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Write great essays, 2nd edition
The strange world of the university –
Read this first!
The world of the university – the ‘academic world’ – is a world of its own. It’s
very different from the ‘real world’ in which you and I and most other people
exist. If you’re a student, it’s crucial to your success that you are aware of the
many differences between the two worlds and can move easily between them.
‘Out there, in the real world, things happen and things change.’ In the real
world, people live and work, raise children, play or watch sport, go clubbing,
and so on. There are lots of other human activities and processes going on as
well, like manufacturing and trading and communicating and providing
services of many kinds. Out there too are a host of natural phenomena: to do
with the weather, all kinds of matter and energy, chemical reactions, the birth,
growth and death of living things – you name it!
The academic world, on the other hand, is full of ‘mental constructs’:
descriptions, theories and explanations, ideas and critiques. You and I can’t
experience such mental constructs in the same way as we experience the real
world, directly, through seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling. Instead
we have to get them into our heads through the medium of – in particular –
the written word and the spoken word, via books and articles and web pages,
and the lectures that academics give. ‘It is a peculiarity of academic learning
that its focus is not the real world itself but others’ views of that world.’1
What this means is that in the academic world you’ll be learning at second
hand, so to speak, rather than through your own experience, as you do in the
real world. Learning at second hand does not come naturally to most people.
You need some help. Sadly, such help is in short supply in the academic world.
The series of Student-Friendly Guides, of which this book was the first, is
designed to fill that gap.
But differences in ways of learning are far from being the only differences
between the academic world and the real world. You think you can read, right?
In the academic world, you’re probably wrong, on two counts.
First, if you’re at university in an English-speaking country you may have
the impression that the books and articles you’re told or recommended to
read are in English. Certainly the words and grammar look like English, but
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The strange world of the university
don’t be misled: they’re actually written in ‘academic-speak’. Academic-speak
is a long way removed from day-to-day spoken and written English. In
particular, it makes far more use of abstract words and expressions: they exist
in people’s minds but don’t have a physical or concrete existence. So reading
academic-speak is not the same as reading ordinary English. You’ve got to
translate as you read, so it’s much more like reading a foreign language, with
lots of looking up words in the dictionary and puzzling over the grammar. It’s
a slow process at first, inevitably. It takes time to become fluent.
What makes matters worse is that every subject has its own particular
academic-speak. So if you’re taking courses in several subjects, you have
several ‘foreign languages’ to get used to. Don’t let this discourage you: most
people manage it! The secret is to be aware of what’s going on: it makes those
times when you feel you’re not making progress much easier to cope with.
Second, you may arrive at university taking it for granted that ‘reading’
means something like ‘starting a book at page 1 and reading all the way
through to the end’. Beware! ‘Reading’ in the academic world means using
books to find what you want in them. If you try to read everything on your
‘reading lists’ all the way through then you’re heading for a nervous
breakdown. Think of reading as a treasure hunt: an active search for what
you want rather than an attempt to soak up and absorb everything you come
across.
Other words, too, have strange meanings in the academic world. You think
‘discuss’ and ‘argue’ refer to conversations with other people? Forget it! In
most essay-requiring subjects you’ll have to discuss and produce arguments
on your own.
In the academic world, students come and – after a time, when they’ve
completed their courses – go. The academics (faculty, teaching staff) mostly
stick around for much longer. You may feel, having met a few, that academics
are, by and large, a somewhat strange bunch. I have to say that that’s my
feeling too. They’re certainly very individual (have you heard the joke that
organizing academics is like herding cats?) many to the point of being
idiosyncratic if not actually eccentric. Almost all of them are people who
themselves did well as students at university and are now doing research as
well as teaching. So the chances are that they’re (a) quite talented at their
subjects, and (b) quite preoccupied with their research work, especially as
almost all academics get promotion on the basis of their research
publications, not their teaching achievements.2
This can create quite a few problems for students. The pressure on
academics to produce publications and perform administrative duties limits
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The strange world of the university
the time and energy they can put into teaching. Moreover, talented people,
people who have an intuitive flair for their subject, can be really poor at
explaining it, because when they were students themselves, they were able to
tackle it by leaps and bounds: they didn’t have to go slowly, step by step, as
mere mortals do. Although many academics are dedicated to teaching, most of
them have had little or no training in how to teach. And what training there is
conspicuously omits what is arguably the most important skill of all for a
teacher, that of empathizing and developing rapport, without which a teacher
has no chance of being able to put himself or herself in the shoes (and head)
of a student grappling with a task.
As a student, you may also find that academics distance themselves from
you in all sorts of ways. Unless you’re really fortunate, you’ll be treated not as
a junior member of a learning community but as if you belong to a separate
species. You’ll be a distraction from research, a burden (‘workload’). You’ll be
treated as one of the masses, to whom education is to be ‘delivered’. You’ll be
someone in an audience, listening or trying to take notes while the speaker
engages in that one-way mode of communication beloved of academics,
telling other people what’s what. You may well find, like many students, that
the feedback you get on your work isn’t satisfactory.3 In all probability it’ll be
mostly criticism rather than appreciation, focusing on bad points and ignoring
the good ones, while at the same time not helping you to see what to do if
you’re to get better marks for your next piece of work. And at exam time you
may experience the relationship with your teachers as a kind of game, in
which you have to work out for yourself what the rules are for winning: what
the examiners’ expectations are, what approach, style, etc. will be rewarded
and what will be penalized.
I suspect that all institutions are capable of messing up the lives of the
people who work for and within them. I don’t see universities as an exception
to this rule. At some point, different academics will be giving you different and
conflicting advice about some aspect of your work. And there will be mixed
messages to look out for. For example, you may be given group projects to
work on to develop your ‘teamwork skills’, and at the same time be warned
very strictly against collaborating with other students on writing tasks: this is
regarded as ‘collusion’ and will be punished!
Does all this sound very gloomy? I can’t pretend that I don’t think that the
culture of higher education in the UK is in serious need of reform: I do. But for
you that’s a side issue. If you’re to succeed as a student the first thing you have
to do is to appreciate the nature of the system you’ve signed up to, which is
why I felt it important to be absolutely realistic about it in this preface. It’s only
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The strange world of the university
when you know the system, warts and all, that you can formulate your own
strategy for dealing with it. Without such a strategy, you’ll have no confidence
in what you’re doing. You’ll be looking anxiously all over the place for clues as
to what you should be doing and how. You’ll be dragged this way and that, all
over the place, trying to keep up. It’s like running after a bus, trying to catch it
but never quite managing it, tiring yourself out and getting your lungs full of
exhaust fumes in the process: a thoroughly frustrating experience.
In this series of student-friendly guides, my overall aim is to help you to
take control of your studies, to be confident in what you’re doing, and
ultimately to get what you want out of your university experience – which I
hope will include both fun and having your mind stretched. To this end I have
done my best to demystify and make sense of the academic world, to address
the many issues which students raise, and to suggest practical courses of
action. I’ve tried to write in plain English, and to help you to deal with
academic-speak. Whether you’ve come to university from school or further
education college, or you’re a mature student or an international student, I
hope these guides will help you to master and enjoy your studies, and to win
the qualification you’re after.
Peter Levin
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Introduction
My aim in writing this Guide is to help you to read and write effectively and
efficiently, so that you can write essays that your teachers appreciate and give
good marks for, and do so in a way that makes best use of your time and
energy.
The culture of higher education in the Western world is very much a culture
of the written word. Even in the age of the internet, printed-on-paper books
and articles in journals are the prime medium for recording and disseminating
thoughts, arguments, research reports, etc., although ‘e-journals’ are
becoming more numerous. Authors commit their message to paper and
become publicly identified with what they write. Academics’ careers depend on
publishing, and counts are made of ‘citations’, mentions of their publications
in someone else’s. As a student, if your first question on starting a new course
is ‘Is there a textbook?’, you are in good company: we all feel reassured if we
hold the manual in our hands when faced with a new and challenging
experience.
Reading and writing at university level are closely connected. Most
obviously, when writing essays you will have to draw on materials to be
found in books and articles (also known as ‘papers’ when published in
‘learned journals’). But, if you are doing your job properly, the two activities –
reading and writing – will also be linked in your own mind. As you think about
the subject, your thoughts will provide you with a structured approach to both
your reading and your writing, simultaneously. Consider what happens when
you’re reading and a question comes into your mind. You carry on reading but
now you are keeping a lookout for the answer to that question, and you may
also now be envisaging that your essay will have a section devoted to that
question. Collecting and organizing your thoughts is a central part of both
reading and writing.
Here are some of the questions I’m frequently asked about reading and
writing:
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