Essay Writing Guide

Interpreting the Title

The first task involved in writing an essay is working out what is being asked for by the essay title; it is important that you interpret what the essay question is asking for correctly. This involves understanding what topic area the title refers to and what are you being asked to do with the information.Common faults with essays are that they cover the wrong topic or they fail to deal with the information in the way that was asked by the essay title. Thus there are two main questions that need to be asked at this stage; "what information is being asked for by the question?" and "what are you being asked to do with that information ?". The next two sections will deal with each question in detail.

What is the Topic?

The first question concerns what area of psychology the essay is to be about, for example:


obviously concerns short term memory. Titles are normally transparent as regards the general area that they concern. Any ambiguities can normally be cleared up by talking to your tutor or the lecturer that set the question. It must be added that although the general area of the question is obvious, the relevance of the some of the information you gather may not be. It is part of the art of essay writing to decide what information should be used. For the example above, the focus of the essay should be on short term memory, but there could be some mention of long term memory to provide the contrast. However the discussion of long term memory should be kept to a minimum, and the LTM system should only be discussed in terms of its relationship to short term memory

What is being asked?

The next issue to be dealt with when interpreting the question is; "what are you being asked to do with the information you have researched ?". It is important to know initially what is being asked by the question. There are many different types of essay question, but they fall into two main categories; the descriptive and the analytic. The descriptive is merely asking for a description of a certain area, for example the title above should be answered with a full description of the different models of Short Term Memory. Therefore the main objective in answering such a question is to provide a full and comprehensive account of the models of memory within the essay's word limit.

The next type of question is the analytical. Title such as:


demand answers which have a degree of analysis of the topic. It would not be enough to merely describe the different models of memory in an essay like this as that would only partially answer the question. Analytical essay titles ask for a full discussion of the topic; for example, in the above titles, a good answer would outline the different models of STM, and then describe any evidence for the different models. The analysis of the topic would involve discussing the differences between the models, also how well they are supported by the experimental evidence? Do some models explain the experimental results better than others? These questions, although specific to the titles that we have outlined, are typical of the question you should be asking yourself when answering a analytical essay.

As can be seen, the first task of writing an essay is understanding what the title is asking. It should be clear in your mind what the topic area is and what is being asked for, before you start to do research for the essay, never mind start to write. The next section within this guide concerns another area which causes students' problems; structuring the essay.