A Cook's Guide to Writing Essays

Kitchen Emergency

We’ve all been there. Your date is coming round for dinner, and somehow — maybe you’ve had too many essay deadlines — you haven’t had a chance to go to the market. You look at your watch. Two hours to go. Then you look in the cupboard to see what you can make. There’s not much in there. It’s all a bit depressing. But there’s nothing else for it. So you grab a few things to throw together into something like a meal, and hope for the best. You chop and fry and stew and braise, and by the time you have finished, you still have ten minutes to spare.

You taste your food. It is not exactly terrible. But it isn’t tasty either. It’s just… bland. You stand in the kitchen, not sure what to do. Your date is arriving soon. You run to the balcony, where you remember you have a few neglected herbs. They are dry and shrivelled, but you pull off a few stalks anyway. You come back into the kitchen, and have another look in the cupboard. There’s an old jar of spices that you haven’t used for years. You throw some spices and some herbs on top of the dish. You taste the dish again. It is still bland, though the herbs and spices help a little. Maybe, you think, you need some more garnish. You get a cucumber from the fridge and cut it into slices to put on top. It looks okay. But it can’t disguise the fact that the dish doesn’t have much flavour.

There’s a knock on the door. It’s your date. You look at the food you have made, and take a deep breath. It could be worse. You’ve managed to salvage something. But it’s not ideal.

You go to answer the door…

Garnish and Ingredients

What has gone wrong? Obviously, lack of preparation. If you’d had more time — if it hadn’t been for all those essay deadlines — you would have gone to the market, and prepared properly. That’s one thing. But the other problem goes a bit deeper. It is that you have got your process back to front.

You have thrown a few things together — hoping for the best, without much thought for tastiness. You haven’t really thought through your ingredients and how to best use them.

And then — because not you have got to the end, the final dish doesn’t seem that great — you have sprinkled on some extra bits and pieces as garnish, to try to cover up the fact that your dish is really not as good as it should be.

Cooking a Tasty Essay

Of course, this little blog isn’t really about cooking at all. It is about essay writing.

When writing an essay, it can be easy to feel pressed for time, like our poor harassed chef in the example above. You want to get started right away, to put some ideas down on paper, to throw together whatever ingredients you have to hand in the hope that your essay will be “tasty”, or pleasing to the reader.

Then, when you get to the end, you realise that you need to add in a few references. So you quickly go online, grab a few references that you think fit, and sprinkle them over your essay, the way you might add garnish to a not particularly tasty dish.

But the trouble with this approach is that however much garnish you throw on top of your dish — however many extra references you sprinkle over the top of the essay at the last minute — you are never going to disguise the fact that the dish itself just isn’t very well-cooked.

So what should you do? The first thing you need to do, if you care about writing tasty essays, is to stop thinking about your references as garnish, and start thinking about them are ingredients. They are not just things you add in at the end. They are an integral part of the dish.

So, when it comes to writing an essay, once you have thought a bit about the question you are going to answer, the first thing to do is not to start writing.

Instead, you need to go to the market and see what ingredients might help you address this question. Which market should you go to? Try the global marketplace of ideas, where scholars and thinkers and writers come to trade their ideas. Go to JSTOR. Go to Project Muse. Go to Perlego.

As you don’t quite know what you want to cook yet — what products are in season, what you might find in the market when you start looking — this initial visit to the market can be quite exploratory. Fill your bag with lots of things that seem good and nourishing. Don’t worry, at first, about what you are going to cook. Just see what ingredients are out there.

When you have a nice, full bag, you can drag it all home and then take a break, have a cup of tea, and start thinking about what you might make. Look at the question again. Look at your ingredients. Read through the things you have collected or downloaded. And as you do this, plenty of ideas will start to crop up about what kind of essay you could cook up.

Make a few notes. Maybe you need some more ingredients. That’s fine. You can always head back to the market and pick up a couple of extra things. Perhaps you’re not going to use all the ingredients you have brought back. That’s fine too. They’ll keep. And a good cook doesn’t throw everything in just because it’s there. So you don’t have to use all your ingredients right away, or in this particular essay. Put them somewhere safe — a store cupboard, or a folder on your hard drive — and they may be useful later.

By now, your ideas should be taking shape. You are familiar with your ingredients. You have thought about the question. You have a sense of what would make a really tasty essay. So now, if you like, you can head into the kitchen, and get to work. You can start writing. You can start to mix together your own ideas and insights, and those of the writers whom you have been reading. You can use these ingredients you have gathered to start to build a really rich and flavoursome argument, and a really compelling essay.

Serving suggestions

If you follow this process, you will write better, tastier essays. It is almost guaranteed.

Instead of this:

Write first → put in references later

Do this:

Gather and read relevant materials first → write later

Referencing is not about garnish. It is about having the ingredients, the raw materials, you need to cook up a delicious dish.

And if you have tasty enough ingredients, the dish doesn’t need any garnish. But if, at the last moment, you want to find a final quote to use as an epigraph, or to add a bit more colour to your text — the way you might put a cherry on the top of a cake, so it looks nice — nobody is going to object.

Good luck in your writing!