Hey All,
So recently I've had a talk with my English and Literature teachers about the quality of my essays.
Their main criticism, along with other teachers who have cross marked my sacs, is that I tend to ramble on in my sentences. ie; it takes a while for me to actually reach my point. I find this occurs in my everyday speech as well; I'm not really an effective communicator unless given time and a pen. When I write my essays, (often in timed conditions), I write whatever is in my mind, so it's not completely coherent and concise as it could be.
My knowledge of the content is good, but my teachers commented that this rambling is what is dividing me from that A+.
How can I improve on my coherence and conciseness in my essays ? My English teacher told me to read high scoring responses but since this is a new study design, there isn't many available apart from those in the text guides.
Thanks !
This is a really good question and I think a problem for a lot of students. I was a serial rambler but managed to get over it (mostly
). There's nothing wrong with writing whatever is in your mind, but it needs filtering to lock your writing together perfectly. By taking ten (or 20) minutes to write out an essay plan in dot points, you could get everything out and only pick the cream of the crop for your essay. You do have to get pretty specific though - I tended to list my ideas, evidence, and the logical conclusions so that writing the essay was less about the thinking and more about just making it cover everything with minimal fluff. Obviously that's not going to magically make you a more concise writer but it's definitely a start.
Try practicing without a time limit - take a few hours if you can spare it and just write slowly. You said you have some trouble in timed conditions so it coulod be helpful for you to start by writing a few 'perfect' essays with no pressure and then incrimentally adding more time restrictions. Just dipping your toe in, so to speak.
Maybe starting your sentences with evidence or a strong point could help too. I'm personally of the opinion that essays don't need a lot of fluff to be good. I don't know many people that actually enjoy reading handwritten english essays so being blunt and less artsy is a positive attribute in my mind; 'masterful inclusion of unique and abstract alliteration' is probably over doing it, for example
. Not to say that you can't have fun and show off a bit, but being frugal with your flair can really spice things up a bit.
Heidi wrote a bit about being concise
here, she has some other tips that you might find to be worth a read.
Edit because I forgot to mention it: For conciseness, the actual content of the old essays don't matter. I don't know if any of the texts you're studying right now have relevant stuff to look at, but what you're looking for is sentence structure. It's worth printing some (or just reading them on the computer or whatever) and highlighting sentences that sound really, really cool to you. Maybe it's a bit nerdy to think there are cool sounding sentences in essays, but there's some really great ones that come up in examiner's reports and such that I'm pretty sure it's impossible to find any faults with at all. Definitely worth a look at old essays even if you don't know anything about what they'e actually about.