Posts Tagged ‘essay’
Scholarly credentials
As those of you who follow me on Twitter will know, I’ve been in the process of writing a very large Philosophy essay (by A-level standards) recently and it has got me thinking about the kind of work I will be doing at university as I imagine there will be plenty of similarities. The task is to write four thousand words on one of a small selection of topics and then convert this into one thousand words of notes, and reproduce the essay in exam conditions – on a computer, so with my typing speed this makes the whole activity a complete farce since it will be thoroughly checked and perfected by my teacher and I before knocking out words to convert it into the thousand words of notes ready to be reproduced in a four hour session. Fairly ridiculous for something that words out to be 20% of the A-level as a whole which is more than any of the other individual exams. Everyone in the class is aiming for full marks or very close to that. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy writing the essay itself. I sat down about a month ago and just typed away on a laptop for most of a Sunday (with breaks at various points, making it take up the better part of the day) and, mainly from memory given that we’d discussed the whole thing at such length in class and I’d read various other things, produced the first draft of the essay. What makes the whole thing even more ridiculous is that we had a photocopied chapter of a book that basically answers the very same essay question. I drew ideas and argument order from this but little more though, and cited it where appropriate.
The whole idea of making an interesting essay that illustrated its points and flowed along nicely really appeals to me. What’s also great is that I’d got to the point (with this particular topic only I note) where I was spontaneously quoting from other books and then having to go find the attribution rather than the other way round: searching in those books for something to quote. So I remembered a good way of expressing something and then grabbed a book and started flicking through to find the line in question. I assume that this is what university Philosophy will be like to some extent, reading various sources and bringing together some form of argument. If it is, I very much look forward to it. The problems begin to arise for me when it comes to changing the essay in order to make it more suitable for the exam. I was told that while my content was fine and the essay was elegant it wasn’t structured clearly enough to be marked by an examiner, despite being a good read. So over the past two days I’ve been working on making the argument clearer and clarifying some examples, but in the process I’ve completely overshot my word limit. This has really made the whole exercise seem a lot less worthwhile since I liked (and my teacher liked) what I had originally. But unfortunately I remain stuck in the grip of national exams which I must pass to go where I want to go in October.
So I now wonder how good I actually am at studying a wordy subject, unlike Maths which I am generally happy to just sit down and do. History last year was awful for me because I really didn’t know how much work to do at any one point and I was constantly tied up in wondering how much work to do for exams. But I am really hoping that that will change after this summer. I hope that at university exams really won’t be the constant concern or checking point for everything academic I do and that finally I can be free to explore subjects as fully as possible. I really hope that I can actually become good at being a scholar: reading (at a reasonable speed, which I fail hard at at the moment and this puts me off doing any reading at all) others’ works, working out what is useful, and building something of my own. Someone said to me recently that they thought I’d go down to Oxford and never leave. While I’m not convinced I’m good enough for that, I would now like to just be an academic, a lecturer of some form probably, as a career. There’s nothing that I care about enough other than my subjects to put my lif e towards.