Essay Structure [and my SECRET to coming TOP at UNI]!

hi everyone my name is Dr Matt Williams I'm a teacher in politics and what is known as the access fellow here at Jesus college at the University of Oxford now in today's video about writing better essays we're going to be talking about essay structure which is so important I can't emphasize it to you enough and if you stick around uh to the end of the video I'll explain how I came top of the Year from the entirety of my undergraduate degree because honestly this is a skill that's so empowering that it's well worth practicing and

practicing and practicing and it will make you a much better student and it will take you very far in life but it's the sort of thing that students do often underestimate the importance of so that's why I really wanted to make this video so my bother well I guess I've kind of given a bit of the game away it's just incredibly important but also ironically a well-structured essay sets you free so you might think that that a highly structured essay where you've put your points in a quite a particular order and you've explained that order

to your readers is quite restrictive it's not it's actually it's freeing it's liberating and primarily because it helps you express yourself and it helps you get understood that's probably you know it makes you more comprehensible to your readers and that's just so important right ultimately you're writing this for an audience you're not just allowing things to Tumble out of your head onto a page for your own sake you're doing it for somebody else's benefit so that they can learn from your thinking and they can see that you have generated great critical thinking skills and that

means you've got to be communicative and structure is communicative so ironically I would say structure sets you free and it gives you fantastic power one thing to think about is imagine you're a lawyer you're going into court and you're going to fight a particular case you know essays are quite argumentative at least they are typically in British universities and in specifically here in Oxford you know if you were a lawyer going into court trying to defend someone from prison and you didn't organize your arguments and you weren't clear whether or not they were guilty it's

a bad day for your client right they're going to go straight to jail and it's going to be your fault quite a significant extent so imagine you're a lawyer in every essay you write if you're just allowing points to be put forth in a totally random haphazard order as they just come out of your brain then the audience who in a courtroom would be know judge and jury but in an essay will be your examiners and other people they're just going to be totally confused and it's really gonna you know blunt the impact of your

work and you really don't want that you want your work to have as much punch and power as possible okay so I would go so far as to say that the organization is over 90 of the case itself the way you put the points together helps make the case and indeed you'll probably do it without noticing because you know when you have certain points that you want to make to try and Advance a particular point of particular argument you will start putting them in a certain order anyway and that is your brain being led by

what other people think okay and this is why it's so crucial you've got to know what you're doing you've got to know why you want to put points in a certain order so I'm a politics tutor right and one of the most common points that students start with in politics essays is to do with the economy now what they're doing there is they're basically just they've learned from everyone else that you know the amount of money is often one of the most fundamental and the important things in any political question but that just means they're

being dragged around by other people's views they could stand up and say you know what I'm not going to start with the economy I'm going to start with something completely different to try and solve this puzzle because I want to solve it for myself or they could start with the economy but explain why they think they think they ought to start with the economy not why someone else thinks they would start with the economy okay so whether you're conscious silver or not your brain is going to be trying to put points in a certain order

but you've got to be conscious of it you've got to be self-aware because the minute you're unconscious is when you lose power and your audience gets confused okay so that's why you should bother right in fact you should structure everything in NSA not just the whole essay itself but everything every sentence every paragraph besides the whole essay itself so how do you structure a sentence well you just got to keep them short and sweet right you've got to make sure we know who's kicking whom if you write very long complicated sentences it's going to be

difficult go and see my video on George Orwell's six rules of writing well if you're not sure about this but the the gap between the subject the object and verb of every sentence needs to be pretty small and clear and easy it's quite common for students to write in a way that's quite flowery a bit poetic almost and that's usually it's not always going to be the case but that's usually not what's being called for what's being called for is good evidence of critical thinking and Clarity is so important so short simple sentences is usually

better than very long very complicated sentences with lots of Clauses and lots of long complicated technical words that just confuse people usually and lead to more questions rather than solving questions okay so be careful with punctuation if you're tempted to put in a semicolon or an ellipsis or a dash or whatever think about why not just have a full stop why not start a new sentence it might make everyone's life a lot easier okay and then how to structure your paragraphs well there are broadly speaking two approaches to this and they've got some useful acronyms

the first is peel and the second is Peter but they achieve pretty much the same sort of approach so the peel approaches makes your point then provide some evidence for that point then explain the point and then link back to your overall argument and also link to the next Point that's coming along the Peter approach is point evidence technique so that's sort of techniques used to generate that evidence the methods if you like then explanation then reflection now either of those would work fine and of course it will depend a little bit on the type

of essay you're writing or the type of University that you're attending but the general point is that each paragraph needs to be like a mini essay it needs to have a beginning a middle and an end it needs to have its own logical internal structure and crucially it must link to the next paragraph provide some linking sentences that explain why you're moving from net from this point one to the next one it's so common for students to just finish a point and then start with a new one and it's almost like they've jumped from one

stepping stone to another and it's just a bit confusing you want there to be a really obvious thread that's linking all of your points beautifully together okay so overall how do you structure the whole essay well you've got to have a plan right if you fail to plan you should plan to fail right poorly planned essays are obvious the the second you start reading them because the the points are just a jumble you've got you've got what I would describe as a shopping list rather than a recipe there's lots of ingredients laid out there but

there's no sense of how those ingredients mix together to form the argument again going back to you being a lawyer in court and you're trying to convince the jury that your client's not guilty but you're just bafflingly throwing out points Here There and Everywhere and they just cannot understand how they connect together so you've got to have a plan right and it doesn't matter how little time you've got for writing your essay you've got to plan it and in order to plan an essay you've got to focus on the question you've got to be led

by the question okay and one technique you can use in order to work out how to focus your the structure of your essays is the bunny ears technique so bunny ears as in putting quotation marks around important words okay because that can help you focus your mind on what are we fighting about so remember you're like a lawyer in court lawyers in criminal trials the fighting over not guilty that's the focus of their fight that's what they're all going to be scrapping and bickering about and in your essays there'll be a word or a couple

of words that you're also going to be fighting about so let me give you a couple of examples or four examples about from different exams these are all Oxford University exam questions from different subjects so the first one comes from law do judges exercise illegitimate power in the United Kingdom Constitution do judges exercise illegitimate power in the United Kingdom Constitution the fight the focus of the fight in this case is the word illegitimate so I would structure my points in a way that breaks up the concept of illegitimate into certain sub points that can all

then be linked together in order to make my case that yes judges do exercise a legitimate power or no they do not exercise illegitimate power or they do exercise illegitimate power but only in these ways but not in these other ways right those are basically the three essays that are possible that are allowable for this question okay the next question comes from philosophy how do we perceive change now the bunny is there I've put around perceive obviously the word changes into interesting and debatable but it's how we perceive change that the fight is focused on

here okay that's the thing that every paragraph every point every sentence needs to be focused on and if it's not then I'm not answering the question and if I'm not answering the question I'm not getting any marks okay you've got to be really ruthless with yourself third question comes from history was the Tudor dynasty securely established by 1509 so I put the bunny ears around established because that's what we're fighting about that's the debate that's the not guilty in this instance right so my plan has to work around that final example comes from politics does

democracy cause growth now there's a lot of ambiguity in this question but growth is the ultimate thing that we are trying to explain and its connection to democracy so I would probably split up growth into certain aspects and try and work out its connection to democracy or I would try and find some way of structuring my points around those words okay so that's the the approach to making uh to using bunny ears okay now then we need to think about what makes sense as a story how can you link your points together in a way

that makes sense you want them to progress so you want it to feel like the this point leads naturally on to the next point or at least it leads on to the next point in a way you can explain even if it's not natural because what is natural it depends on a person's perspective okay so there are to my mind four fundamental ways to structure an essay okay and I've got some little diagrams to try and illustrate these so the first is a timeline so one thing happened earlier than another thing and therefore we go

through them chronologically Point by Point okay so that is a logical structure it can mean that you tend to focus on the passage of time rather than the actual sort of points that matter for us and so that approach can can also lead to sort of heavy description where you say this thing happened then that thing happened and less analysis analysis is usually where the marks are at so be careful with timelines that's why they sometimes don't work what might be more effective is the mechanism which is kind of similar to a timeline where you're

saying one thing goes in and another thing comes out but there rather than focusing on time as being what courses change you're focusing on the actual mechanics by which change occurs this of course would only be relevant if the essay was about dynamism about change about things going in and coming out of a perceived mechanism okay another approach is called a funnel structure which is where you work from the largest possible wide angle view down to the narrowest view so it could be for example if you start by looking at an entire society and then

you zoom in on an individual actor so it could be that you talk about how an entire Society felt about a certain thing and then how an individual politician managed that thing so that's a funnel structure where you're kind of zooming in if you like and then finally there's a feedback loop where you have a cycle of points where one point leads to the next and then leads on to a third point and then that leads to a fourth point and then it starts back again at the beginning and it's just up to you to

determine where at the beginning is and go through those points in a way that makes sense to you and make sense crucially to your readers again so let me give you an example for that question about whether or not democracy causes growth okay so what I might do is split up into three fundamental points I'm going to make about growth and I'm going to explain how growth depends on trust between individuals because what you need for growth is to be able to put your money in a business and for that business then to grow because

the business can depend on certain things happening and it being able to securely continue its operations and stuff like that so I'm going to focus on the parts of democracy that contribute to different parts of that growth approach right so I've got laid out very simple plan here with seven paragraphs starting off with the introduction where I'm just going to say what I'm going to do in the essay I'm going to lay out the fundamental argument I'm going to make and I'm going to lay out my roadmap which is where I explain what points I'll

make Andy in what order it's incredibly useful thing to have it only needs to be a sentence where you just say I will go through these points in this order and that that'll be that thanks very much my next paragraph will deal with some fundamental conceptual definitions things that need to be pinned down like the word growth what does that mean are we talking about growth in general and gross domestic product yeah classic definition then I'll go through the points now what I'm suggesting here could be um you know sort of as an inverted funnel

in that I'm starting at the narrowest point and widening out to the to the biggest point so start by point one with Democratic culture which is where how where each individual trusts other individuals to a certain extent because they are citizens in a democracy so I'm starting at the individual level with culture and then I'm expanding to institutions at the mid-level and then I'm going to the widest point which is how democracies between countries trade with each other and how they grow together so those are my points and I put them in that order and

I put them in that order starting at the narrowest point because I think how individuals think of themselves in democracies is the ultimate driver of growth that's what I think really really matters so that's why I put it first right remember you know put put your best Goods at the shop window your most important Point kind of needs to go first and if you can think about a plan that can help deliver that important point that would be really helpful okay then my sixth paragraph will deal with some caveats and counter arguments this is not

so that I completely tear apart my own arguments but it's so that I strengthen it because I say what's what could be better about it what other people think and why with respect they are wrong and I'm going to continue with my my own original arguments and then finish off number seven with conclusion where I just say what I said okay now once you start thinking about a plan you'll start to notice that there's a bigger picture you've got an ultimate sort of theory that links together all of your separate points and that is where

you're going to really communicate your vision most clearly right you work out the bigger picture so the bigger picture in that plan about the connection between growth and democracy is that in democracies I'm I could argue that trust creates growth and trust is more common in democracies and so that's my sort of bigger picture argument and that's the thread the beautiful golden thread that links all of my points together rather than me offering lots of separate ingredients I've got a recipe now okay now how about standing out from the crowd and getting the highest marks

well the trick that I pulled in University was being a real contrarian so I would find an argument that I thought no one else would be willing to argue I would counter intuition again a bit like being a lawyer I would pick up the briefs that were unwinnable if you like or at least everyone thought were unwinnable and that would therefore show off my skills to a much higher level and it also forced me to think about the arguments rather than me just trotting out arguments that everyone else makes I was definitely making my own

arguments they've got to be careful with this because of course the dangerous that you say something that's completely unsustainable so you've got to make sure you can back yourself up but fundamentally it doesn't really matter what you what you think it matters what you can prove okay so if you want to show off your thinking skills don't worry about what you believe in so I I might believe that democracy generally causes growth but that doesn't matter I'm going to argue it doesn't just so I can show off okay and it it kind of works provided

you you do it carefully so here's you know an approach you could make to say the Democracy doesn't cause growth because planning is what's needed for growth and democracies are not terribly good at long-term planning and actually the bits of democracies that do help with growth are the parts that are nothing to do with popular will it's things like courts and rule of law and human rights which are more the liberal aspect of a liberal democracy it's the things that constrain popular will that's the stuff that helps to helps businesses grow and you know one

telling point is that no business is a democracy I mean you've got shareholders who can vote I guess but you know the the way that businesses are organized tend to be quite authoritarian and that's because they wouldn't want to constantly vote on everything that they were doing because it would mean that planning would be confused and muddled and could change very quickly and it probably wouldn't work so I'm going to try and argue that democracy cannot cause growth and I'm going to do that not because I believe it but because it'll show off my skills

to a greater extent okay and then again after my introduction I'll go through some definitions and I'm going to have this thread going all the way through which is that actually growth requires planning and that's that's what's needed and I'll go through point one and again I'll start with Democratic culture and so I'll start at the the individual level how do individuals in a democracy think and feel and how are they acculturated and then I'll go to point two which is sort of mid-level about Democratic institutions and point out that it's not the ones that

have anything to do with popular will that drive growth it's not the legislatures it's not the referendums it's the courts and the courts are kind of counter majoritarian they're almost anti-democratic some would argue okay and then point three I'll talk about how democracies interact with each other and show that that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with growth either and then at each point I'm making I'm introducing caveats so again this is not how I sit on the fence so that I say well I couldn't argue this or I could argue that I'm saying at

every stage I argue this other people might think that and here's why with respect they're wrong and I'm just stress testing my argument I'm just allowing my readers the opportunity to to to know that I've thought of their suspicions and their concerns and I've addressed them okay so that's why that can really work and then I finish off with a conclusion job done okay so that's the trick and it is just a trick it's not nothing to do with genius and ultimately this is why you should bother because structuring your essays will make you much

more powerful and ironically it really sets you free so give it a try see how you get along let me know in the comments if you have any questions or comments and I'll see you next time thanks so much for watching bye now