How to Write Brilliant Psychology Essays. Paul Dickerson

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      Think of someone sculpting a beautiful statue, having to work with the clay or other materials, bringing form out of them, with them and through them. The medium used isn’t just the passive recipient of the will of the artist; it can inform and shape what happens next. This act of creation is quite different from an act of destruction, where the will to destroy is simply imposed on the outer world with little or no engagement with the target object. Essay writing – good essay writing – has that creative quality, working with the words and ideas. We take our plans to our writing, but our writing then talks back to us – it highlights problems, offers new ways of seeing things and it suggests things to us.

      Our writing helps our thinking which helps our writing

      We may struggle with our writing at just the point where we are thinking through different ideas. Our writing can help identify that struggle – for example, that effort to characterise an approach. This develops our thinking as we try to think about the issues we are writing about more deeply. This dynamic interplay is at the heart of some of the best academic writing. The author isn’t the font of static, fixed knowledge that they passively convey as if taking down some dictation. Instead, the author is dynamically struggling with ideas and articulating them. In making ideas clear to others, they are simultaneously making them clear to themselves. This dual articulation process involves passages that run smoothly and then hit a snag, but the snag isn’t like a blockade in the road ahead; instead, it identifies an issue that can be taken deeper – an opportunity to further clarify, deepen or extend our understanding. Writing and thinking are dynamic, mutually-enhancing processes. That is what makes them creative, fun and worthwhile.

      How to write introductions like a reader

      This advice might be best left on one side when you are trying to get words on the page – you certainly don’t want your inner editor inhibiting you. But writing is a bit more like speaking than we sometimes realise. When we talk, we often take into account our audience. We sense, or try to sense, how well they are understanding what we are trying to communicate and what they feel about it. We can’t get that sort of live feedback when we write, but we can try to think about how our reader(s) might relate to what we are writing. Starting an essay without an introduction is a very clear signal that the writer is not thinking about their reader, but is just keen to cram down whatever they have in their mind connected with the essay topic. By contrast, a thoughtful, intelligent introduction gives the sense of the author relating to their reader in what they write – not with ‘witty’ messages to the reader in brackets (you know what I mean, don’t you?), but with an intelligent outline of what the essay is all about.

      The ‘so what?’ reader

      This concept will be returned to in later chapters, but for now let’s revisit an abbreviated version of one of the opening examples in this chapter.

      Essay title:

      ‘Critically evaluate the contribution of fMRI research to understanding psychological processes.’

      Sample essay beginning

      One particularly important strand of research has involved using fMRI data to localise psychological function to specific brain regions. An example of this is found in the work of Downing, Liu and Kanwisher (2001), who investigated whether the same regions of the brain were employed in object recognition regardless of the specific object being perceived. A particular interest for Downing et al. …

      This looks like it could have been a really good essay – but it has gone wrong from the start. It is not that the content is incorrect or irrelevant – it looks right on target. The problem is that the reader comes to an academic essay with a high chance of asking the two-word question that they (almost) never ask of dictionaries, encyclopaedias or of the instant results to their twentieth Google search that day: ‘so what?’ Don’t write your essay like a dictionary or encyclopaedia entry or a Google factual search result. These are great for conveying information, but your essay needs to do more than that and your introduction sets the scene.

      Starting an essay without conveying a sense of what you will cover and why it is relevant to the essay title means that however relevant and accurate your information actually is, your essay will suffer as you have not demonstrated a scholarly mind at work. Your essay, from the introduction onwards, is a medium for demonstrating your thinking about the title and showing that thinking, rather than leaving the reader to try to deduce what sort of thinking there was or wasn’t from flimsy and incomplete evidence.

      While the reader of your essay is possibly the most wonderful, engaged and enthusiastic person you can think of – it can be handy to imagine that – whatever their many strengths, they have a tendency to ask ‘so what?’ A well-written essay can meet the ‘so what?’ challenge and prevail. It can even prevent our dear reader(s) from even asking the question.

      To write a good introduction, get a draft down first and then read it through as if you were the reader – perhaps the marker – who does not know what’s coming up in your essay, rather than the author, who does. Reading your introduction in this way, ask yourself these three questions:

      Exercise

      Interrogate your introduction