Don’t write your essays like this

I have spent much of lockdown writing a book called Mind Flip: How to Stop struggling at College and Get the Degree you Deserve. It’s an attempt to distil the lessons of my nearly twenty-five year experience of university teaching – the things I find myself explaining to students again and again. In this post I want to share with you the most common mistake I encounter in the essays I mark – and give you a sure-fire technique to avoid it.

Before we get to what that error is, let’s consider what you’re aiming to do. An essay question is not a demand for a definitive, precise answer, but a request for:

1. An explanation about why it is difficult to answer.

2. A rough attempt to say what a plausible answer might be if certain definitions are used.

3. A ‘try’ to go beyond the limits of what we know with a bit of informed speculation.

This means that your answer needs to cover:

1. How the terms can be defined in multiple different ways, and the points of overlap/disagreement between the definitions (and what you think is the most helpful definition)

2. How and why scholars disagree (and what the strengths and weaknesses of their arguments is)

3. Problems with the evidence (and what we might get out of the evidence in spite of these).

Above all, you need to determine what is at stake. That is to say, what issues does the topic or question raise that are of broader importance and are likely to divide opinion?

If you can do all the above things you should be able to avoid the No. 1 mistake that occurs in student work. This is not a mistake that causes students to fail, nor is it a mistake that is restricted to failing students. In fact, it is possible for hardworking students to carry on making it throughout their time at university and still get reasonably good grades. But it is fatal to true success.

The mistake is:

Sitting on the fence.

It’s a very natural temptation. Nobody likes being criticised. And if, in your assessments, you avoid coming down firmly on one side or another, you can’t be criticised from either side, right? In other words, it’s an obvious defensive move to make if you don’t feel confident of your own opinions.

Yet it results in work that is incredibly frustrating to read and mark. It’s frustrating because, on the one hand, the students in question have very often and very obviously done a lot of hard work. Yet they are failing to convert that effort into a satisfying argument. It is important that the effort they have made is recognised in the grade, but one can hardly say that the essays that they have written are a pleasure to read. A typical introduction might read a bit like this:

“Some scholars, notably Paul Addison, have argued that after 1945 there was a ‘post-war consensus’ in British politics, defined as an unusual degree of agreement on policy between the Labour and Conservative Parties. Others, such as Ben Pimlott, have argued that the idea of consensus is a nostalgic myth, and that the parties were separated by a clear ideological divide. In this essay I will consider whether or not a consensus existed.”

This introduction, I should stress, is perfectly OK as far as it goes. Indeed, with a bit more work it could potentially be very strong. But note how the final sentence fails to give any sense of what the student who wrote it actually thinks; or how one might arbitrate between the two conflicting points of view. Quite likely, as the essay goes on, the student will cover many pertinent issues, but will not commit themselves to one opinion or the other; or at best provide will provide a weak conclusion such as “the truth probably lies somewhere in between”. The result may well be a reasonable grade, but the student has done no more than hedge his or her bets.

This situation comes about in part because students receive conflicting messages - or rather, messages which they perceived as conflicting. They are repeatedly told:

 “You must have a strong argument”

And also:

“You must have a balanced argument.”

Students often struggle to reconcile these conflicting requirements. Some students - a minority - interpret the request for a strong argument as a demand to ride roughshod over all opposition and to either ignore competing opinions or to depict those who hold them as ignorant idiots. Most students, however, default to “balance”, or rather their interpretation of it. Balance seems right and natural - we all want to be thought fair. And balance, in a student’s mind, often amounts to giving an equal weight to all different points of view - and either refusing to determine which of them is more convincing or attempting to split the difference in an implausible fashion.

To make clear why this is unsatisfactory, let’s take the approach to ridiculous extremes:

“Some people say Hitler was great. Others say Hitler was terrible. So Hitler was probably just about average.”

Devising a strong and balanced argument often strikes students as an impossible challenge. Yet balance is not neutrality. Balance means recognising different viewpoints and taking them seriously. It does not mean treating them, in the end, as all being of equal worth or validity.

A strong, balanced argument acknowledges the existence of conflicting views, weighs up their strengths and weaknesses, and offers a judgement.

Remember that the (implicit or explicit) proposition in an essay question is likely to be plausible but not wholly satisfactory. But if it is unlikely to be 100% acceptable (unless modified in some way) it is wrong to merely dismiss it.

Therefore, while you need to avoid sitting on the fence, you need to give the proposition in the question a run for its money. You need to show why somebody could plausibly think that, even if you go on to show that the idea is completely and utterly misguided.

You strengthen your argument not by ignoring other opinions or dismissing them out of hand but by showing how and why they are powerful - and then overcoming them. Just as a strong argument does not overlook or trivialise suffering viewpoints, so a balanced argument is one that demonstrates fair-mindedness to others without capitulating to them. It’s a lesson which, perhaps, we might all try to follow outside the classroom too.