Acing The Essay
Acing the essay: tips for the writtens
Monday, 17 March 2008
I’ve always had a literary mind set, unlike many of my colleagues my background prior to medicine was more arts than sciences, but I truly think that the essay is one of the easiest places to pick up marks on the writtens.
How does the essay work? Basically you get given a quote and you’re supposed to write an essay in response to that quote. The College guidelines give a decent idea of what they’re looking for and you really need to read these a couple of times.
An ability to write well is useful but not essential to do well. More important than ability to use fancy words or write brilliant prose is the importance of structuring things well.
The first level of structure is common to all essays; have a beginning, a middle and an end. As one of my university lecturers once said, in the introduction you tell them what you’re going to say, in the middle you say it and in the conclusion you tell them what you said. So, the first important tip is; You must have some idea of what you’re going to do. To do this you should spend a decent chunk of your reading time planning what you’re going to say. I aimed to have at least two paragraphs arguing in support of the statement and one arguing against it, or vice versa depending on the topic on the day.
A decent chunk of the marks for the essay come from an ability to place psychiatry in a broader societal context. Which leads to the next important part of structuring the essay - follow a plan to make sure you cover sufficient breadth. I made up a mnemonic to help remind me of this – HELP. (Apt huh?) Which stood for History, Ethics/Economics, Literature and Popular Press/Popular Opinion. If you can draw in references to at least some of those topics you should do well.
Finally reading widely and very broadly can help in itself. In my case, I lucked in with the essay- the quote they used was from an author I was familiar with so I was able to draw in some references to that.
To give you a worked example, I can briefly discuss how I handled the essay on my written paper. The quote was from a Peter Goldsworthy novel and went something like: the days of the talking cure, self knowledge as liberation, are numbered. I started with definitions, what is meant by the ‘talking cure’, what do they mean by self knowledge and liberation from what? Then I went on to discuss in the body how this view might have arisen, (i.e. popular press, economics, ethical considerations), what evidence there was for the effectiveness of psychotherapy, a little bit about the history of psychotherapy as treatment in the premedication days and concluded why I thought psychotherapy was still relevant. Luckily South Australian parochialism (where I went to med school) is strong and I actually knew who Peter Goldsworthy was and was able to finish off with a reference to the fact that he was a medical practitioner.
In summary, plan out what you’re going to say, have some idea of basic grammar, do a couple of practice papers if you’re “no good” at writing and hope for the best. Good luck.
Ingrid Butterfield