My last week in college, I only had two things on my agenda: writing a final paper for one of my classes and having a root canal before I started my full-time job the following week. I wasn’t worried about the procedure messing up my schedule – it was towards the end of the week and I had convinced myself that, with all my other classes completed, I could leisurely type up my paper in a day or two at most. I didn’t have an essay writing process, but that hadn’t stopped me before.
Of course, by the time the appointment came around, I made zero progress on the essay. Over the course of several days, every attempt I made to work on the paper transformed into hours-long viewing sessions of Inside the NBA highlights on YouTube. Frustrated and beginning to panic, I headed into the dentist’s office. The night after the procedure, I lay awake from the pain, clutching a bloody paper towel against my gums. But one thought brought a smile to my face: “At least I’m not working on the essay.”
The difficulty in writing essays
Why is essay writing so unpleasant? For starters, essay writing requires thinking. And thinking is difficult, particularly the sort of thinking you do when writing. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman outlines two systems of thinking. System 1 is fast, emotional, and automatic. It is the kind of thinking that allows you to solve 2+2, drive a car on an empty road, or read a simple sentence on a billboard. System 1 thinking is effortless – you can do it without even realizing you are doing it.
System 2 thinking, on the other hand, is slow, calculating, and conscious. It is the kind of thinking you use when you solve a complicated math problem, try to park in a tight space, or read an academic text. System 2 is effortful, and like other effortful things, our brain tries to avoid it. Unfortunately, writing is a System 2 task. That exhaustion you feel when you worked on a paper for an entire day is the mental effort you have spent writing the paper. More importantly, your tendency to procrastinate when writing an essay is your brain anxiously trying to avoid difficult work. Add in the fact that most modern writing occurs on the computer, a device almost perfectly designed to enable procrastination, and you can see why writing can be a frustrating task.
Together, the two enemies of writing – effortful thinking and ease of distraction – can cause a negative feedback loop whenever you run into trouble while writing a paper:
The recommended essay writing process
The goal of this essay is to articulate a strategy that breaks this circle by lowering the mental effort needed to write the essay and taking the writer away from the computer. Here are the steps:
1. Choose a motive
The motive is the underlying question your essay is trying to answer. Once you have a clear idea of what that is, writing your essay is simply stating what your answer to that question is (your thesis) and several logical points to support that answer (your body paragraphs). Identifying a motive for your essay can be tough! So tough, in fact, that we’ve created a separate article on just this step.
2. Write an outline by hand
The outline should include a thesis sentence, topic sentences for each of the body paragraphs you are planning to write, and nothing else. For the thesis and each topic sentence, take a first pass at writing them as if they were in the final essay, but do not edit them any further, even if they do not feel quite right yet. There will be many opportunities to edit later.
3. Free-write under each outline header (also by hand)
For each of your paragraphs, write down any sentences you think might go in the paragraph. This is a stream of consciousness exercise – your sentences should be out-of-order, half-thoughts instead of fully-formed ideas. The purpose is to get the main content of each paragraph on the page without any formal structure. Large pieces of what you write here won’t make it into the final draft, but that is ok. If you feel stuck, refer back to your outline.
4. Write the first draft (by hand)
Your first draft should be as serious a pass as you can muster without editing anything. Take short breaks between paragraphs. If you are doing this correctly (that is, without editing) each paragraph should take no more than 10-15 minutes to write. If you feel stuck on a certain section, refer back to your free-writing section to see if there are any pieces there you can use in the draft.
5. Type up and edit the first draft (computer)
Once you are done with your hand-written first draft, open a Word document and start typing it up. Here, you may start editing the sentences as you type. If you run into any trouble while making edits and get an itch to surf the web, simply skip that part and keep typing up the hand-written draft.
The benefits of the approach
What are the benefits of using this approach? First and foremost, it takes you away from the computer for the vast majority of the writing process. And, when you finally get to the computer, you are polishing a completed draft, not trying to write from a blank page.
Second, the process prevents you from getting ‘stuck’ as much as possible. Typically, running into a roadblock occurs because 1) it is unclear how the line you are writing fits into the overall narrative, and 2) you feel like the line has to be perfect before moving onto the next sentence. The method proposed avoids this by ensuring that, for the greater part of the writing process, there is both a completed body of work for you to refer back to and time carved out to perfect the sentence later (e.g., when writing your first draft by hand, you can both look back to the free-writing section for the overall structure and remember that you can edit during the typing up step).
Lastly, this process should reduce the amount of anxiety you experience while actually using the computer. By the time you reach the last step and begin agonizing over specific words, you already have a fairly completed draft that you could turn in if you run out of time.
Overall, we hope this writing process helps take the pain out of essay-writing. Have another writing tip that we should include in an article? Send us an email at [email protected].
If you feel like you’ve got writing down pat, check out our article on taking math-based exams.
