So, first semester freshmen, you've been tasked with writing your first Human Event (or English or any other class) essay.
Alrighty, let's do this. You call up some friends
...and decide to have a write sesh. You all sit down
...and try to jam out your papers together. Good start! A productive environment is important. Before you can start writing, you guys take a few minutes to talk and catch up. That's alright, everyone has to get settled, and if you let people get the talking out now, they can focus better later. What you need is focus.
Grab a pen
...or open your laptop
...and let's get started! Well, s***. Where do I even start writing?
Even if you already have a thesis, you might find it's hard to just sit down and write. Most people can't really do it. Luckily for you, throughout my time as a newspaper editor, I found a few tricks that seem to help people. Let's start with an outline.
1. Talk it out
If you've already got a thesis, then you've probably at least thought about how to support while you were coming up with it. Sit down with a friend, verbally explain your arguments to them, and have them "take notes" on the main points. Use these "notes" to write your outline. Once you have all the points down, go through your texts and find quotes to support your points and add them to the outline.
2. Put your outline into words
By now, you've probably got quite a pretty decent amount of content just in your outline. Before you start writing paragraphs, go through your outline, make sure the order it's in makes sense. Once your outline has a coherent structure, just take the bullet points and turn them into complete sentences. This should leave you with a slightly broken mess, but that's okay. You have to start somewhere. Clean it up, work on phrasing, then print your essay for editing by hand. That's an important and often overlooked detail. At some point, you should have somebody else read your essay as well. It's often helpful if the person reading your essay hasn't read the texts you're writing your essay about, so they'll be able to point out if your paper doesn't make sense on its own (it always should, no matter the background knowledge of the reader). This whole step will take you a lot of time, and you'll find that you will spend a lot more time than you thought you would looking up quotes in your source material.
3. Reverse outline
This is a piece of advice my Human Event teacher gave me that I wish I had known in high school, and it is universally applicable whenever you need to write an argumentative paper. Print your essay, and in the margin on the right, work backwards and try to develop an outline based on what's written in your essay. By essentially taking notes on what you have written, you might notice that you missed a major bullet issue, or that the idea you intended to convey in your original outline was lost in translation. Better yet, have a friend try to develop an outline of your paper, as he or she won't be biased by knowing what your original outline looked like.
Good luck everybody! If you've already turned in your first Human Event paper, hopefully some of this advice will come in handy in the future. The last piece of advice I have to give you is to feel free to approach your professors or TAs for help, as well as take advantage of all the resources we have here on campus for writing. I emailed my professor several times writing my paper, and I promise I came out completely unscathed!
