Reddit reviews Writing Essays: A guide for students in English and the humanities

How have you approached your other essays? Did you do them last minute, slow and steadily, or in bursts? How did you do?

If you've ever written anything at the last minute, you'll probably have faced the feeling of "oh bugger, this is actually really interesting, I wish I had more time to explore x y and z, and when I wasn't struggling to stay awake". Be nice to yourself by giving yourself as much time as you still can within reason, and trying not to put yourself through that.

Know how you work as an individual and if you don't neatly fit the boxes in guides, do what works for you.

Just write down your thoughts on what you've researched so far: if some of it's essay paragraphs, if some of it's bullet points, and other bits pasted quotations, that's okay. You just need to make a start and start getting used to the little world of the topic, writing about it and researching further when you see you need to. Don't get hung up on structure, you can tidy that up later when you've got more comfortable with the work.

Do a bibliography early and keep track of it as you go along. Add books you've used and get the referencing format the tutors want. Record your sources. It's awful trying to find where something was from weeks later. Finer points of referencing (all the full stops and commas in the right place, attributes in the right order; how do you reference a graph from a blog anyway) is something you can re-check and tidy when you're stalled or a bit tired.

You'll have written this much in wordcount over 3 or 4 termly essays before, it's definitely possible.

This book is very good on constructing arguments: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Writing-Essays-students-English-humanities-ebook/dp/B0171ZQSZM/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

People have certainly got firsts on dissertations done in less than a month. Not everyone does, but it's possible.