– an owl mid flight I saw last summer. try drawing it.
“You should have failed this class. I’m going to make accommodations so that no student can pass next semester the same way you did.”
This is what my Ancient History II professor told me when my group and I got our final group project essay handed out. Every group would have an interview with her to get feedback on the essays and ideally congratulate students. We did get really good feedback on the essay.
She loved the essay, but while giving that feedback she almost was exclusively looking at my friend sitting on my left. Then she looked at me, and told me to thank my friend because he obviously carried me through the essay and that I should’ve failed her class so next semester the final essay would be individual.
She was kind of right
Although it was an embarrassing moment for me, I don’t blame her. What she saw was me arriving late or even sleeping through class. I’ve always had trouble staying awake when sitting in lectures ever since kindergarten. I’ve been kicked out of classes for sleeping more times than I can count. And my friend was the complete opposite: he was active in class and had no issues with arriving in time since he lived right next to the campus.
But my writing carried me anyways
On the other hand, she was oblivious to the fact that I had written that essay almost entirely by myself while my friend was copiloting a bit on the side or sleeping while I kept writing until 6am. I was the one that read and re-read the full bibliography we used for the essay. I was the one that proposed the thesis and the main ideas. I was the one that structured the essay. What she praised was my writing.
The single most important thing
In Spanish we have a saying: “Irse por las ramas” (to go/leave through the branches). It describes when people deviate from the topic and discuss irrelevant stuff. It has this implicit analogy that there’s a central trunk, with branches you traverse through, but that you should always be coming back to the central trunk. For every successful essay I wrote, I identified the central trunk first.
Before writing anything you should know what you are going write about. Seems kind of obvious but the natural impulse I’ve seen is to write similar to how we speak: without further thinking ahead for more than a moment. But the cool thing about writing is that it’s not immediate, so you have all the time to think ahead. Before you even start writing you should have decided these two things:
1. Theme
The trunk is the theme you will be writing about. This helps you ground your ideas and not get lost in the weeds. Reader attention is key, and if you don’t keep it focused on the theme, readers will either get lost on what you are trying to convey or worse: get bored.
Examples:
a) This post’s theme is essay/non-fiction writing
b) Here the theme is brainrot and vacations
c) Here the theme is how SOLID and Clean Code are presented
2. Thesis (optional):
The thesis is what you want to say about the topic. You will not always have one, but if you don’t have one make that a conscious decision. If there’s an opinion there always a thesis. But theses can also be implicit throughout the text.
For example in my latest post there’s an implicit thesis that reading, maths, nature and socializing are a cure to brainrot. An example of a post of mine that doesn’t have a thesis is this post where I share my earliest memories that supposedly I shouldn’t be able to remember.
As a rule of thumb, if what you are going to write is exclusively expository, narrative, descriptive, functional / transactional; then it’s possible that you don’t have a thesis. But even then make it a conscious decision because even the forms I described above can carry an implicit thesis.
Support the most important thing
Now that you have decided what you’ll be writing, make sure everything you write is in line with that. Think of it as a hierarchy where the Theme/Thesis is at the top and then you have the arguments that support your thesis. For longform writing I like to think of arguments as further mini-theses that in turn can be supported by more arguments and so on.
Arguments can be supported by:
Evidence / facts — verifiable statements
Data & statistics — quantified evidence
Expert testimony / authority — citing someone credible
Quotations & citations — letting a source speak directly
Anecdotes / personal experience — a lived instance
Case studies — one example examined in depth
Analogies & comparisons — explaining via something familiar
Cause-and-effect reasoning — showing the mechanism
Definitions — pinning down a term the argument depends on
Hypotheticals / thought experiments — invented scenarios to test a claim
Concessions — granting a limit, which strengthens credibility
Counter-arguments & rebuttals — raising the objection, then answering it
Visuals — charts, diagrams, images (medium-dependent)
AND SO MUCH MORE. BE BOLD
Arguments are the branches that make the tree a tree, and further down you sprinkle leaves and fruits (elements that support arguments) that make it a cool tree.
The second most important thing
Theses and arguments are irrelevant if they are not read. So the second most important thing when writing is how you present it.
What kind of tree are you drawing?
To come back to the tree analogy. Some readers enjoy figs, others, apples, and even pineapples (which don’t grow on trees unfortunately). You must make sure that the tree that you draw in your essay is the one that your reader is expecting and will actually read from top to bottom. You do that by designing the characteristics of your tree. Height, branch structure, the type of leaf; they all define the tree. When you write be conscious about the structure of what you are writing.
Write for your audience
Every discipline and community has its own writing culture. There’s abstract concepts and writing styles that you need to get used to if you want your audience to enjoy your writing.
In history I noticed that articles tended to be introduced with some narrative that illustrated the central idea, then consolidated it through arguments that were in turn exemplified by historical facts and narrative, in order to end up explicitly stating the conclusion at the end. (This is a huge simplification but you get the idea). So for my essays I followed the same structure that the required reading had. That way I made sure that professors would like the style and pace.
Structure it in waves
I rarely hike, but when I do the trails I enjoy aren’t the ones that only climb, a few drops and downward slopes here and there are deeply appreciated. They make the trail even more beautiful and give me moments to rest my sore muscles while still moving.
In modern Educational Sociology and Linguistics of Learning there are two core pillars that translate this perfectly to how people read and learn: Nominalization and Semantic Waves.
Nominalization: A grammatical process that transforms actions (verbs) or qualities (adjectives) into abstract nouns. Example: from “water evaporates” to “evaporation”.
Semantic Waves: A profile or graph that describes how a teacher’s discourse shifts dynamically between abstract/complex and concrete/everyday meanings.
If you are interested in this stuff you can learn more about semantic waves by looking up Legitimation Code Theory (Karl Maton), and nominalization from systemic functional linguistics (Halliday)
Knowledge has to be packed and unpacked. And in order to do that we increase and decrease the complexity in semantic waves. One key tool for packing is Nominalization, that helps the reader pack the knowledge they’ve received into a concept to be stored in memory. But if you only speak in tightly packed abstract concepts students get lost. And thus you drop down in abstraction and teach through examples, stories, images, that help students digest the contents.
You can’t keep a high flatline because then students will mostly memorize buzzwords but lack understanding. You can’t keep a low flatline because students will understand and enjoy class but will fail to develop the formal academic language required for higher learning and more abstract concepts. What you need is a wave.
The same goes for readers. Your writing should be mixing both the abstract and the concrete in waves that keep the reader engaged and (if it applies) learning.
How writing carried me through Contemporary History II too
If I had a nickel for every time I heard a professor tell me I should’ve failed their class for only passing through essays and reading materials, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
The second time I was almost failed this way was during an Contemporary History oral exam. Similar story. This time I got perfect score both on the final essay and on the oral questions regarding the course bibliography, but I was complete disaster on content exclusively discussed in lectures. Same reason as in Ancient History II: falling asleep, arriving late, and also I’d add my awful note-taking habits, terrible social skills to study in groups, and lacking capacity to remember or even pay attention to what I hear.
Reading and writing skillz
Note: “History Learning” or “Aprendizaje Histórico” was one of the most pleasant surprises of all the curriculum. Shoutout to Prof. Rodrigo Henriquez. This should be the first class taught in undergrad history. I only took it as an elective 3 years into the degree.
All this to say that reading and writing is what carried me through my History degree. And if it wasn’t for the reading and writing skills I learned there I wouldn’t even be a Data Engineer today, so I’m grateful for those years in university. The writing advise above is a summary of what I learned during essay writing workshops, “History Learning” classes, and obviously practice.
I have a confession to make
The structure of this post is a bit of a miss for me. Sorry about that. I wanted to write a short post about writing non-fiction but it turned out to be a bit longer than expected and I need to get to work now. I hope you enjoyed it.