INTRODUCTION
One of the best ways to take possession of knowledge is to write about what you have heard. At times you listen to a lecture and you think you already know what the writer is saying but by the time you attempt to write it out using your own words that is when you will discover that you do not know as much as you think you do. You might have been thinking that you knowhow to argue well only to discover when you start writing that you do not knowhow to put your points together. That is why it is important to practice writing different kinds of essays so that you can be proficient in almost all kinds of writing.
Composition writing is also designed to test a candidate’s ability to use English as an effective means of communication in specific situations. These types of compositions are designed to make you express yourself with clarity and coherence in a manner appropriate to the audience, purpose, topic and situation. You may come across situations in life when you may have to argue, describe, narrate an incidence or do some other things that require some skills verbally, non-verbally or in writing. When such situations occur, you are expected to be able to demonstrate your knowledge and skill by presenting what is logical, acceptable, convincing and understandable to the audience, reader or listener. Below are some of the objectives of this unit.
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3.1 Planning
Planning is a very important stage in composition writing. In some public exams, some students get disturbed when they see some other candidates scribbling away almost immediately they collect their paper. The confusion may be so much for some naïve students such that they too start writing without planning or thinking much about what they want to write. In a public exam, you have to take a few minutes off to think about the topic, the points you are going to write about, how you will arrange your paragraphs, what your introduction will be and what your conclusion is likely to be. All this planning should not take more than 7 minutes.
If it is a group assignment, and you have probably decided on what to write, you need to plan and decide on the following
3.1.1 Materials and Resources
These are important because your topic will determine the kind of resources or materials you need to look for and this you must do before you start writing. If it is a take home assignment, you can visit your departmental library or the main University library. Resources can be classmates, lecturers and computers for materials; you can also browse and check the net for materials. The materials can be books, handouts, magazines, extracts, submitted undergraduate of postgraduate theses etc. The resources can be very useful in helping you to structure your thoughts, decide on the topic, get adequate and enough materials for reference etc. You also have to decide whether you want to work alone or with other people. In actual fact, an instructor can give out a group assignment or individual work. When this happens, you have to decide whether the assignment requires that you do it alone or with other people.
3.1.2 Group work
Deciding whether you want to work with other people is part of planning. ‘Cill Home’ (see reference at the end of the unit) on ‘writing’ notes the following as the advantages of working alone or with other people.
Advantages of group work
Reasons for working with other people:
. you get more ideas from other people,
. they can suggest improvements,
. some other people can tell you if you make a mistake,
. they can encourage you to do bet,
. explaining things to other people can help you understand better,
. sharing helps you to be quicker,
. you can share your thoughts and feelings,
. teamwork skills and experience are important for your career.
Reasons for working alone:
. your work will be different from other people’s work,
. if you share a task, you can learn your own part of the task,
. you may not want to be influenced by other people,
. you may not want to share your ideas with other people.
Which ever way you decide to work, planning is important. The next section is about some essay writing strategies.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1
What are some of the things you need to take into consideration before writing?
3.2 Essay Writing Strategies
3.2.1 Note taking
Note taking is an important aspect of writing. Writing down the main points as it occurs to you while reading is important because it helps you to remember and organise the salient points in your work. When you have to analyse your topic, you need to write down the points as you hope to use them to develop the paragraphs as you write. You may even need to research a topic before you start writing and taking notes as you read will help you when you need to acknowledge the source of your information although it has been mentioned earlier on that you need to write in your own words as much as possible.
One of the purposes of taking notes is to help the student recall at a later time the essentials of what he/she has read. The mechanics of note taking such as good hand writing, use of abbreviations and layout are very important details to consider. Make sure you write legibly so that you and other authorised people can find your work easy to read at a later date. There have been cases of students who have written and have been called upon to read the same works later and have not been able to read them because of bad hand-writing. Going through what you have written should be a constant practice and this habit should be cultivated during examinations as well. You should create time to go over your work before you submit. There may be some I(s) to dot or some t(s) to cross. Abbreviations may be good for personal work but not for examinations.
3.2.2 Organise your Work
You should have an idea of how you want your work to be organised and you need to work towards this. If it is an argumentative essay, you should know the side you want to support. Even though you have to balance your arguments, much of your submission still has to reflect your support for which ever side you want to identify with. You should organise it in such a way that each paragraph has a main point while the other sentences are supporting. Your conclusion should be such that will summarise in brief the argument you have presented.
3.2.3 Analyse the title of the Essay
When you are given an essay topic, you need to analyse the title and make sure you understand what the question is trying to say. When you think you understand, you can use this knowledge to draft your introduction. If you misfire right from the beginning, you may loose your direction and focus thereby making you to score low marks on the write-up. For example, some students were asked to write an article sometimes ago on the following topics:
1. Should capital punishment be abolished in the country?
2. Write an article on the need to curb the wave of violence in our country- Nigeria
You may be surprised to know that some students misinterpreted the two essay topics in a very funny way. Some students mistook the first question on capital punishment to be corporal punishment and they wrote extensively on that. This made them to loose marks under content, organisation, expression and mechanical accuracy. The other set of students who answered the question on the need to curb the wave of violence were writing about the waves of the sea at the bar beach in Lagos. It may sound funny and you may be wondering if anybody could do such a thing. But it did happen. So, correct interpretation of the question is important.
At times an essay topic may have two or three parts, you must make sure you cover every part of the question otherwise you would not have done justice to the question. Analysing means breaking down into parts and dealing with each of the parts to get a compact whole.
3.2.4 Build up your Essay
You need to build up your essay on ideas you have developed yourself. Some of the ideas that will occur to you may be those you got from books you have read. You should examine those ideas very well to find out if they go along with your thoughts and if they do and you want to make use of them the way they are, you need to acknowledge the source so that you will not be accused of copying or plagiarism. Andrew Roberts (internet, see reference at the end of the unit) notes that you should not allow the notes you put down on the books you have read to set the pattern of your essay. Your essay should express your own thoughts and that is why you have been advised to write in your own words.
3.2.5 Revise
You should revise your work before you submit or before you even give it to another classmate or friend of yours to read through for you. It is possible that your skipped some errors while writing and going over the work for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors will do you a lot of good and save you from all kinds of embarrassment that such mistakes can cause. After the revision, you still give it to another friend to go through for you. This is particularly important if the write up is a long essay and you are all writing on different topics. But if the assignment is a class essay where you are all expected to compete for marks, it does not make sense giving it to some one else to read for you because you would have defeated the purpose for which the test or exam is set.
3.2.6 Errors to avoid while writing
If non- English language specialists make mistakes while speaking, it is seen as pardonable but if an English language student or specialist does the same, it is frowned at. Once you claim to be an English language graduate, people see you as someone to contact in case of any difficulty on language issues. They may want to test if you know the spellings of words, meanings of expressions because they believe you know everything. Let me share a personal experience with you. I got engaged to my husband as a master’s student in English and the day I went to my in-laws house for the first time, a young boy wanted to test me. My husband had told his people that his fiancé was a master’s student in English so I guess the boys wanted to test me. The boy asked what the English equivalent of ‘Isu ata yan an yan an’ was. I smiled and knew that the nearest to what he said was ‘pandemonium’ or ‘chaos’ depending on the situation. I answered him and since that time none of them tested me like that again. You can find yourself in such a situation and that is why you need to be equipped as an English language student. Below are some errors to avoid.
Errors in Grammar - Omission of an essential element
The elements of structure of a clause are the same as the elements of structure of a sentence. (Subject, Predicator, Complement, Adverbial or Subject, Verb, Object, Complement). These essential elements which will be discussed in some of the units in this course are important for a sentence to be grammatically correct. Except a sentence is designed to have a particular structure, omitting an essential part of a sentence will make your sentence awkward and incorrect.
Some of the major errors in grammar include wrong tense, wrong tense sequence, misuse of modal operators (may/might/ can/ could etc) ambiguity in the use of pronouns, misuse or omission of articles, including confusion between countable and uncountable nouns, wrong prepositions, misuse of relatives, subordinators and conjunctions. There are also errors of concord (agreement between the subject and the verb).Some of these and others will be discussed in other units as you go along.
Punctuation Errors
Punctuation errors are errors that should be avoided in good writing and some of these include non-use of full stops, question marks or exclamation mark. Misuse or omission of quotation marks. Either single or double quotation marks could be used. Consistency is however important in the use of either single or double quotation marks. You must stick to one except informal writings where you are instructed to do otherwise.
Some other punctuation errors include the use of a comma where a full stop or semicolon is required, insertion of comma between subject and verb and object, insertion of comma between subordinator or conjunction and following clause or group or between adjective and noun or between verb and adverb. Misuse of capital letters should also be avoided in good writing. You can go through the detailed notes on punctuations in units 2&3 of module 2 for more on punctuations.
Spelling Errors
In modern English usage, there is a great deal of liberty. Nevertheless, spelling errors should be avoided as much as possible. Make sure you check up on your spellings before and after doing your write-up. In this case, all spelling errors can be detected and addressed before the submission of the write up. For example, putting a hyphen on words such as *how-ever, *some-one or failure to hyphenate a divided word at the end of a line could be considered as errors. In addition, faulty amalgamation e.g. writing inspite of instead of in spite of should be avoided.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
Mention and discuss some essay writing strategies that have been mentioned in this unit.
4.0 CONCLUSION
In this unit, we have mentioned some pre-writing activities and the need to analyse the topic so that your writing can be well focused. We have also talked about some errors to avoid while writing. Taking notes while you read is important for documentation of ideas and going over your work before submission makes your work to be free of errors.
5.0 SUMMARY
In this unit, you have learnt that:
. planning is important if you want to present a good essay,
. you need to plan for the materials and resources you need,
. some of the materials could be books from the library, cassettes, past post-graduate theses etc while some of the resources could be your lecturers, class mates, computers etc.
. it is important that you minimise errors to the barest minimum,
. errors in grammar, spellings and punctuation should be avoided.
6.0 TUTOR-MARKED ASSIGNMENT
Read the essay topic below and answer the questions that follow.
‘Education is a means of livelihood’
1. What are the materials and resources you need for this kind of composition?
2. In analysing the topic, what are some of the points you need to take into consideration?
3. Imagine that the assignment is an individual one. Would you want to give your write up to a friend to go through for you? If yes, why? And if No, why?
4. Write a brief introduction for the essay topic above.
7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READING
Roberts A. (Retrieved from Middlesex University resource) http://www.mdx.ac.uk/WWW/STUDY/Essay sl.ht
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