Improving your Essay Writing Skills
As art and architecture students, we tend to be creative and quite practical, creating drawings and models. However when it comes to writing essays, in more cases than not it can be difficult, especially if the essay is about architecture. Today’s post is going to be a brief rundown of how you might be able to improve your essay writing skills and some of the steps we take when planning and writing large pieces of architectural text.
Reference for this post has been taken from: ‘Write great essays’ (A student- friendly guide) - Peter Levin
1. Understanding & analysing the essay title
The first thing to do when writing an essay is to make sure you understand the essay topic and know what is expected from the assignment by reading the marking criteria (e.g. the rubric). When analysing the essay title look at what is being asked of you and the key terms that are used. Are you being asked to ‘discuss’ where you give arguments for and against, including criticisms and examining the implications of both sides or are you being asked to ‘compare’, where you would look at the similarities and differences of both either in a critical tone or by drawing your essay to a specific conclusion. There are also many other terms, such as outline, compare and contrast, describe etc… that you will have to understand what is being asked of you.
Example 1 ~
With reference to two sites, discuss the economic and social advantages and disadvantages of urban regeneration schemes. The essay question is asking you to ‘discuss’ the advantages and disadvantages of two factors, meaning you will explore both sides of the argument. In addition to this, in the first half of the question it clearly states that you must reference two separate sites that have undergone urban regeneration schemes. This is a must since it specifies the number of examples in the question.
After I’ve analysed the essay title, the first thing I like to do is write the essay question in the centre of a blank page and begin writing down anything I know about the topic. Whether you have one or ten initial points, mind mapping any terms or information that you already know about the topic gives you a starting point in your research.
2. Plan the essay structure
For me, this point is one of the most important parts of writing a good essay. Having a structure is very important as it supports the flow of your essay and makes it easy for the reader to follow along. The plan you make at this point will consist of headings and bullet points on topics you may talk about and components you want to include. As you progress with your research methods you can come back to your plan and add detailed notes with signposts to larger documents.
To begin the plan, we know that every essay must have an introduction and a conclusion. In the introduction you want to add context, this could be defining an architectural term or architect from your essay question, almost like you’re setting the scene. Outline what's coming up in the sections of your essay, this may include listing the main point of each paragraph, and briefly mention your methodology (if you have one). In the conclusion you want to summarise the main body of text by drawing together any loose strings in your argument whilst referring back to the essay question. For the main body of text, depending on the word count, you can split it up into a series of paragraphs that can be set up in a few different ways. For example, it could be one point per paragraph, your main body split into two arguments with a couple paragraphs each, etc. Once you’ve settled on the format for the main body of text it's time to start bullet-pointing what you might already know about the contents of each paragraph. This includes making notes to define any necessary features/terms related to the topic of that paragraph. Eg. If your essay is about gothic architecture and your paragraph is on flying buttresses as one of the characteristics, it's good to describe what a flying buttress is .
3. Architecture research methods
If you have read our post on architecture research methods, you will be well versed on this step to improve your essay writing skills. If you haven't already you can read it here. Architecture research methods group together the different types of sources you can use to retrieve information for your essay. Some examples are interviews, ethnographic study and archival research. You can use these research methods alongside books and qualitative research (journals and papers) to write your essay.
4. The concept of reading & making notes
Whether you’re reading a book, a journal, a newspaper article or listening to a lecture / interview, you won’t be able to note down or copy everything. You have to be selective in the way you take notes, with direct quotations and translating pieces of information into simpler vocabulary for you to understand when you read back on it. When reading to write an essay, there are different ways to approach different types of books. Some books are really good for referencing, some are great for images, whilst others are good for essential reading on the topic of the essay. You’ll often find that you will have to read about one topic from multiple different sources, to find the most relevant information.
When it comes to using the information from these sources it can be done so in a number of ways. You can directly quote using the author's words, paraphrase to rearrange the original text with similar words, summarise to condense what you’ve read and you can synthesise, creating text from information you've gathered through multiple sources. With all of these methods you want to have a well balanced quantity. Once you’ve completed your reading and have composed a collection of notes, you can add them into your essay plan that you outlined in the previous step.
5. Write!
Now that you’ve done your research and have structured your essay into an essay plan, you can go ahead and begin to draft your essay! I would recommend doing this as soon as possible so that you have enough time to step away from what you’ve drafted and come back, as it’s much easier to spot mistakes like spelling errors and to improve the language you have used. Sometimes it's not easy to write for long periods of time especially if you decide to start writing whilst you're still in the midst of still collecting information and researching. So writing in shorter periods more frequently can sometimes be more productive but it can also help break down the editing process as you would edit the existing text every time you open the document.
6. Editing + Iterations
Just as you iterate during your design process, it’s unlikely that your first essay draft will be your last. When you come back to your essay after having left it for a couple of days, you might find it easier and more concise to make the points you’ve made, freeing up your word count to elaborate on looser arguments. You might come across additional research that can help strengthen or tweak your essay points to make it stronger. Or you might find a counter-argument that you can include to show you understand different perspectives on the topic you’re writing about. Make sure that during the editing process, you’re also on the lookout for good English and grammar. It can be beneficial to ask a friend or family member to read over what you’ve written. Even if they don’t understand the content they can double check the grammar, spelling and vocabulary used. It’s also a good idea to get the most out of tutorials if you can benefit from these during the time period that you’re writing your essay. The more you bring to the table, the more work you have to get feedback on and iterate your essay to the highest standard.
7. Bibliography
Bibliographies are crucial to essays. What type of referencing you need to do will depend on your university/submission guidance. My best advice for creating a bibliography would be to do it simultaneously with your research and reading. Not only does it make referencing so much easier but also a lot quicker.
You can read a sample second year essay here.
Remember, the information you collect through your research is not critical but descriptive and factual. You have to analyse critically without being too subjective! That’s it for this week's post. We hope this post comes in handy when you are writing your next architecture essay. Let us know some of your tips for writing architectural essay’s under our latest post on @archidabble and follow us to enjoy our other content which we upload on Mondays!
