Essays: Two Ways to Cut the Waffle and Make Your Essay Clearer

So, you’ve finished your essay! 
Before you burn all your notes, though, you might want to read on. It’s possible to write a really great essay and not get a very good mark. It could be for one of a few reasons:

• you’ve written a lot and not said much
• your work isn’t clearly signposted for the reader
• you haven’t presented your essay correctly

Below, we’ll go through how to deal with the first two bullet points, and then I’ll cover the third later.

How to Cut the Waffle

Image credit: Parkerman & Christie (Flickr)

No, no, not that kind of waffle.

waffle (verb): to talk or write a lot without saying anything important or interesting.

Source: Merriam-Webster online dictionary

This is exactly what people do in essays: they write a lot without saying very much - or, they just say the same things over and over again. It happens to all of us: even with the most detailed plan in the world, it’s easy to slip and repeat yourself, or go too far from the question and talk about things which are interesting but not important to the topic. It’s also something that is very easy to spot as a proofreader. I can tell straight away when someone hasn’t fully understood the question, or just hasn’t read their work before sending it to me. That means, though, that good news is that you can spot your own waffle, too. Just by leaving the essay for a few days after you’ve written it, you can go back and see where you’ve repeated yourself, or talked about irrelevant things. 

Two Ways to Get Rid of Waffle

• Print it off. It’s so much easier to read an essay (or an academic journal) if you’ve got the paper in front of you. I think it’s because you can involve more senses as you work: you can feel the paper (a bit like the difference between e-readers and paper books that people often talk about) and, importantly, you can physically highlight phrases and add notes to the paper. Obviously, you could do this on a computer, too but, for me, there’s something about having the paper there that makes it all so much easier.
• Be critical of each paragraph. I don’t mean be critical in a negative way, but take each paragraph, highlight each point that you’ve made and explain to yourself how it fits into the paragraph. If you can’t prove what your point adds to the paragraph, it needs to be deleted - or maybe you’ll find it fits better elsewhere. And then you can do the same with paragraph. Explain to yourself how it adds to the overall argument you’re making. Perhaps you’ll find it doesn’t add anything, or maybe that your argument isn’t in the most logical order. 

How to Make Your Essay Marker Like You

No, I’m not suggesting you should bribe your lecturer with cash or gifts, but there are definitely ways you can make their lives easier. We’ve talked previously about how an essay is a bit like a story - with a beginning, a middle and an end - and stories generally take the reader on a journey through someone’s life or experiences. In the same way, your essay should take the reader on a journey, too. Journeys are also usually signposted (with a map or road signs) and, guess what? Yup, your essay needs to be, too. 

Signposting your essay means explaining to the reader what you’re going to discuss (maybe you’re going to concentrate on the use of visual imagery in Dante’s Paradiso), and how you’re going to discuss it (through comparing and contrasting two specific portions of the poem, for example) in the introduction. Although this seems like the kind of thing you should decide before you start writing your essay, it’s common (and perfectly normal) to slightly change the way you answer the question as you go through your plan and perhaps think of different links you can make between the material. It’s much easier to write the introduction at the end, when you know what you’ve written already. You should also briefly mention why you’ve chosen the topic (and not just because you were set the question by your tutor!): perhaps studying Charles Dickens’ work gives us a better idea of the life of the poor in Victorian England, or maybe studying various media responses to the 9/11 terrorist attacks shows us how easily the news can be manipulated, which can also be applied to current world issues. 

Things you should include in your introduction:

• A definition of the key terms of the question. What do you understand to mean by Dante’s ‘visual imagery’? How will this affect how you write your essay? What will you concentrate on?

Things you should not do in your introduction:

• Give a summary of the plot (if you’re writing about literature). You can assume the reader knows what happens in Le petit prince if they’re reading your essay about it. 
• Give a complete biography of the author’s life (for the same reasons as above). The only exception to this is if some aspect of the author’s life is relevant to the essay question, obviously.

Signposting your essay also means making the most of linking sentences between your paragraphs, using phrases such as “Another way in which this is demonstrated…”, or “Dante’s use of visual imagery is also important because…”. 

You should also make a big effort to make sure that each point you make within the paragraph is linked back to the question. How is this relevant? What does this tell us? This is especially true when quoting critics. It’s all too easy to copy what someone has written in a book and leave it. The marker is interested in your thoughts on the topic, though.

In the conclusion, you should summarise what you’ve explored and how this links back to the question. I try and sum it up in one sentence at the end so that my opinions are the last thing that the marker is left with. Avoid the temptation to cram extra things in that you haven’t mentioned in your essay into your conclusion. If you haven’t mentioned it already, don’t talk about it in the conclusion!

The most important thing to remember when tackling waffle and trying to signpost your essay is that it’s the lecturer’s job to set essay questions. They (generally!) know how much there is to write about the topic they’ve set, and will give you a word count that’s the right length. If you set your own question, they usually go through it with you to make sure it will make a good essay. So that means that if you’re finding that you don’t have enough words to fill the word count (which is one big reason why people waffle), you probably haven’t explored the question enough. 

COMING NEXT WEEK: 
Essays: The Two Ps of Essay Writing

DON'T MISS OUT on our "Essay Writing" series and many more! 
Click subscribe for weekly reminders and blogs.

Don't delay! LIKE us on Facebook or FOLLOW us on Twitter, and we'll make sure you get all of our free support and advice along with information on other services we offer.

Look right for the links ---- >