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Study Skills: Win Copies of Thinking from A to Z and The Basics of Essay Writing

If you'd like to win free copies of my books Thinking from A to Z and The Basics of Essay Writing and a £30 token to buy Routledge books, Download this flyer (pdf) for further details. Entry by email. Closing date 26th September 2008. Winner will be notified by email by Friday 3rd October. This competition has been organised by Routledge.

Philosophy Memory Stick Now Available

THE PHILOSOPHY STICK

You can now get four of my books together in electronic form.

The following complete  books are available all together on one Memory Stick (USB 2.0 flash drive) together with space for your own use. NB These sticks only work on PCs.

Philosophy: The Basics
Philosophy: The Classics
Philosophy: The Essential Study Guide
The Basics of Essay Writing

The 4 Habits of Highly Effective Philosophy Students

You can download a handout from a talk on Philosophy Study Skills I'm giving to A level students at a sixth form conference at Heythrop College. Download the_4_habits.rtf [44KB rtf]. This is based on my book Philosophy: The Essential Study Guide.

Further Philosophy study skills advice: Preparing for Philosophy Exams: 5 Tips.
For more general advice on writing, see The Basics of Essay Writing: 10 Tips.

Essay Writing - Getting Started

(adapted from my book THe Basics of Essay Writing)

Writing is a strange activity. If you have an essay to write it is amazing how easy it is to find other things to do. Writers’ block – a total inability to write anything at all – is very rare. But the urge to do something other than write whenever you have writing to do is extremely common. Give someone an essay to write, and suddenly they will remember a list of urgent chores they have to perform before they get started on it. They might ‘need’ to eat or drink, tidy their desk, or go to the library, go shopping, do the washing up, or surf the Internet for suitable materials.  As I’m writing this, I’m feeling a very strong desire to have a nap or at least to go and get myself a coffee to give myself more energy. But I know that this is largely my mind’s bid to get me to do something else – almost anything else – than write. Luckily I’ve made it to my word processor, and the words have started to come. But if I’d fallen asleep I would have taken a lot longer to get started.

Professional writers are well aware of their own avoidance strategies, and of those urges to do something, anything, other than write. But these urges aren’t always excuses. Perhaps you do genuinely need to do some of these other things. For instance, to write well I know that I need energy. If I just took that nap now, perhaps I’d write much better. There is a whole series of books that tell business people they need to take a  ‘power nap’, the short sleep in the middle of the day that refreshes you and allows you to return to your work with a new vigour. It may be true that you need to do more research before you write that final version of your essay. However, the skill you need to acquire is the skill of beginning: the skill of getting to your desk, or wherever you work, and making a start. What I mean by this is that you should make sure that you at least begin to plan and write your essay. You should get in front of your computer screen or blank page of paper and make the first moves even if you feel that there are many other things you also suddenly need to do. Once you’ve started the process, writing usually gets much easier and you may find your tiredness evaporating and your urge to do all those other things diminishing…

For more advice about writing essays, see my book THe Basics of Essay Writing.

Preparing for Philosophy Exams - 5 Tips

Preparing For Philosophy Exams - 5 Tips
Nigel Warburton

1. Make Your Revision Active
Active revision is the key to performing well in examinations.  Good preparation is the foundation of good performance. Don’t waste time grazing over revision notes and nodding off over set texts. This isn’t the most effective use of your time. You need to prepare for the activity you will be judged on. In most cases you will be expected to write three or more essays in 3 hours or less. The grades you get will not be directly proportional to the number of hours you put into revision. The best marks usually go to clear, well-argued essays, focussed on the particular question set and which make a good case for the conclusion arrived at.

Revision shouldn’t be just a matter of looking back over what you have done, but rather preparation for what you will have to do. This sounds obvious, but once you begin taking the easy route of just glancing over your notes, you can easily be seduced into believing that this is all the preparation you need to do.

2. Write Practice Essays
The best way to prepare to write under examination conditions is to practise writing timed essays. If you were preparing for a marathon, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the best you could do was to run long distances. But because writing timed essays is a lot tougher than skimming over old notes, most students shy away from the undeniable truth that writing good essays against the clock is what you need to practise. Set aside an hour, take a question from a past paper, and try to write a legible, coherent, well-argued essay in response, without going back to books or notes. Even if the result is a mess, it is far better to get this bad essay out of the way than risk producing it in the actual examination.

There is no room for any digression. Everything must be strictly relevant to the question asked. Exposition of ideas takes time. Thinking up relevant illustrative examples takes time. Addressing arguments and counterarguments takes time. With all this going on, if you have to write by hand, you will probably be struggling to keep your handwriting legible. Yet if it is not easy to read, the marker may not recognise how well-argued your work really is. You may have to work on the physical preparation of writing legibly at speed as well as sorting out the intellectual side.

3. Write Practice Outlines
If you can’t bring yourself to write practice essays, then writing practice outline answers to specific questions is another good way of engaging actively with what you know. It forces you to structure your ideas as potential examination answers, and can be an effective way of discovering gaps in your understanding of material. When you write these outlines make sure that you are really answering the question set, and not just summarising your thoughts on a topic. Within the outline your angle on the question, the conclusion you are arguing for, should be clearly stated and supported.

4. Invent Examination Questions
Put yourself in the position of the person writing the examination paper. For any topic there are only so many questions that can be asked. Try writing examination-style questions yourself, using past examination papers as a guide. You can use the questions you concoct for writing practice essays and practice outlines. This activity is part of active examination preparation. Whether writing essays, outlines or questions, whenever you reveal a gap in your understanding, you will be able to go back to your notes and reference books with a specific question that needs answering, and some motivation to answer it.

5. Be Prepared to Think in the Examination
Expect to have to think in philosophy examinations. These aren’t usually just opportunities for regurgitating what you have learnt. You have to draw together relevant elements of what you have learnt to make a coherent case for a conclusion that answers the question set. The highest grades go to the best argued essays. If you begin the examination with your head stuffed with memorised quotations and preconceptions about what you are going to be asked, then you may fail to answer the actual questions in front of you – a bad mistake. Often the lecturers setting the examinations will have set questions that they know you won’t have anticipated simply to force you to think about and apply your ideas rather than just regurgitate your revision. If you have the appropriate frame of mind, such questions shouldn’t throw you. They should challenge you to organise what you know in a new way. If you are well-prepared, answering such questions can be stimulating. You will find that as you write you are thinking about the material in new ways. Some students of philosophy have even said that the subject didn’t really crystallise for them until they found themselves thinking things through as they wrote examination essays.

[You are welcome to print this for personal non-commercial use only]

Nigel Warburton

For more about study skills in Philosophy, see my book Philosophy: The Essential Study Guide.

There is an extract from the book available here. For general advice about essay writing see my book The Basics of Essay Writing

The Basics of Essay Writing: 10 Tips

Essay writing is at the heart of education. The process of writing an essay may be a struggle, but it is worth it. It is one of the best ways of gaining an active understanding of your chosen subject. Writing is a kind of thinking. It also leaves a trace that allows your tutor to give you feedback and help you move forward. The key ways in which students learn in the Humanities, and in most other subjects too are: reading, listening, discussing and writing. But without the last of these, the discipline of writing essays, study can become unfocussed and progress slower. Most people don’t achieve a good grasp of any topic until they have tried to explain it clearly to someone else in writing.

Everyone can improve their essay writing. There is no mystery about how to do this. You need to practise. But as in all effective practice, you have to work on acquiring  and reinforcing good habits and eliminating bad ones. Realise that there is always scope for improvement.

Here are my top ten tips for improving your essay writing. There is more on all these topics in my book The Basics of Essay Writing (read a review)...

1. GET STARTED. Don’t procrastinate. Get down to it now. If you have an essay to write it is amazing how easy it is to find other things to do. It’s also easy to underestimate how long the process of writing and rewriting will take. If you find yourself lapsing into an avoidance strategy, trick yourself by just writing the first paragraph, or committing to a focussed ten minutes of writing. Once you’ve started, everything gets easier.

2. ANSWER THE QUESTION. The worst mistake you can make is failing to answer the question set. No matter how brilliant your writing if it is an answer to a different question it won’t get you any marks. If the question is a direct question, give a direct answer. All your work on your essay, including the planning, research, writing and rewriting, should be driven by your awareness of the question and your angle on it.

3. RESEARCH YOUR ANSWER. Unless you are writing under examination conditions you should research your answer. Read the question first, though. Pay particular attention to TMA notes, lists of recommended reading and any advice your tutor gives.  Don’t, however, let research become an excuse for not planning or writing the essay. Research should be driven by the question set and your angle on it. Don’t think of your research as something that you complete before beginning writing. Often it is only when you try to explain a concept or defend a position that you realise that you need to research some facts. Remember that you may not know what you need to research until you have attempted to answer the question.

4. MAKE A CASE. In almost any subject, when you write an essay you need to make and defend a case for your conclusion. This typically involves using argument, evidence, quotations and so on, to back up generalisations. It also involves considering counterarguments and evidence that seems to challenge your reasoning or conclusion. By the end of your essay your reader should be completely clear about where you stand on the question set. This sounds obvious, but many students fail to make a case for their conclusions, and some fail to draw any conclusion whatsoever.

5. STRUCTURE YOUR ANSWER. The structure of your essay is the logical framework of the case you make. Structure helps your reader understand the significance of any point you make. One useful three-part structure that works for most paragraphs is this: 1. make a general point, 2. back it up with some evidence, quotation or argument, and 3. show the significance of this point to the question you were asked. If you are unsure whether or not your essay has a coherent structure, try reading just the first sentence of each paragraph. Do these sentences reveal the framework of your essay? If not, rewrite them.

6. AIM FOR CLARITY. Here are some suggestions for achieving greater clarity in your writing. Be economical with adjectives. Be concise. Avoid using adverbs wherever possible. Avoid complex syntax. Explain any technical terms. Don’t show off your knowledge of obscure jargon. Use the active voice rather than passive constructions. Use shorter rather than longer sentences. Whenever you read a particularly clear passage in a book, try to analyse how the writer achieved this clarity.

7. GET THE TONE RIGHT. An easy way to irritate your readers is to use colloquial language in an academic essay or to make over-familiar asides. Getting the tone right requires sensitivity to the genre within which you are writing. A peppering of exclamation marks in an academic essay is a sure sign that the writer doesn’t appreciate this point.

8. AVOID PLAGIARISM. Don’t try to pass someone else’s work off as your own. It’s immoral and you may well get caught, not least because many institutions are now using software that detects plagiarism. Resist the temptation to cut and paste unattributed paragraphs from weblogs and webpages. Even if you manage to get away with plagiarism, you deprive yourself of the chance to think the topic through for yourself, and reduce the chance of learning from the process of writing. Always be sure to distinguish your own notes from copied sentences and longer quotations: when you come to write your essay there should be no risk of including someone else’s writing without acknowledging its source.

9. EDIT YOUR ESSAY. If you have the luxury of re-writing or  at least revising your essay, use it. Obviously this won’t usually be an option in an examination, but in other circumstances you should leave yourself enough time to edit and amend your first draft. Try reading what you have written out loud – poor phrasing and bad grammar will be more obvious, as should any weaknesses in argument. Make sure keywords and the names of people you discuss are correctly spelt. Although you may not lose marks for poor spelling, it is likely to colour any reader’s view of your writing ability.

10.LEARN FROM FEEDBACK. Many students are more concerned with the mark they get than with the other feedback their tutors give them. This is a mistake. Try to find patterns in the feedback you get and remind yourself of the criticisms of your previous essay before you start the next one.

© Nigel Warburton [You are welcome to print or otherwise copy this for personal non-commercial use only.]

Philosophy Study Skills

The most important thing to remember when beginning to study Philosophy is that what you are doing is learning skills as well as acquiring information about what the philosophers of the past have said or written. It isn't a spectator sport. You are learning to be a philosopher at some level not to parrot philosophers' ideas. Even when you are reading the work of long dead thinkers you will be expected to engage with their ideas, reconstruct their moves in argument, formulate criticiss of their work, and so on.

There There are four principal ways to study Philosophy:

1) Active Reading

2) Active Listening

3) Active Discussion

4) Active Writing

My book Philosophy: The Essential Study Guide (I wanted to call it The Four Habits of Highly Effective Philosophy Students, but my publisher wouldn't let me), discusses all of these. There is an extract from the book available here.