It’s essay time, and that means students everywhere are tearing out their hair and binge-eating while staring at a blank page.
Sometimes, it just feels like essays exist to weed out the weak-willed, or to give professors and TAs something to evil-laugh about at night. The thing is, essays should be about quality, not technical aspects.
What’s the point of a 10-page essay? What’s the point of any word count at all? If a student can get their point across effectively, the number of words or pages shouldn’t matter.
Personally, I think it’s more difficult to condense information and make a good summary of it than it is to go on about the same thing. When I’m writing an essay, I always feel like 20 per cent of what I’m writing is good information, 50 per cent is me using a thesaurus so I can say the same thing over again, and 20 per cent is complete nonsense. The other 10 per cent is footnotes.
That brings us to the bibliography and citations. Goodness, there are enough rules to drive a person crazy with rules changing from subject to subject. The craziest thing about all of it is that it shouldn’t even matter.
In the real world, no one cares about which company published the book you found that quote in. And people definitely do not care if you put the publisher’s name before the year of publication, or if it’s underlined, or italicized, or circled in red pen. Bibliographical formats are just nonsense that someone made up.
And yes, perhaps somewhere, someone possibly has a real use for their preferred version of the bibliography. But for the most part it is a waste of time. Because really, it has nothing to do with the information that is presented in the essay.
I’m not saying we should be taking credit for other people’s work. Yes, indicate that you borrowed this idea from another person, or that you read about that idea in a study. But how you express that information shouldn’t be judged as part of your mark, and it shouldn’t be a huge, stress-inducing ordeal.
“If you want to know more about where the book I used was published or when that website was last updated, you can go find it and check for yourself,” is something I’d love to say to a professor but never would and now I’m a bit terrified that maybe a professor will read this.
The fact is, the essay format is not the only way to present information and it’s not always the best way either. After university, there are few jobs that require academic writing formats.
After university, the years of perfecting the craft of writing an essay go right out the window. Think of all the classes, since elementary school, that have been spent learning about thesis statements and bibliography formats. Think of all the more useful things we could have learned. Seriously, think about all the things.
Really, the important thing should be to teach students how to find good information, and how to concisely present it. Because in the real world, what’s important is being able to differentiate valuable info from nonsense. In the real world, no one has the patience to listen to your 10, 000 word babbling.
