George Orwell has a famous essay “Why I Write”, where he presents four reasons that someone might do so: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose (in his words).
If you ask most undergraduates why they write their weekly essays (you can find mine here), I suspect the response will not be one of the above reasons, though. There are a lot of other potential motivations to write, and the purpose of a piece of work changes how you should approach the process of writing it.
Writing because you had to
Note that there are degrees of “having to” do something. Writing tutorial essays is certainly more optional than doing examination ones, which itself is relatively optional when compared with, say, drinking water. I might write about this in another post. This essay made some decent points about level of engagement with coursework.
Tutorial essays
You should always be suspicious of contexts where it is possible to get as high a “reward” from arguing the answer to a question is P as when you argue it is ¬P. This is a sign that strongly optimising for truth-seeking in your essay will not lead to a higher mark from the institution demanding you write it. Competitive debate shares this frustrating feature of having no « right answers », only ones that are better argued-for.
Take a recent philosophy essay title I had: What conditions must be met for person A in 1984 to be the same person as person B in 2000? There are several theories about this in the literature: some emphasise the importance of bodily continuity, others disagree and say only psychological links are relevant; many pre-modern thinkers might have appealed to Cartesian egos and non-natural minds or souls. The tutor reading your essay will likely have their own view, but they’ll accept that people could quite reasonably hold different ones. I get the impression that although they might argue against a fellow academic who they see as having incorrect beliefs, your tutor probably doesn’t mind very much which side you take, just that you’ve picked one and advocated for it consistently. There probably are some tutors who decide to actually engage with their students’ views, because they’re interested and invested in their intellectual development – I just don’t think I’ve had that from mine for philosophy or politics yet. Instead, the emphasis is very much on essay-writing as a performance, a way of proving your ability to digest and coherently regurgitate what eminent thinkers have already said (and what the Stanford Enyclopedia of Philosophy has already synthesised).
In my experience, this makes it very difficult to produce a high-scoring essay that is argued entirely in good faith. Problems in politics and philosophy always have a lot of nuances, which you have to either dismiss or neglect entirely in order to stay within the word count. For instance, Peter van Inwagen’s influential consequence argument against free will compatibilism (the claim that we can live in a deterministic world yet still have free will) turns out to be invalid, though might be repairable. But in the essay, you only have space to claim that Inwagen’s argument is a slam-dunk against compatibilism, or if you’re feeling adventurous, provide an equally slam-dunk counterexample proving how flawed and hopeless its attempt to refute compatibilism is.
When I’m writing tutorial essays I tend to spend a few hours thinking about the question – which is usually hard and never answerable in 2,000 words (indeed, many have been contested for more than 2,000 years already…) – before deciding that it’s not worth the trouble of arguing what I actually believe.
To be clear, you might have intrinsic motivations to argue for what you believe (see the section on writing to learn below), but fulfilling these goals will probably be in tension with finishing the essay to the specification required. Of course, I could just not do the essay as they want it to be done, learn lots about philosophy, and then only in the exam optimise for what they want. If I really cared about the topics, that’s probably what I would do. But (as I explain slightly more in my post about PPE), I don’t view these questions as important or tractable ones, and committing to think deeply about them feels like an inevitably unsatisfying waste of time. That’s also why I rarely proofread essays when on topics I didn’t enjoy writing, because by the time I get to the end of writing I’ve had more than enough of them.
Why am I submitting these essays at all? That’s a good question, and one I’ve asked myself before. One reason is that I feel as though it’d be arrogant to assume that a topic is pointless and unimportant without having read and written about it. It also feels like good intellectual exercise to try to weigh up conflicting ideas and fit them together somehow, and doing so can be enjoyable. Reflecting on what I myself believe is valuable, and occasionally the writing process will lead me to change my mind. And often sending in your essay will be a requirement for attending the associated tutorial, although when I forced myself to write one on personal identity as my tutorial entrance ticket I came to conclude that the attraction wasn’t really worth the price. In future I will be more discerning about which essays I do decide to spend time on. Edit: I discuss this more when I talk about having a sense of “taste”.
Examination essays
Here’s some better-informed exam advice than mine!
In terms of the optimisation target, these are fairly similar to tutorial essays (which makes sense, since tutorial essays are largely to practise for the exams). However, they’re shorter and done under significant time pressure, so there’s significantly less scope to do anything interesting at all. When you have 45 minutes to write an essay, there’s very little chance that you will be able to come up with new ideas for it, and so you’re mostly reliant on whatever went into the tutorial essay you’ve written before. Two exceptions to this in philosophy are using syllogisms to analyse arguments advanced in the title of a “Discuss.” question, and deploying thought experiments to support your case, because you can feasibly generate these in the exam. I got very positive feedback about using both in my tutorial essays, and I imagine this carries across to exams.
Examiners’ reports give you a good sense of what the reward function looks like. For Prelims, my impression is that having an understanding of all the basic arguments, objections, and responses is sufficient for doing well enough to get a Distinction (roughly the top 25% of the year in PPE). Getting significantly above 70 seems to require more – strong arguments that other candidates don’t bring up, or particularly detailed knowledge of the literature, and so on. It might be the case that what I’d call “grumbling” about the title (i.e. criticising it in one way or another, such as by arguing that what it asks about isn’t what actually matters) helps with this, but I’d imagine it’s a high-variance strategy.
Something which I think reliably has a big effect on the mark given in exams (and tutorials) is style. Most people are bad at writing, and just having your essay not be painful to read will probably put you in the upper half of scripts. Surprisingly many people construct their essays as dialogues between two opposing thinkers, but (as the examiners’ reports will tell you), markers really don’t like this. When referencing the literature, my preferred approach is to present paraphrased arguments directly, and then cite the source in parentheses afterwards. This takes hardly any more work than copying over extended quotations, but seems to make tutors much happier. More detailed style advice belongs in a different blogpost, and in any case there’s plenty of it to be found elsewhere on the internet.
In terms of structure, I’ve found that an extremely formulaic stock structure works well. If the question invites it, your essay can open with a “Yes, …” or “No, …” or maybe an “Although …, …” if you’re in a bold mood. My introductory paragraph is effectively an abstract, followed by a paragraph of definitions for politics, or challenges to the premises & assumptions of the question for philosophy.Then I present one or two basic arguments, along with objections and replies, making sure to always explain why the point I’m raising is relevant to the question (examiners like things to be spelled out to them, and I suspect they’re only skim-reading your work anyway, so making obvious that you’ve submitted a good answer is important). Finally, there’s the conclusion, where I usually just copy out my introduction and reiterate any part of the essay that I thought was original or clever; this has always gone down well. Each paragraph is usually around 200 words.
Figuring stuff out
- When you care about a topic, or your view on it matters a lot for decisions, then it’s worth spending time reflecting on what you believe.
- Writing is a good way to do this
- See Holden Karnofsky’s piece
Impressing others / having your ideas out there
- Like the egoism point. But framed slightly differently
- Gavin’s website is a “simulacrum standing in for Gavin Leech”.
- This is a motivation for the blog, I think. You have lots of thoughts & ideas, so do I. Writing them down is an efficient means of transferring the ideas, but also information about our respective characters & personalities.
Having fun
- Rather like Orwell’s aesthetic point. I wouldn’t be writing this blog if I didn’t get some pleasure from the processes of turning rough ideas into loosely structured bullet points and then polished prose.
- As you can see from this post, though, there are limits: I haven’t properly finished writing it out. This does bother me a bit, but at the moment I want to have a more contentful blog, even if that means less-refined pieces get published.