If you’ve been practicing taking research memos, if you’ve been looking at our feedback and thinking about what I or the TAs have said, you are already 9/10s of the way to writing an essay that can critically examine some issue, backed up with meaningful scholarly insight.
Yes! It’s true!
An ’essay’ - literally, ‘something you try’ where you explain a concept to yourself or someone else - is a pedagogical exercise for your mind. Right now, for you, the point of an essay is the doing of it, not the byproduct-of-it-having-been-done (ie, a stack of paper that someone else might read). And frankly, until you’ve had more experience in dialogue with scholarly literature, digesting it, making sense of it, I don’t think you’re ready for an essay.
What’s more, the instrumentalization of higher education means that for too many people, such things are regarded as hurdles to jump in order to get a grade. A grade then translates into a better chance at a job. In which case, a rationale response is in fact to use some kind of machine to generate an essay to jump over the hurdle, right? So I haven’t assigned you an essay because the pedagogical value of that kind of exercise, right now, at this stage in your scholarly development, would get lost in the noise of instrumentalization. This is why we’re going with an Exit Ticket instead.
But, here’s how we’d do an essay if we were
- I’d have all of my research memos in something like Obsidian that allows me to create links between ideas. (If you want to see what that’s like, you can try a webapp I build called PKM WebNotes).
- I’d read through my notes and search for connections. I would make those connections using Obsidian’s wiki-linking ability (we’ll actually practice this kind of thing in class).
- I’d examine the resulting visualization of connected ideas to see what thoughts might emerge from my research memos
- I’d look for pathways in my notes between interesting ideas
- I’d arrange each research memo in sequence along those paths
- I’d write the connecting tissue, the literary flourishes, that explain the connections.
So why not give that a try for your next class? I think there’s a lot of value in the discipline that crafting an essay requires. And if you’ve learned to make research memos, you will never be at a loss for what to write. The last minute panic of a deadline won’t happen, because you’ve already done all your thinking as a habit, as part of your scholarly reading apparatus.
Make your own luck
That is my hope, my goal, for you. Look, I’ve been doing this scholar-schtick for almost thirty years now. I do it because I get a buzz out of making the connections, finding the why, the how, and the meaning, behind the things I see in the world. If you can do that too, you’ll never have to rely on luck or tricks to get the job etc: you make your own luck by making yourself ready for it.