Essay Writing - Part One

This is an important part of nearly every subject you study, and can help out with simple note-taking as well. Below are sectiosn from a pack I was given when we were writing out photography personal study, but it applies for all subjects. Just skip over parts that are purely subject-based. I'll have to type it into parts, so bear with me. Or, you can download the entire pack from here.

Essay Writing
Essay writing is an essential skill when articulating your thoughts and ideas. No matter how good an image maker you are, youw ill need to articulate and explain your ideas through words, whether verbally or written.

Listening and Taking Notes
The first port of call for writing an essay is listening in class. Take notes, a lesson is an interactive experience, even when the teacher is giving a long lecture. The more engaged you are, the more you will get out of it, and the easiest way of doing this is to take notes. Writing while you listen is a key skill; it enables you to remember and absorb more of what you are hearing, which generally improves your memory. When taking notes, flag up any interesting points, or things you would like to know more about. Leave spaces and questions for parts that you missed, or didn't understand. Ask the tutor to fill these points in, or expand on them. Talk to your classmates later to see how they write their notes. NEVER be afraid to ask when you don't know.

Why Reading Helps Understanding Images.
It may not be immediately evident how one can 'apply' a particular piece of reading - a theorectical text, a cultural analysis etc - to a set of pictures, or footage, or media layout. But it is always true that the more you know, the more you can see. What, exactly, we see depends on our viewpoint, and this changes the object we think we are seeing. The job of artists, scholars and critics is to interpret historical events and to evaluate what they really mean, what they appear to mean, and what they can be made to mean, from different viewpoints in culture.

How To Read
We all think we know how to read, but reading with an essay in mind requires preparation and concentration. Again, note-taking is essential. After the fifth book or article, few people will remember the first unless they've made notes. Copy out quotations you find striking or illuminating, note the details of images as you find them. Come equipped with post-it notes and index cards. Get used to carrying a book; read it on the bus or over coffee. Read a newspaper, ideally one with arts coverage and in-depth articles. Keep pen and paper with you so you can jot down ideas and references as you go. Get a decent dictionary and look up words that you don't know, and write them down as you go. The complete Oxford English Dictionary will also tell you when a word was first used, and what it meant then. Use the Dictionary of National Biography, or the Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought to find out the correct names of people and the definitions of more complicated terms such as Modernism or Industrialisation. These methods are probably quicker than looking them up on the Internet. only use the references from the Internet from reliable sources such as University websites or Google Scholar