Essays HowTo

How to Write an Essay

Writing of critical essays is a core element and aspect of this programme. The following guidelines will help you develop and structure your work.

Introduction

• Every good research paper or book, regardless by whom and on which academic level it was written, essentially investigates one question or issue. What is the issue you are going to investigate in your paper? If you only have a subject you want to write on, but not a question, you need to rethink before beginning to outline or even write your paper.
• Keep the introduction as brief as possible. Don't include lengthy paraphrases of textbook knowledge that can be read up elsewhere. Just sum it up in one sentence, with a footnote referencing the source of information. Your introduction should never be longer than one page; one paragraph is better. Your essay will be more engaging, and make better use of its limited space, if it gets right to the point.

The body of your text

• The body of your text is the journey you undertake in writing: it is how you get from point A to point B, with the conclusion as the final destination.
• In other words: Derive sub-questions from your major question and have your text logically go from one to the next. You always need to know the next point in your argumentation, and drive your text there.
• Always keep your overall research question in mind.
• A core element of the body of your text is to research examples: concrete works (images, text citations, sites, music, performances...) and phenomena you closely observe and analyze. This is from where you derive your own insights and arguments. Always base your arguments on observations you make in the material you investigate. Start with the magnifying glass and then zoom out to the great picture - never the other way around. Observation and argumentation should nicely complement each other: Your body of text should neither be an accumulation of examples and citations with some comment in between, nor a sweepingly general discussion without any base in critically observed details.
• It is about comparison and contrast; this is not the same as that, that implies not the same as this… Make clever juxtapositions that give nuance to your argument. It is useful to develop your essay from a disagreement you have with someone else's position, writing or work.
• Descriptions are useful but don’t overdo the detailing: Details are important when they give evidence either through their fact or poetry. Too many details however can be fatally distracting from your main point. Use them to enhance not derail your argument or research. Some details may actually be detours which unnecessarily complicate or obscure your argument; if you really need to go off track, put this information in a footnote as a ‘by the way did you know…’. In placing it there you don’t destroy the flow of your main text.

Conclusion

A conclusion is intended to recapitulate all of the information you have gone through in the paper. Conclusions answer, in a more general way, the ideas or questions raised in the introduction.

At this point you should be asking yourself: Did I answer the questions I sought to explore in my introduction statement (and my proposal statement)? Was I successful in going through examples or case studies to prove my point?

A conclusion can never introduce totally new concepts as part of its argument. That would mean that you haven't done your homework in the main text. Introducing a totally new concept as part of your conclusion is like telling someone that you are driving them to the cinema (introduction statement) and when you arrive you don’t let them out of the car but instead you drive off to a vacant lot. Needless to say that as a passenger this can be pretty irritating. Readers are also not very keen on this type of journey.

That does not mean that your conclusion might not raise particular questions, which are crucial to your conclusion. For example: “In seeing how meaning shifts in the way objects displayed, certain key questions arise about curatorial responsibility. It is clear that we must question how history is being constructed through the contextual and literal framing of objects.” Or: “In analysing these mechanisms at work we must ask the following: Who or what is being framed and by whom for what purposes?”

Do your conclusions have any relevance to you or anyone else? They should and you should say why. You should expand on the effect or implication of your research for your own work, as well as on the position you take within the larger debate on the subject you have addressed. This is the real point of the project report, and it should not be missed!

No paper, not even a one thousand pages book, will ever answer all questions about its central question. You will have to live with incompletion. Sometimes, it can be useful though to point to open questions or issues, in other words, left-overs from your thought process that didn't fit into the essay proper. Phrase these points, if you like, as open questions and potential directions of future research as an addendum to your conclusion.

Referencing

Cite all your sources of information

Give credit where credit is due! Never borrow thoughts, quotes, or even paraphrase without properly crediting the source. This is done through footnotes and through a list of references at the end of your paper (a bibliography is optional). Accurate, clear referencing offers the reader the opportunity to engage in the process of your research, and to understand how your arguments and ideas have been initiated and developed. Other people may use your paper as a resource to learn more about its topic and pick up related literature from your references. It is also, of course, essential that you distinguish between your own ideas and arguments, and those of other people; the more clear you are, the better you can shape your own ideas.

Conversely, citations do not replace your own thoughts and ideas. Never use sources as unquestioned authorities. The fact that a certain opinion was voiced by a well-known scholar, artist or intellectual doesn't make it true – all the more in the field of media studies with its high amount of speculative (and sometimes half-baked) theories. Theories are there to show you things in a different light, but never to replace your own ideas and opinions.

Use of Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a great information resource and, of course, the real-life example of the power - and issues - of networked media and open source collaborative authorship. Many academic teachers, however, frown on its use for research papers. Sometimes, this is based on prejudice and outdated opinion. The overall quality and reliability of Wikipedia has greatly improved in the last couple of years. Nevertheless, we advise you to use Wikipedia carefully and, just like any medium and source of information, with the right skepticism:

• An encyclopedia, whether Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Britannica, never suffices as a source of research since it only contains the most generic information on a subject and, by definition, no critical analysis to engage with.
• That conversely provides a good checkpoint for you: If your essay could - hypothetically - appear as a Wikipedia article, then it failed as a course assignment because you wrote a summary of facts instead of a critical investigation.
• Wikipedia is helpful where it a contains good general explanation of a subject. This often frees you from reinventing the wheel in your own essay. Instead of explaining, for example, the Internet domain name system in much detail, you might simply write a single sentence like: "The Domain Name System (DNS) is the server infrastructure that technically provides all Internet domain names such as pzwart.nl and google.com", and add a footnote to the corresponding Wikipedia article.
• Wikipedia is also a good resource for finding pointers to research, in print publications or online, on a particular subject. For your research, the external links and bibliography section of a Wikipedia article should normally be more important than the main article.
• Wikipedia is a mirror of Internet culture. The rule of thumb is: Wikipedia is an excellent resource for all subjects related to computing, technology and the Internet. It is also a good resource on the hard sciences and many popular and fringe cultural topics. Articles on the humanities (philosophy, literature, anthropology, media studies, for example) are of varied quality, and sometimes outright bad. Wikipedia's coverage of contemporary arts and design is still fragmentary and unreliable.

An important rule: If you quote a Wikipedia article, always give the URL of the particular revision you are referring to. That means, you must cite the "permanent link" to the article (which you find in Wikipedia's Toolbox menu on the left).

Plagiarism

Not properly referencing your sources is plagiarism. Plagiarism means to present work done by others as your own. While plagiarism has been tactically advocated and used in activism and experimental arts to question ideologies of intellectual property, not crediting your sources is unacceptable in course work because it is dishonest to your advisors and fellow students and prohibits others from using your paper as a point of departure for their own research of your subject. Plagiarism invalidates your essay and may result in further disciplinary procedure, including possible expulsion from the course.

Lay out for quotations

Short quotations can be written as part of the flow of the sentence, with quotation marks. Longer quotations (three or more lines) should be separated from the main body of the text by means of indention. In this case quotation marks are not needed. For example:

 “I agree with Hal Foster when he says:
 I supported a postmodernism that contested … reactionary cultural politics and advocated artistic practices not only critical of institutional modernism but suggestive of alternative forms of new ways to practice culture and politics. And we did not lose. In a sense the worse thing happened: treated as fashion postmodernism became démodé. (Foster, 1998, p.20)

Going further from this point, I would suggest that theory, a key feature of the postmodern enterprise, became démodé only after becoming convention…” - Be careful not use too many block quotations in your paper. Your should never write a text which just consists of short remarks between block quotations!

The Harvard System of referencing

We do not have a compulsory system of referencing essays. However, we do recommend that you follow the Harvard System. The Harvard System of referencing works within the text itself and not in footnotes or endnotes. Whenever you quote, or refer to someone’s words (directly or indirectly), or use someone’s argument, or refer to a source, you should use the system described below.

Whenever you quote you write the surname and the date of publication in brackets. When you quote directly, you should also add the page number:

 In studying the anatomy of brains of early man, some 19th century anthropologists came to a conclusion which one writer reminds us was ‘at the time considered highly provocative but which is now obvious to every anthropologist’ (Wendt, 1974, p.12).

If the name of the writer is part of the sentence itself, put the date in brackets after the name: Wendt (1974, p.12) reminds us that the conclusions of some 19th century anthropologists were ‘at the time considered very provocative’. The same applies when you are not quoting directly:

 Wendt (1974) reminds us that the conclusions of some 19th century anthropologists were considered very provocative when they were published.

Sometimes, you find a useful quotation from one author in a book by another. In such cases, reference like this:

 Johnson sweeps aside this argument: ‘His expressed view of the world has more style in it than sense – or evidence’ (quoted in Mason, 1990, p.44).

In this case, you are quoting Johnson from a book which you have not read and which you therefore cannot quote directly. So the reference is to Mason’s book, which you have read.

You will sometimes need to refer to more than one book or article by the same author, each published in the same year. In this case, put a letter after the date to show which of the publications is referred to in this instance: Peterson (1989b, p.45) was risking the wrath of her profession by suggesting that ‘there is more to be gained by restraint than by rushing headlong into open debate’.

list of references

At the end of your text, you should list all sources you have used. They are normally set out as follows:

 Surname, initials of author(s) (date) Title, place and name of publisher

book

For example the complete reference for a book will look like this:

 Gilbert, S and Gubar, S (1988) No Man’s Land New Haven, Yale University Press

article

When referring to an article in a journal, you should put the title of the article in quotation marks, and the journal title should be underlined:

 Rollerton, F (1989) ‘Wordsworth’s Secret Dreams’ in Citations Vol.12, No.4 (pp.113-124)

If you are citing an article from an author from a book edited by a different author, the reference works as follows:

 Silvershum, P (1978) ‘Fellowship Societies’ in Donaghue, P. (ed.) The Roots of Masonry Sidney, Outback Books

The list of references or bibliography should be in alphabetical order.

When you refer to more than one work by the same author, these should be set out in chronological order.

When you refer to more than one work by the same author from the same year, they should be differentiated by adding ‘a, b, c’ to the dates: 1989a, 1989b, etc.

Bibliography

The reference list should include only those works you have cited in your text. There may, however, be reasons why you would with to offer a list of works which have informed your general thinking and understanding. If you want to cite works in addition to your references, this should be done in a separate list headed ‘bibliography’.

Illustrations

If you use illustrations of work by others or by yourself in your text, make sure you use accurate referencing. Referencing for illustrations will normally include (elements of) the following: Name of the artist, title of the work, date, materials, size

For example:

 Pierre Huyghe, Sleeptalking, 1998, 16mm film, 15 min.

You may add if appropriate: Site, exhibition, collection or commissioner; place

For example:

 Pierre Huyghe, Sleeptalking, 1998, 16mm film, 15 min. Installation at Manifesta, Luxembourg, 1999.

 Fiona Banner, Le Bar du Peuple, billboard, Marseille, 1995. 

Document formatting

Please publish your essay on the course Wiki. It should be submitted as a PDF file; it's good to additionally provide a standard HTML page. The first page of your PDF should be a sheet stating its title, your name, the name of the institution and the course, the thematic project, the date. All pages should be numbered. Footnotes should be continously numbered throughout the whole document and appear on the same page as their corresponding text, i.e. literally as footnotes, not as endnotes.

If one adds all requirements for referencing, quoting, footnotes, page numbers etc., it is impossible to format an academic paper in a Wiki, in plain ASCII, in HTML or a similar basic text format. Therefore, our recommended software for writing essays is:

• either a traditional word processing program such as Openoffice.org Writer. (Openoffice.org Writer is more reliable for long documents with footnotes than Microsoft Word. In addition, it has built-in PDF export and exports cleaner HTML. We recommend it not only because it's a free/Open Source program.)
• or a markup/text formatting system for academic writing such as LaTeX or Docbook XML. (The Linux program LyX provides an easy-to-use word processor interface for LaTeX.)

Both technologies have advantages and disadvantages. Markup languages are more flexible and universal, and more apt to the web; they translate better into other document formats, and can be better interfaced with databases, search engines and programming tools. In addition, LaTeX produces typesetting-quality output. A conventional word processing program however doesn't distract your eyes with markup code, and Microsoft-compatible word processing files are the only commonly accepted format for submitting papers to publishers, journals and conference proceedings in the arts and humanities.

You are advised to choose the technology that is most straightforward for you to use and interferes the least with your writing. It is a bad idea to learn both essay writing and whatever new way of document processing simultaneously. For your convenience, we provide document templates for LaTeX and Openoffice here.

Further reading

For guidance on writing essays and good research practice, you are advised to consult: Tom Davis, How to Write an Essay, [1]. For a more advanced introduction, read Rob Barnes, Successful Study for Degrees, Routledge, 1992, chapter 6, p. 64-87. (This book can be found in the course library.)