Surviving an Essay

Essays are always a daunting process, but the stress of an assignment can be easily minimalized if you follow these crucial steps.

It is always best to try your hardest in any type of academic work, whether it's included or not in your overall grade. This is ultimately because if you try your best in an assignment and the assignment is included in your overall grade; you will be at an advantage with the extra marks. The same is true of putting your all into a formative piece of work as you will be able to use this as revision when it comes to the exam period.

It is crucial to stay hydrated, with a glass/bottle of water.

Also, if you feel like you need an extra push to stay concentrated, make an espresso or a large cup of caffeinated filter coffee.

It is really easy to put on a lot of weight when you are revising or doing an assignment, so make sure you're eating the right stuff!

It is crucial to write down the deadlines in your diary or in your phone calendar so that you stay focused on what you need to be primarily focusing on at that point in time.

Additionally, it is paramount to start planning and assembling your essay ideas and information early so you don't have a great rush at the end resulting in sleepless nights.

Gather a list of books or articles you need to get from the library or electronically so that you know that you have to retrieve relevant information. This helps to keep your essay content focused; which also means that you will get extra marks for the inclusion of primary and/or secondary sources. However it is crucial to stress that if you are going to refer to other opinions, sources or author's views - remember to reference!

Once you have assembled all of your information, read carefully through it and make sure you understand the author's argument. This part of the process may take a long time but it completely worth it when you decipher what is relevant to include in your essay argument.

The best way to annotate books if they are borrowed it to use post-it notes because then you are not ruining the book and you can use the post-it notes when you have to return the book. However remember to reference the page which you have either quoted from or summarised.

Any student's nightmare is when the final product or the uncompleted essay disappears from the face of the earth/hard drive - so you must make sure that you back this work up! You can either do this by saving it to your computer hard drive as well as saving a copy to an SSD Card or a USB stick.



Key principle to live by: proofread. You can either do it yourself or get a friend to do it or both! This is such a vital part of your assignment process - it will improve your marks if you correct any spelling errors.