Don't Be a Completist When Writing Essays

-

 If you looked at this album cover and concluded this record didn't win any Grammys, congratulations. You are presumably $8.45 (plus tax) richer than I am. A musical connoisseur and very discerning listener once told me, "I'm not the kind of Beatles fan who has to buy everything Paul McCartney puts out." This kind of thinking is very foreign to me. It's also a great essay-writing tip. As a Beatles fan who is also a completist, I need not only Paul's records in my collection but Ringo's oeuvre as well. But as a writer, this impulse can have negative consequences.

 

So what is a completist? Here is as good a definition as I've seen: "At its root, the completist impulse is about feeling as though there's no point in collecting something unless you have every single item."

 

Being a completist as a collector can be fun. I enjoy hunting down rare records or hard-to-find stamp issues. But when it comes to writing essays, completism should be resisted at all costs. Essays For Sale

 

What does completism have to do with essay writing? More than you might think.

 

In my case, the process of finding sources isn't too different from hunting for items to fill out a collection. In both cases, I like to have both standard works and "rarities"—in the case of writing, articles in obscure journals that speak to an aspect of my research or long out-of-print primary sources that may only be held by a few libraries worldwide. I remember being a third-year undergraduate in history and proposing a paper on opposition to World War I in Wales for a British history course. The professor responded that I wouldn't find enough scholarly material to produce a thorough, nuanced essay on the subject. I went into full collector mode and sent him a list of about twenty sources as a preliminary bibliography. The professor responded "Bravo!" and allowed me to begin work on the essay. essayforsales.com

 

So far so good. But the best essay-writing help I can give is to advise you not to be a completist when it comes to your essays. Why?

iStock-853344122

 

It's because locating sources is only one part of the essay-writing process. It's an important part to be sure, but an essay lives or dies by its thesis and its analysis and interpretation of evidence. And the thing is: there's always one more source you can track down, one more footnote you can follow up on, one more passing reference you can spend a day researching. At some point, this can become a form of procrastination. This is especially true if, like me, you're good at it (or if you prefer it to actually writing your essay—also like me). 

 

At some point, you have to decide that you have what you need and dive into the hard work of structuring an argument and supporting it convincingly. This is as true for ten-page undergraduate essays as it is for 300-page dissertations. https://essayforsales.com/

 

Recognizing when some material is essential versus when you are indulging your completist instincts requires self-awareness and judgement. Remember that essay I wrote on Welsh pacifism? At the last minute, I decided to delete my section on trade unions and their opposition to WWI. The essay had become unwieldy and I couldn't get this section to work. It seemed at odds with the other points I was making, so I cut it. And it affected my mark. The professor said, rightly, that you can't really discuss opposition to war in the UK without discussing the labour movement. So yes, I should have addressed the activities of Welsh unions, but that doesn't mean I needed to hunt down everything ever written about them or read, say, 500 pages of a labor organizer's letters to his parents. Judgement. You have to make distinctions.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Write an Essay Fast

-
With a truly tricky essay, 24 hours might be not enough. However, it might happen that you have less than an hour to craft a classy paper. Take your SATs for example. There, you’ll have to fit into a 30-minute time slot. Before you can write an essay quickly, you’ll need some committed training or a decent plan. If you didn’t have enough time to practice your speed writing skills, don’t worry. Because the key is detailed planning. So what’s the fastest way to write an essay? We’ll share with you the secrets of how to write essays faster below. “I need to write an essay fast. Do you have any tips?” A bunch of the following quick essay writing tips will lead you through this seemingly arduous task. They are the main steps you’d normally take when writing a paper. Before you get to them, we’d like to point out that the most important thing about fast-written essay is careful planning, remembering about time, and sticking to the point. 1. Plan Your Time How much do you have till you need t
Read more

Before You Build Your First Product, Do This

-
  Before you build a product, create a whole program around a service you offer, or start printing business cards, you need to first see if you can sell something. And this is simpler than we realize. So far, we’ve identified why we create, the importance of making money off our art, how to know what to sell, and to whom, and so now… it’s time to sell. Yesterday, I asked you to find out who might be interested in your product, that is how you choose to package a solution to a felt need. I wanted you to float the idea out to a small group of people for feedback. At this point, you’re trying to gauge demand. Ideally, this would be done through a survey or some kind of open forum whereby people can freely respond, “Yes, I’d love to buy that book or listen to that song or take that course!” When you get a good amount of people telling you this—say, ten or so—you’ve demonstrated that there is some demand for this idea of yours. Now, it’s time to validate it. This is the point at which most
Read more

How To Write a Critical Analysis Essay

-
Image
Perhaps you’ve been asked to write a review of a book or a work of art. Or perhaps you’ve been asked to write about a proposed change in law or an event in history. Or you might have been asked to write about the ethics of a philosophy such as vegetarianism. All of these topics invite you to have an opinion and to make a critical analysis in   support   of that opinion. A critical analysis usually contains: A clear presentation of your own point of view on your topic An evaluation of the arguments and evidence relevant to your topic An acknowledgement of the limitations of your own presented evidence and arguments Your conclusion   Step 1: Critical Reading & Extracting of Content Regardless of whether your topic is a book or a philosophical position, all subjects contain a main theme or idea. An accurate identification of this central theme will allow you to better position your own ideas and findings.   Of course, if you are going to challenge any existing theories, topics, or poi
Read more