Guide to Essay Writing in Media and Communications
Preamble-Scholarly Communication
One of our teaching aims in the department is to produce graduates who can communicate in numerous genres and forms. Many of your units in news writing and media production are designed to help you do this. We hope that as part of your development as writers you learn to identify different genres and their conventions, and adjust your writing practice accordingly. But scholarly or academic writing is also a genre that has particular rules. Some of these relate to presentation, formatting and referencing. But there are also conventions around the idea of scholarly communication that are important. Indeed, it is often only when students understand more about scholarly communication that they begin to understand the importance of following academic conventions like referencing.
Scholarly communication can occur in a range of genres, from conference papers to debates or forums, to book reviews and essays. The one you experience most as an undergraduate are essays. Essays have a special place in scholarly communication. They are an incredibly compact form for exploring an entire suite of skills: from researching, to formation of an argument, to page formatting and referencing (the latter being crucial to avoid penalties for plagiarism). Essays are a very useful genre for exploring positions and arguments. The term ‘essay’ has links to the idea of ‘assaying’, weighing up. The essay is about examination, trial, testing, proving, measuring, adjusting and ascertaining.
For many of your lecturers, having an argument is a defining aspect of an essay. But what exactly does this mean when your lecturer says you need to find an argument, or make it stronger? Some key terms and ideas might be useful here.
1. Focus.
An important term to think about in relation to argument is focus. This means addressing the topic or essay question at hand, and formulating a response to it. In some cases the response to the question will be a collection of points that are only loosely organised. This loose collection of points will often be lacking any strong conclusion. A more sophisticated response is to develop an argument and organise your points in a way that strengthens and demonstrates your argument.
2. Defining your terms.
Every concept and term has in built-in characteristics and limitations. One of the key responsibilities of scholarly writing is to define terms that you use. Don’t always use a dictionary, as a dictionary tends to give common meanings rather than special or technical ones. Often, the definition promoted by a key figure or theorist in the field is better.
3. Assertions and Claims.
Every time you make an assertion or claim, you are assuming things about the state of the world. One of the dangers students run into is firstly making unsubstantiated claims, and secondly making claims that are far too general. Unsubstantiated claims lack support and evidence. General claims are by nature generalizing (e.g. ‘All people [without exception] think x’). Look at what claims you are making and whether you have explained them correctly and clearly, and whether you have supported them. A secret of good academic writing is to make claims that are relevant and supportable—but note, restricting your claims to first person ‘I’ does not always give your claim strong support. ‘This is what I think’ is not a strong academic argument. ‘Based on these arguments, and these circumstances, backed up by these sources, this is what I think’, is stronger.
Making a claim based on the activities of unnamed figures, or basing a claim on generalisations, is not good practice. Common knowledge provides limited justification for statements, but you should be careful in relying on common knowledge. If you find yourself making unsubstantiated claims, you may need to adjust the claim you are making to make it less grand. This might mean going back to what your readings or textbook has said about a topic, and building a claim more carefully, or grounding it more carefully. If you find yourself making claims which are too general, you may need to qualify your statements, or bolster the claim with evidence (sometimes both are important).
4. Structure of argument.
An argument sometimes involves multiple parts; one claim followed by another. Special attention should be given to the structure and logic of the argument. This also means thinking about organisation. In your essay, you will have identified many different points to make. But the issue is, which point should be made where, in which paragraph? A point could work well in two places. This is where organisation comes in, as part of creating coherent paragraphs that deal with similar bits of the argument. A good rule of thumb is to try to deal with all points relating to an issue in around about the same place in your essay.
5. Position.
An important term to think about when thinking about Assertions, Claims and Arguments is ‘position’. Every time you make a claim or assertion you are taking or adopting a position in relation to some matter. Having an argument means on one level taking ownership of the position you are adopting. This means more than simply gathering statements from lecture notes or materials together. It means thinking about the position from which you are making meaning. A very important area to think about here is quoting. Students sometimes quote from a text as a way of establishing a particular position. But a key principle here is that quotes are not in themselves self-evident. They need unpacking for the reader. They should be contextualised in your essay.
