this question apart and that's exactly what you should do and he would also be really some fastidious you want to know what all of the elements of the question mean and this is another great skill of Tablas astaire actually highly disciplined ironically they don't drift off the point they subtly but what does that mean but there's their dogged and determined and that's what you should be our humans ruining the earth what what's the earth what does it mean to ruin something what a what a human's right you need to go through the question with a fine-tooth comb and that's what toddlers would do okay do humans need religion what does it need to need something what is a religion are we talking about judeo-christian religions and we're talking about monotheistic religions are we talking about those religions which don't have gods and a more philosophical like Judaism what does it mean to need something do I mean need in the sense of it's gonna sustain me it's gonna keep me alive or do I need it to help me form some asset of my personality okay now of course a toddler will necessarily come up with that sort of analysis but they would at least ask the right questions what does it mean to need what is in what is religion that's what I mean by thinking like a toddler it'll it'll mean that you analyzed the question with a degree of detail that it deserves because you're not gonna take any details for granted whatsoever okay so do that think like a toddler it's quite fun as well actually and the next thing is that you need to provide a logical structure to your your essay proper HAP's the most common way that people write essays is just drops the top of their heads so it'll be a little bit like if they're having a conversation with someone and as ideas pop into their mind they start writing them down the problem with that is that we don't have access to your mind so we can't as readers fully understand why you've decided to go from point A to point Y to point F you know it seems like you're hopping around seemingly at random what you want to try and obtain is is a structure that goes from point A to point B to point Z so it's clear and it makes sense so logical in the sense simply means that it's easy to follow and it makes sense for somebody else okay so we could take an argument that might even have completely nonsensical points it is nonetheless completely logical in its structure such as what I've got up here my dog plays chess chess players eat biscuits therefore my dog eats biscuits now the conclusion is correct but both of the premises both of the points that leaves that conclusion are silly and don't make any sense but nonetheless this is a logically structured argument can you see that by going through the points my dog plays chess chess players eat biscuits you inevitably have to reach the conclusion that my Toby's biscuits you almost didn't need to say it is it's just follows on so logically from the points that we've made and that's the way you want to try and work out writing your essay an essay is a bit like a bad joke that the punchline is absolutely obvious to everyone before they've even read it the punchline being your ultimate point they were ultimate argument you're trying to say yes knowledge is dangerous no it isn't yes we need religion whatever it is you go through in a certain way that that conclusion becomes practically unavoidable okay now how can you break down your essay into points into some segmented chunks that you can go through in some sort of sequence of ABEC well what I suggest is that you seek out what I call the hook word in the question and the hook word is that word or sometimes words upon which you have to cook your argument it's the central contention that you're dealing with now remember I mentioned that you could imagine you're a lawyer in court and you're trying to defend your client who's been accused of a crime in that court trial the hook word the word that you are going to be fighting with against your opposition is guilt or guilty that's the thing that you're going to be fighting about is my client guilty or not guilty that word is everything to your argument everything you present to the judge and the jury has to come back to that central contention about guilty okay and essay questions have a similar focus and you just need to work out where is that focal point so let's start with the question are humans ruining the earth if you imagine this becomes something that would be try in a court in front of a judge the the both sides of the debate the argument would have to convince the other people in the courtroom that yes humans are ruining the earth or no humans are not ruining the earth so ruining is the hook word it is the word that everyone's argument is going to focus on and come back to it is the guilty of this particular debate and so you need to hang your argument of it if you can split the notion of ruining into particular chunks you can work through them in a logical progression okay is knowledge dangerous yes it is dangerous no it is not dangerous or it is dangerous but only to a certain extent the word dangerous is the hook word of that question and you can use it to segment your argument in a nice clean logical progression do humans need religion yes they do need religion no they don't need religion they do need religion but only to a certain extent those are the three arguments you can come up with and therefore need is the focus of that particular question what does it mean to need something is the way that you can structure your case let me show you in more fine-grained detail what I'm talking about this could be a structure to an essay and if you plan your essay before you write it it will be much clearer and much easier to read and the way to plan it is to start by identifying that hook word in the question so in regards to whether or not humans are ruining the earth we would start with an introductory paragraph that answers the question and outlines the way your argument is structured you might then want to define what you think it means to ruin something and then we use that definition and split it into three or so bits that we can move through in a logical sequence of ABC so we've got ruining past one that it means to undermine all that we value about the earth then ruining part two specifically making the earth less habitable for human beings and then ruining part three making the earth less habitable for plants and other animals then we might have a paragraph with some counter arguments to stress test our claims and then a conclusion that would be a nice logical structure if a stranger was reading my say about whether or not humans were ruining the earth they would understand why I've moved through the points in that order I've not just sort of allowed ideas to pop up in my mind and for me to commit them to paper I've come up with something that's much easier to understand and to follow okay so that's how you can ensure that your essays are clearly written and are logically structured you focus on that hook word in the question what is the central contention here what is it that we're fighting over once you've identified that you can break it up into its little bits and to work out how to break it up into its little bits get your toddler to tear it apart get your inner toddler to sort of say well what is ruining me oh it could be this it can mean that and that's where you can start to be creative and come up with some interesting ideas okay so that's broadly speaking how you can come up with a logical structure next up balance now we are always on the lookout for nicely balanced essays now what that doesn't mean is that we want you to sit on the fence in other words we don't want you when you're being asked a direct question to sort of say I don't know or to say well it could be this or it could be that because that degree of balance is totally unhelpful you're not trying to answer the question there so it's not strictly speaking an essay in the literal sense of an attempt to solve the problem so excessive balance is no good because it doesn't solve the problem at hand so if for example we were asked the questions are humans ruining the earth and you said I don't know or they could be or they might not be that's useless you're not answering the question so that's even worse than a politician trying to duck the question because you're not even providing anything close to an answer so avoid that degree of balance what I do mean by a nice balanced essay is where you acknowledge what your critics would think and you explain why respectfully you don't agree with them so if for example you attempted to argue no humans are not ruining the earth and you come up with a nice segmentation of what it means to ruin the earth and you just say they're really not doing humans are not ruining the earth in this way that way or the other way and therefore the conclusion must be that humans are not ruining the earth just empathize with your opponents what would they say what would you say they would probably say well haven't thought about what humans are doing with regards to biodiversity or what about what humans are doing with regard to climate change but you can then explain why you think respectfully they're not quite right and why despite their claims teamers are still not ruining the earth can you see how that would make your argument much stronger because it shows your conscious you're aware of what other people would say and you're able to defend your case against their criticisms again going back to the lawyers in court the best lawyers are not the ones that just argue their case but also anticipate what their critics and their opponents would say in order to crush their arguments as well so the best lawyer will not even say my client is not guilty but the prosecution's case is completely messed up on these grounds and they'll tear it apart okay that's what makes for a really powerful argument and it's balanced but not weak and not sitting on the fence okay hopefully that makes sense but as ever you know do submit any questions you might have but anything we're gonna need just yet but if you do have any questions or comments we're gonna say to you feel free to to contribute okay so what's next is it original write the best essays are the ones that are original meaning that you the author are contributing some original insights to the debate so you're not just repeating something that somebody else has written or said you're coming up with your own ideas now being utterly original is very difficult if not almost impossible in in essay writing because most things have been said by someone at some point so there's nonetheless possible to say to speak to yourself and to come up with some ideas that are truly fresh and you should aspire to that you should aspire to speak for yourself because it's relatively easy to just repeat what somebody else has said it's far more difficult and therefore more skillful to say something that's new and you shouldn't be too worried about getting it wrong because most of these questions don't have a right answer so having the guts to go there and just say I think this is a plausible solution and here let me tell you why I think it's plausible can be really really powerful and the best pay the best rewarded members of the labor market are those that are capable of coming up with the most innovative solutions to these intractable problems and that's particularly what we train Oxford students to be capable of so don't just repeat what others are saying try and speak for yourself and be confident you know be proud of yourself provided you're saying things that you think are plausible and logical then the onus is on your readers to explain why they disagree with you okay there are some specific ways you can be more creative and you can develop your thinking skills one of which is to pay closer attention to detail than most people do and that's where your inner toddler comes in if you take a concept like ruining and you look at it in a really interesting way you perhaps consider a different form of ruining than other people look at then that's the way to be creative and original remember I mentioned the young lady last year who wrote a fantastic essay about how footballers were not in fact paid more than nurses she achieved that by looking at the looking at what a footballer was in greater detail than most people did so she didn't take any detail for granted she looked at it really carefully and that's how she extracted a truly original insight so that's one way to be creative unleash your inner toddler because chances are that the inner child will think about things in a much less sort of systematic and organized way and will come up with some more original thoughts another way to be more creative is to be quite contrary to think against receive wisdom this is not in the sense of just saying oh everyone else is wrong but to be a constructive critic to say well everyone tends to think this but I mean time to think the other so for example in answers the question are humans ruining the earth maybe a contrary view to what many people would think is that no humans are absolutely not ruining the earth and one way we could try and reach that conclusion is to sort of say well what does the earth one how can you ruin the earth perhaps humans by accelerating climate change are actually advancing the Earth's it you can say such a thing if that makes any sense because the the forces that created life on earth come from the laws of thermodynamics and those laws seek out entropy in other words one of the reasons that we are alive is because we are very good at generating wasteful energy and and sort of moving energy down a gradient and so you could say that the earth we're not ruining the earth we're doing exactly what the earth and the universe wants us to do by by propagating climate change and there's a slightly bonkers arguments but you know why not go there so if you see we're received wisdom tends to go when you think well what about the alternatives maybe you could explore those to come up with something a little bit different a little bit more original okay um next up how do you finish how do you finish an essay well there's a famous way of saying how to write an essay is first of all you say what you're gonna say in the introduction then you say it and then you say what you've said and that's pretty much what a conclusion should do so it seems quite repetitive prepare a mind you're trying to convince your readers that you've got this solution to a problem so being repetitive is just a good way of making sure that they are on message that they are going to finish up reading your essay agreeing with you again going back to the the lawyers in court if you constantly remind the judge and the jury that your client is innocence then chances are they will just keep remembering that point so being repetitive in a conclusion is not a bad thing in the slightest one thing that you can add in a conclusion is you can draw out some of the implications of what you've said in other words that say your conclusion is that humans are ruining the earth then an implication of that might be well maybe we should have some tax on polluting activities because that might stop humans ruining the earth so much so in other words I'm saying well given I've concluded that we are ruining yeah that's what what next what should we do about that that will be an implication and that could be something you could truthfully pull out in your conclusion so could I listen think oh so when Karis us a great question how would you alter this way basically writing to better suit an essay that asks how rather than having a simple yes/no answer we get told not to list in any way throughout the throughout so how could we create an introduction that answers the question yeah that's a great question Kara so so if for example the question was how a human's ruining the earth rather than our humans ruining yes how could you come up with a good answer to that question again you need to make sure that your introduction is clearly focused on the questions so in your opening lines you would have to describe in very straightforward terms how humans are ruling the earth in a single sentence humans are running earth by law and then explain what you think the mechanism is by which humans are owning gear and then the hook word becomes how and ruining because that's how that's what you would focus on if you are having a court trial about how humans running the earth so then your essay structure needs to focus on how humans are running earth the way to avoid the list of points a shopping list is to show how those points come together into a coherent case now what I mean by that is that you want to avoid writing a shopping list and instead you want to provide a recipe so if for example I was to tell you to go make some biscuits and I just gave you a shopping list you wouldn't know how to make biscuits if I gave you the instructions as to how you can take those ingredients and pull them together and make biscuits then you'd understand and that's that's how to avoid just a list of points where you just say well this could be how and this could be how and this could be how you need to show how they come together in a single case so when you've come up with your list of things that you think explain how humans are rolling the earth work out what those things all have in common what's the underlying factor that they all branch off from and then that can be your major point that begins and ends your essay and that's a way of avoiding it being just a shopping list from becoming a recipe I hope that makes sense carrots for that's a great question and a difficult one to answer okay so moving on from conclusions I've got some examples of answers opening paragraphs introductions to the same essay question and I want you to see which you think are the best okay and this will hopefully crystallize some of the points I've been making over the last 45 minutes or so now I've written least I would not sort of taken them from poor students that I'm trying to embarrass in public I've written them using the sort of approaches to essay writing that students commonly apply to give you an idea of what's good practice and what may be less good again so the question that I've selected is can will be a good thing which is also on the Explorer web site can war be a good thing and I've written four plausible introductory paragraphs to this and I want you to basically feel like you're the examiner now so you're the one that's trying to work out what's good what's not so good and what's the best okay so let's start with a dulce at decorum s pro patria Mori Gore soaked soldiers recumbent in a faraway field may ponder the vaulting rationale and base ambitions that brought them pain the searing physicality of war combined with its existential threat compel us to question its purposes now the reason I wrote that is because it's quite common in essays for students to try and use very flowery and sophisticated even poetic language and I mustn't often asked is it necessary and the straight answer is no it's not you don't need to sound like someone else doing to prepare pretend to be someone with a vast vocabulary and you don't need to bust out your thesaurus to try and come up with some really flowery sentences because apart from anything else the paragraph in a is very difficult to understand it might make sense after reading it four or five times but it's just it's bulky and it's difficult to comprehend and the ultimate point of an essay is to share your ideas with readers and so writing something that's very obtuse and very difficult to read is going to make that much harder so don't feel the need nor the temptation to use highly sophisticated and flowery language because if is in all likelihood going to make it more difficult for you to be understood that's not to say that you can't apply some elegant language and you can use some some poetic metaphorical word words and phrases but don't go over the top and don't sort of try and pretend to be someone you're not another thing you might notice is whether or not you need to start with a quote the danger would starting with the quote is that you are allowing someone from the very GetGo to speak on your behalf and don't forget at all times that the essay is you and your contribution to the debate and if you allow someone else to talk on your behalf then you are your your some denying yourself the ability just to speak there's no harm in starting with a quote but only if you then take charge Yesi yourself so if you very clearly move from the quote to your argument then that would be fine and do you need to quote in Latin oh good god no it's so pretentious and so unnecessary so good I got a comment and how many words should an essay generally be a good question Beth so you'll usually be told how many words you are allowed in an essay the essays for Oxford University students are typically 2,000 words and the essays that we're doing for this essay competition are about 800 words I think but the instructions are on line I think a good essay is usually pretty short actually you don't need to write an awful lot to come up with a convincing case so that's another key point which is that sometimes less is more when it comes to essay writing but it's good question there anyway that was a and the point of writing a was that it means just over-the-top pretentious to complicated not necessary okay you don't need to pretend to be someone you're else using your own voice is completely fine FB war can certainly be a good thing but is typically not the goodness of war depends on why it's thought and how it's fought in particular defense of the vulnerable against tyranny is a good thing but only when pursued with proportionate force further IR key war is not simply a good thing but in fact a good method as violence to prevent worse file okay now B is much better as an introduction first of all the opening lines directly answers the question so the question was can will be a good thing and in the opening line of B the author has just got taken the the question by the by the scruff of the neck and said well directly it can certainly be a good thing but it's typically not so it's answering the question but with quite a sophisticated response it's not saying black or white yes or no but it's coming up with this sort of shades of gray approach and then it explains precisely on what those shades of grey come from the goodness award depends on why it's fought and how it's fought again now there are some problems with this introduction first of all the goodness of war depends on why it's thought now that should be it apostrophe s fourth why it is thought and actually ideally it should be it is avoid using apostrophes because that's enough shortened language looks a bit too casual and this raises the question as to whether or not grammatical mistakes like this are a bad thing and could could lead to you getting lower marks and the simple answer is yes it will I don't necessarily believe that we should be quite so fastidious about spelling punctuation and grammar but that is the world we live in and it does tend to be interpreted as sloppy writing if you have some typos like this so just be very very careful when you're proofreading it's worth noting that we at Oxford are acutely aware that your ability to process language is not a particularly good way of measuring someone's intelligence for example 85% of our maths undergraduates have some form of dyslexia 85% so there are lots of people that struggle with reading writing and grammar but nonetheless if you have the capacity to check your grammar if for example you've got some software that can help you out or you've got the time to be careful and fastidious then you should do it because it is expected so B isn't perfect another thing about B to note is that it uses the first person in other words I argue so should you do that should you write I me my in your essays very common question the short answer is that a university we don't mind at school teachers tend to say don't do it just avoid using avoid referring to yourself and if that's the way you've been taught it's probably the safest way to go when it comes to university we're not quite so bothered the thing is not so much whether or not you refer to yourself but what you refer to yourself doing so what's the verb you're using it's fine to say I argue something it's much weaker to say I believe something okay let me explain why and again imagine you are a lawyer in court and you've got to try and defend your client who's been accused of a crime if you go up to the jury and you say I believe my client is innocent that sounds really weak doesn't it because they why should they believe the way you believe belief is far too personal far too subjective it's much better to say I argue I submit I have reason to suggest that my client is innocent that's more convincing but if you start saying I believe it's my opinion that my client is innocent oh no it's so weak so don't worry so much about the pronoun you are using imeem I worry more about the verb that you attach to that I argue I contend I have reason to believe I have reason to believe fine but simply I believe no good not convincing at all okay so that's another thing I wanted to raise there I've got two more just to show off some other sort of common traits in essay writing style so see can will be a good thing see says wall comes in all sorts of forms besides battles between soldiers sailors and aircrew there are especially in modern times Wars conducted using computer viruses financial instruments secret intelligence data sabotage bio interference and even intellectual property theft war is nothing new albeit its potential carnage is far worse than ever in the nuclear age so is it a good thing okay now the good thing about C is that the author has been a bit of a toddler with the question so he or she has really torn apart what it means for for us about war they're not just taking it in a straightforward way they're saying well what is war and they're coming up with lots of interesting ways to pull the notion of war around the place so that's really good and interesting the massive problem would see is that they just haven't answered the question so at the end of this introductory paragraph I'm no wiser as to what they're trying to argue than I was at the start so as the reader as far as I'm concerned the essay hasn't even started yet because I just simply don't know what they're trying to argue so it's always best to make sure that in your opening paragraph you answer the question and ideally you do so in the first line so remember B B does that B answers the question in the opening line it's a sophisticated answer but it's nonetheless clear and it uses the essay question in order to frame the response so that is best practice here with C I've read the introduction I still don't know what they're arguing there would be a bit line to the lawyer in court having some sort of wofully introductory gambit at the end of which the jury have no clue whether or not they think the client is innocent or guilty it's just not very helpful so for the for the ease of your audience's understanding start with a very clear response to the question okay what about D it can be argued that war is natural and therefore must be good it has also been argued in fact they don't doesn't write it has also been been in mine it has also argued by many that war was rarely achieved anything of much help to anyone so they aren't really good I believe we should look at all of these different arguments one by one okay again the problem with D is there's no answer and in this case D is quite obviously sitting on the fence D is saying well we need to look at this and we need to look at that well yes but ultimately you need to solve the problem that's the point of an essay don't just don't just present all of the different arguments you're not a curator of a museum of curiosities you're a you're a debater you're a fighter you need to come up with an answer okay that's the the key problem with with D sorry oh she asks what are some sentence starters you recommended for a stronger argument so the the strongest arguments are clear directly respond to the question and demonstrate you have thought about the problem in some depth and details so the reason that I think B is a good starting point for an essay is because it's clear it's direct and it shows a degree of thought that it's not just black and white it's not saying yes war is a good thing it's showing it's saying that war can be a good thing under specific circumstances and it describes those circumstances I think that makes for a strong starter the weaker starters are a because it's too flowery and it's difficult to understand other week starts would be easy because although it tears apart the idea of war very nicely doesn't answer the question and D also doesn't answer the question and just sort of sits massively on the fence another problem with D is that it's committed what's called the naturalistic fallacy now what that is is where it says it can be argued that war is natural and therefore must be good this is called the naturalistic fallacy because it implies that something being natural is morally good and it's being natural is what makes it good the problem is that morality and nature don't necessarily coincide and there's lots of things that are natural but we may think are utterly immoral no there's some ghastly things that animals do to each other that we would probably not describe as moral but would certainly describe as natural it's quite a common argument that people sort of say oh well that must be right because it's the way nature intended is but actually sometimes you know the way nature intends for affine so you know you need to be very careful with the naturalistic fallacy now I'm wearing clothes and speaking to you through a computer anything any of those things are strictly speaking Naturals but I wouldn't describe them as bad either so be careful with the naturalistic fallacy how are we able to formulate our own questions for an essay asks Morgan and good question in fact I'm gonna come to that next so thank you Morgan you've helped me segue to my next point which is what now and the way to formulate your own questions is to find some intractable doubt in your life or in the world around you that you'd really like to solve and this again is a way of dressing back to a toddler to thinking like that curious in a child and seeing the world around you and thinking why on earth does that happen and what is going on here and just framing some sort of puzzle that you really like to solve so you know the sky's the limit you can come up with almost anything some puzzles I came up with the other day where why do we have nightmares which I thought was pretty interesting and connected to that you could ask why damn dream I also thought about well does my mobile phone get heavier when I download apps onto it that's an interesting question when I asked why are humans the only species that cry emotional tears there's another question some physiological questions are coming with you know you you ask whatever matters to you that's how to frame the question it's to take something that like that your inner toddler has never received a satisfactory answer to you've thought what on earth is going on here and if you if you become the curious toddler again and you look at the world around you you'll start to notice that there is mystery and doubt everywhere so there's so much that is just weird and seemingly inexplicable and if you frame it as a question you can start to structure a response to it you can start to work out an answer to it so that would be how I would frame your own questions and I think that actually can make it a really enjoyable process because it can help you sort of work out more about the world around you and take some care and interest in what's going on so that would be my advice but it's a great question more than so and that's that's the end of the session we've had a full hour thank you so much for listening and if anyone has any further questions do feel free to submit them either in the chat bar or to just unmute yourself and say them out loud we'll be sharing this this recording on YouTube will put up on for even we'll share it by Twitter so new book readers watch back if you wish and feel free to contact me by email my email address is at the bottom of the screen there if you have any follow-up questions but you know thank you for your commitment you shame yourselves to be going above and beyond by listening to me walk along for now hopefully I'll get to meet you one day when all of this horrible lockdown business is ended what's the name of our YouTube channel it's just Jesus College Oxford but we'll be sharing it on Twitter and you should receive updates via Saren and all the rest of it but that's all for me so thank you all very much have a have a lovely day stay safe look after yourselves and your families and and yeah hopefully once this is all over we'll get to me properly but all the best I run by now Cheers

Channel: Jesus College Oxford

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Length: 58min 28sec (3508 seconds)

Published: Tue May 19 2020