If you find yourself struggling with essay writing, it’s often because you haven’t understood the question, or haven’t defined it clearly enough in your own mind. Essay writing problems are really thinking problems. Sometimes teachers set topics that are imprecise or vaguely worded. But if students just go along with this and write the essay without trying to define the subject more precisely, then they only have themselves to blame. But teachers quite often set topics that are deliberately open to interpretation, to find out what you make of them. Either way, you need to begin by defining the question to your own satisfaction before you begin planning and research. Even then, you may find that your definition changes as you work on the essay. But it is essential to start with a few notes, or even a paragraph setting out what you think the essay question means.
Question types
A good starting point is to ask yourself, ʻWhat is the question asking me to do?ʼ Essay questions often provide helpful clues to what is expected. For example:
- What was the impact of e-commerce on EU business in the first decade of the twenty-first century?
- What is meant by ʻfactoringʼ?
- In King Lear, Gloucester and Lear both learn through suffering. In what other ways are they similar and how might their circumstances be said to be different?
- ʻOil is the only important factor in Middle Eastern politics todayʼ. Discuss.
- What were the main events leading up to the American Civil War?
Essay writing task types
Each of these questions asks the writer to perform a different task:
- Analyse
Question 1 asks the writer to examine a particular phenomenon and analyse its likely effects. Analytical questions ask the writer to tease out the significant features of a situation, to describe them, and to explain why they are significant. - Define
Question 2 asks for a definition of an economic term. The writer is required to list its defining features and to support this definition by reference to good examples from the real world. - Compare and contrast
Question 3 refers to two characters from a play who have similarities and differences and asks the writer to set these out. The question does not ask the writer to describe one character, describe the other, and then compare them. Instead the writer has to find key features of similarity and difference and build the essay up around these. - Argue a case
Question 4 puts a challenging interpretation of a piece of recent history and asks the writer to examine the two sides of the argument and evaluate them. - Narrate
Here the writer is being asked to tell a story. The danger of narrative is that writing it seems easy: anyone can tell a story and many people enjoy doing so. As a result writers often fall back on narrative, when they should be analysing, defining, or arguing.
You’ll find more about essay writing in my book
The Oxford Guide to Effective Writing and Speaking.
Each of these types of question has its own distinctive structures and approaches. Sometimes questions are ʻpureʼ examples of one type, as in the examples quoted. More often they are hybrids, combining two or more types in one question.
Take this question, for example:
Many find that Measure for Measure fits uneasily into its First Folio category of Comedy. Consider the extent to which Shakespeare subverts or endorses the generic conventions of comedy.
On the face of it, this looks like a fairly straightforward type 2 question: you are being asked to define the play. Is it a comedy or isn’t it? But when you start to think about it, questions start to niggle. What was the First Folio category of Comedy? What are the generic conventions of comedy? Is there just one, or are there lots of different ones? Do different people have different answers to those questions? And anyway who said this play had to be put in that particular section of the First Folio?
In other words, the question is more complicated than it might seem at first glance. As a result you soon see that you are being asked to do more than one type of writing:
- Define
This is what the question seems to be asking you to do: define what kind of play Measure for Measure is. So your essay has to amount to a definition. - Analyse
Before you can do that, you are going to have to analyse what was understood by the word ‘comedy’ in Shakespeare’s time – and possibly what we thinks it means now. - Compare and contrast
You will then need to compare and contrast the various definitions you have come up with. - Narrate
You may need to sketch in some of the history of this: how the definition of comedy was changing at the time that Shakespeare wrote the play. You might want to set this against the history of time, explaining how the arrival of James I as King of England changed things. - Argue a case
And when you have got all these possibilities open in front of you, you need to provide your own take on the question and explain why it is right.
You’ll find more about essay writing in my book
The Oxford Guide to Effective Writing and Speaking.
The second article in the series on essay writing can be found here.