The Art of Writing Up

It's been ages innit? Since the last post of mine. Hopefully, that explained as well the workloads that I carry. Sometimes I think that the postgrad life starts taking its toll on me. But, yes. I keep on pulling myself together, picking the pieces all together to remind me how grateful I am to be here. 

Alright.. moving on from my pointless whine. Here's the thing. Very recently I have been receiving numerous queries, asking me about the technical advice for writing up an essay. Then I realised, that this is a scholarship "opening season". Many awards are opening applications, and with that, it is an essay writing season. The whole thing takes me a walk down the memory lane where I needed to arrange words after words, getting through the same thing to win an award that eventually brought me here.

Yes, Indeed when you get into the professional words, writing an essay, or on a broader scale, writing skill, in general, is important. Often enough, it got us felt like stuck onto a wall with nowhere to climb, go around or break through the wall. But what's intriguing is, seeing how many occasions are there, that we required to display our fineness in writing skill. give it a name. IELTS test. Business matters. University Assignments. Research Report. Scholarship Application and the list will go on and on. 

There has never been any particular, robust, exact formula for writing up an essay though some scientific researches might have proven otherwise. In my personal standpoint at least, the way we judge a quality of an essay will never be excluded from an element of subjectivity. Two different readers might dispute over the quality of one same text, whether it has fulfilled the minimum requirement of good writing or not. Needless to say, the quality of writing that produce is defined by many factors. Our knowledge and a basic understanding of the language we are writing in, our ability to develop a contextual thinking, and what's equally important is, our sense of aesthetics. However, it is still possible to specify the way we think. It is possible to bring this broad discussion into a realm where it is less arbitrary to digest. There is a way, to determine a correct approach to write efficiently and come up with a satisfying essay if writing a perfect one is nearly impossible. 

So let me simplify it for a bit... Before we get there, I need to make one thing crystal clear here, that these all bits of advice are based on my own angle. I'm gonna have to say that I am lucky enough to have spent 14 years in using English, even in some cases, I still got tangled before I managed to finally completely deliver what I am gonna say. But these hints I'm going to give away will hopefully be applicable into any form of writing.

Alright... Let's dive in! First thing first, I will always, tirelessly, continuously, say this every single time people come up to me asking for advice. Read. Any form of reading is highly essential. I think I have mentioned this somewhere on my previous IELTS post: "Taming Down IELTS Writing Session". Your writing skill is heavily correlated with your reading habit. Put it this way. How many times we are sort of in the middle of writing down stuff, but we feel like running out of words to say. Like no more bullets to fire. That's simply because you don't read enough, mate. As simple as that. I say you will never be able to understand what a good writing looks like, let alone writing one if you never read a good one! You will never ever find a good one if you don't even bother to turn a page reading. See? it all absolutely makes perfect sense. So, read. No excuse for this one. To build your writing upon a strong foundation, we need to have a proper understanding towards a good text, and reading is fundamental to create an appropriate essay. 

Next thing, bear in mind that there is no such thing as a perfect essay. You will always flaw, at least I bear that in mind that perfection is almost unobtainable. Sometimes, aiming for perfection is not only time consuming, but can also be stressful. You start to worry over an unnecessary piece of details And it is important to remember that in most of the case, our emotion could be reflected in our writing. That correlates heavily with your timeline. Never put your essays to a whisker away from the due dates. A good essay comes with continuous revisions, and putting things for tomorrow will only get the time bomb to go off. But then again, the length of duration needed to cook the whole essay up varies based on writing skill, and our the level of writing we are trying to develop. Certainly, my suggestion is to start as early as possible and take gradual steps in developing the essay. Hence, plan your essay. Draft it. A failure in planning is a start of almost every doomsday. Plan precisely how many words you are willing to write. How many paragraphs you are going to write. How many topics and subtopics you are going to include within the essay. Plan.

Right, next up. Never starts with a keyboard. This is surprisingly helpful to remember, well at least for me. Never in a million years, I got it right if I start any form of writing with my fingers dancing on the keyboard, never. I always start with a classic pen and paper method, and for me, one of the most effective ways of doing it is by creating a mind map. Called me old fashion, but that works perfectly well every single bloody time. By creating a mind map, you can draft your thinking, apply your research of the topics into the draft, therefore creating a rock-solid backbone for your essay. Trust me, you can actually tell when an essay is written down in a blink of an eye or actually well-planned. Prioritise things what elements to include and not to necessarily exclude in your essay. Therefore, create a fine-flowing essay. Remember, your readers HAVE feelings. They can actually sense if a particular essay is written with genuine emotion. And for me, that emotion is built upon my hand stroke, not through a computer screen. So, think about it deeply.

This leads us to the next thing we need to pay attention to. Appeal to your readers' sense of aesthetic. If that's a bit too complex, let's simplify it. When I told you that your readers have feelings, it means that you can use that to your own advantages. Your readers have a tendency to be attracted by a well written and a well-structured writing. Excellent used of expression and a broad range of vocabularies.  Understand your topic well, and try to build your words around it. Well, this is, of course, bring us back to square one. In order to get the most of that, you need to get to know a great number of expression and stretch your vocabularies. Read more. There are tonnes of expressions you can find out there: English Expression, and yes, it will take a bit of a practice before you can naturally include them within your text, but trust me, adding expressions to your essay is "a cherry on top". Well, I just did. For readers, the perfectly placed and accurately used expressions are signs of your deep understanding of the written language. Thus, they will put a massive respect to your effort in making the essay. 

Ask the opinions of others. It is always good to hear from people and to see things from a different perspective. Again, this correlates with my previous point, that readers have feelings. It is good to engage with them before you actually hit the submit button, cause there is no withdrawal once you get it sent. So get the draft done, send it to some trusted people and ask them what they think about it.

Concise writing. Finally, I am sure that as much as your readers have feelings, they are also capable of getting bored. Especially when they are faced with a giant pile of essays, which in most of the case, is realistic. In the future, you will write essays for multiple purposes, therefore, you will get readers from various background: lecturers, supervisors, recruiters, or general friends. The bottom line is, whoever your readers are, you really want to make them as comfortable as possible with your writing, and often enough a wordy essay is never a good idea. Get your points crystal clear, point out straight to the point, but develop it well under well-constructed sentences. Take a theme for every paragraph you are writing and let the paragraphs connect to each other. This way, you will get your messages delivered perfectly and receive a positive understanding of your readers.

That's all I suppose! Pretty much it. In the end, constructing an excellent piece of writing has never been a one-night-stand job. Your quality of writing will increase gradually the more you write and the more hours you put in actually improving it. Mark my words, I had more times sick of reading my own writing that actually feel satisfied by it, I had more time got my paper turned down than got a good mark. But I've always believed only when we get through the process, we will hit the bullseye. 

" There is no elevator to success, you've got to take the stairs. "

Same thing with writing. Yes, there is an art of writing up. And I can give you hints and advice of mine, but it's your job to nail the art.

"Lad with the handful of dreams & wishful thinking.. "