How to Write Social Science Essays

Writing social sciences essays is an integral part of your course since it is a requirement that gauges your knowledge and understanding of the things that had been discussed – two skills important to social science. While these skills can be acquired over time, there are ways to make writing social science essays less of a pain in the meantime.

Essay writing follows a formal structure, and this should find particular application if you are learning how to write social science essays.

Follow this guide on how to write social sciences essays and you could never go wrong:

1. Getting started. If your instructor provided you with an essay question, the first step to take is to carefully read the instruction. Be sure you understand what is being asked. It would also help to underline the keywords as it helps to give direction on the right treatment to follow. These words can be analyse, assess, compare, contrast, criticise, describe, discuss, evaluate, examine, explain, illustrate, justify, outline and synthesise. While some keywords are synonymous to each other, the same may be asking for different approaches in writing the social science essay.
2. Doing the preparation/research. The only way for you to substantiate your arguments with valid data is to get information from a number of sources: reference books, textbooks, class notes, videos, digital media and the Internet (be sure to use credible sources with authority in a certain field). This makes for a more comfortable essay writing process.
3. Planning and writing the essay. Now that you have all resources ready, it’s time to plan your contents and draft your essay prior to writing it. As in social psychology essays, your essay should begin with an introduction that mentions the hypothesis and your expected response to it, followed by the body that attempts to establish the hypothesis, and ended with a conclusion that synthesises the entire paper.
   

Follow this guide and you should have no problem writing your social sciences essays.

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The Importance of a Flexible Coursework Schedule

The Importance of a Flexible Coursework Schedule

As a student, you might have noticed that there is no such thing as a coursework schedule that is immune from adjustments. You will eventually learn to accept that your planned schedule may not turn out to be the exact schedule that you actually followed. There will be events that will get postponed and unexpected things that will come up. This may make your coursework tasks, particularly your essay writing assignments, more difficult to finish than what you have anticipated, thus, your schedule has to be changed accordingly.

However, if you have already kept these possibilities in mind before you planned your schedule, your schedule becomes more flexible and can easily avoid concerns that involve emergencies.

Flexibility is a key element in planning for a coursework schedule. When you budget your time for your essay writing assignments, keep in mind that your plan does not intend to encase you in a straitjacket, where you do not have the option to adjust freely when unexpected changes occur. Rather, the goal of your coursework plan is to help you take into consideration the various demands that may affect your schedule and balance these demands against your own personal need to complete your coursework duties. A realistic schedule provides adequate time for productivity, and it also allows ample time for relaxation, research and other important activities that will help you achieve your goals.

You can help yourself stick to your new schedule by building a system of rewards into it. You may also inform your colleagues about your schedule to prepare for any additional pressure that follows the schedule that you have planned for yourself. You will then realise that with a more flexible schedule, you will have fewer worries in the process of completing your essay writing assignments, while giving you more time for recreation and relaxation and better academic marks.

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Planning for your Essay Assignment
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Planning for Your Essay Assignment

No matter what educational level you are in, there are certain general principles you may use to help you set up a schedule in completing your essay writing assignments. The first principle is to set your goals. Determine what you want to achieve from your essay and work out a plan that will help you meet that goal.

• Plan for required periods of time. Classes at school, mealtimes and other required activities should be blocked in first to give you a clearer idea what free time you have left for your essay writing assignment.

• Plan for emergencies. Your schedule must be flexible enough that you can make adjustments in your essay writing schedule for emergencies. You may include an occasional free period in your school to delegate enough time for a contingency plan in case urgent matters arise.

• Plan ample time for each task. Some tasks will need lesser time to be accomplished. You may need more time to write your essay draft than your essay outline. You may delegate the longest periods of time for your research, if you determine that this task is your weakness. You must be able to judge how much time certain tasks need. You must also leave time to take breaks. This will refresh your memory and restore the other faculties needed to complete your essay efficiently. Try to make a schedule within the limits you have set yourself. If you have a schedule that is too stressful to follow, you are merely defeating the purpose of planning ahead for your essay writing schedule.

• Plan for your learning style. Students have their own learning style. Your schedule, then, must be able to fit in the style that works best for you. Do not schedule your actual writing of the essay draft in the mornings if you know you are least productive during these times. If you can plan your schedule knowing your limitations, you can also schedule it according to your identified strengths.

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Breaking Down the Essay Writing Task

Your essay writing task may seem difficult to accomplish since you think that once your professor has given you the assignment, you have to only finish it in one setting. This will be a time when you have finally conceptualised everything in your head so it can be easily deposited in your writing.

If this has been your mindset all along, it is no surprise that you have acquired lower marks in most of your essays. An essay is such a meaningful piece of written content that must be prepared properly. Your professor may not always give you ample time to submit your essays so critical thinking is a must before putting your thoughts into writing. Rather, you are given enough time to break down your essay writing into chronologically arranged tasks to make sure that almost all the elements in the essay are properly covered.

Generally, the essay writing task is broken down into the following activities:

• Preparing the preliminary essay outline. This allows you to list down the initial points that you want to cover in your essay before you begin your research. It is more advantageous if you already have a general premise on hand to know the supporting points you want to cover in your essay. You can also easily identify what points need further research.

• Conducting your research. This is the stage where you will be finding the sources you want to include in your essays to further strengthen it.

• Preparing your final outline. You may have encountered new ideas that you want to include in your essay when you conducted your research. You might as well list them down so you will not forget to cover all of them.

• Preparing your essay draft. This is where you start writing your first draft based on your final essay outline.

• Revising the essay draft. Give time to review the essay yourself to track down errors you may have missed in your initial writing. You may also ask feedback from other people—the more eyes you have asked to edit your essay, the fewer mistakes your essay will likely have.

Preparing the final essay copy. Once you are finally satisfied with your work, you may now prepare the final essay copy for submission.

Develop the Skill of Essay Writing

Talent and skill are two different things, although they are usually interchanged in usage. A talent is something that a person naturally has since birth. A skill, on the other hand, is something that can be easily developed through practice and skill. Unlike what most people usually believe, essay writing is a skill as well.

The development of any skill takes three stages:

• Cognitive stage
• Psychomotor stage
• Affective stage

In the cognitive stage, you are still determining the essential elements of the skill and the actions you must do to develop the skill. In essay writing, particularly, you have to fully identify and determine what the essay is—what it is, what purpose it serves, what minor tasks and skills are integrated with it and what habits you must develop before you master it, among others. If you have understood the essential elements that contribute to the development of your essay writing skill, you have greater chances of mastering it.

The psychomotor stage occurs when you have been given venues where you can practice the skill. As a student, you are consistently given venues to develop your essay writing skills. Your essays are a major part of your coursework; it presents you valuable opportunities to develop your writing skills further. Take in mind, though, that you will still not fully develop the skill unless you have understood what the essay is. No matter how many essays you have written, you will not grow unless you have absorbed new things and lessons in essay writing along the way—and practice them well.

The affective stage is the determining point that fully establishes your mastery of the skill—you have to value it. The essay writing skill you have developed may help you through your academic career, but unless you have fully appreciated what you have developed, you will not be as motivated to practice the skill. This lack of motivation affects your skill to die a slow, natural death.

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Conducting Interviews for Data Collection

There are various means that students can use for their data collection task. It is important that students collect more data to further substantiate their written coursework assignments with relevant supporting facts.

Generally, there are two kinds of data: primary and secondary. Primary data are those that students acquire themselves through interviews, surveys and questionnaires, among others. Secondary data, on the other hand, are those that students acquire from books, magazines, dissertations, journals and other material the students did not author themselves.

An interview can easily provide students with facts and personal viewpoints that add more credible volume to any of their coursework assignments—whether it is an essay or a dissertation. To make sure that the data the students have acquired from their coursework research are relevant, their respondents should be those who are knowledgeable in the field that they are pursuing.

Students can start by placing calls for appointments or a letter requesting for an interview. In the letter, students must be able to specify what information they hope to obtain from the interview. They may prepare beforehand by reading background material on the topic and the respondents they are about to interview. In this manner, they will be able to ask intelligent questions and follow-up enquiries.

The success of the interview will depend on the quality of the questions the students will be asking from the interviewees. They must be able to prepare a set list of questions that detail what information they want to acquire from the interviewees. The interview provides students with an opportunity to get firsthand information for their coursework tasks; therefore, students must not ask information from the interviewees that are readily available from other sources.

At the close of the interview, it is suggested that both the student and the interviewee go over the main points covered as they are understood by the student. That way, the interviewee can easily correct any misinterpretations that the student may have made. This will further ensure that the information gathered from the interview is important and relevant to the essay or dissertation.

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An Overview to Referencing
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An Overview on Referencing

When completing academic essays for a coursework assignment, it is important for students to provide the proper referencing as well. Referencing is loosely termed as the act of crediting sources included in any written composition. Referencing reflects the students’ act of intensive research before their professors, ensuring that the essays they have written are sound and accurate.

If the students’ research leads them to consult many sources, they will be spending a lot of time reading. Not every source will turn out to be useful. Once the students have decided that a certain source is useful, students may take a few times noting the source of the information for their reference.

The main purpose of referencing in an essay is to document the sources and to give credit to the proponent whose words or ideas are being used in the essay or dissertation. It assists other students and readers to look for other sources if they wish to pursue a topic related to what the essay has discussed. It ultimately prevents students from committing plagiarism, an unethical act of assuming ownership of certain ideas, thoughts or concepts that are not originally theirs.

In general, referencing should be exercised for the following materials:
• Direct quotations
• A restatement of a certain proponent’s words or ideas
• Facts, statistics and other quantitative information
• Transcripts from interviews, surveys and other data collection instruments

A reference must contain all the information a reader might need, including the author, title, publication place and date and page numbers, among others. Electronic sources, for example, require the actual date the URL has been accessed by the writer.

There are also various referencing formats that students can use, such as the Harvard, Oxford, MLA (Modern Language Association), BMJ (British Medical Journal), APA (American Psychological Association), Vancouver and Chicago styles.


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