Academic essay writing tips

I started writing this to a class, and it got out of hand, so I just uploaded the whole thing here.

• Reference peer-reviewed resources, and not web-pages. Journals, edited books. The best way to find these is via JSTOR, Google Scholar, or in the University library.
• Be critical, independent-minded, and listen carefully. Read essays two or three times. Start to develop opinions on where you agree and where you disagree, where you see the author’s point and where you don’t. Think about how essays are constructed. Print them off, if that helps. People who write secondary criticism are not mystical gods; they will be wrong about things, make specious points, not know certain things (especially if it’s an older essay), or just be talking plain nonsense. Peer review is a hoop to jump through, not a stamp of intellectual authority (but it’s a convention we pay attention to it.) Use sentences like “Jackson’s contention that Mrs Dalloway is a novel about nuclear physics is true in certain senses, but is more problematic in others”. Listen and question. DIsagree intelligently (i.e. don’t just dismiss things out of hand.)
• Quality over quantity, always. It doesn’t matter too much how many essays you’ve got in your bibliography. The important thing is you’ve related to them, listened to them, and know what’s in them.
• Read the question very carefully. If it has a certain adjective in it, find out where that adjective comes from. If you don’t understand the question, or if it doesn’t make sense, then use that as a creative springboard for your own response.
• If you are having personal difficulties, use these to enrich your response, rather than as obstacles. Bereavement or passionate love or disease are the raw materials of literature. Your personal circumstances can help to slot you into the canon, to understand why writers choose to make strange or confusing decisions.
• Read the primary text many times. Read it from new angles – backwards, if you like. Pick it apart. Try to work out why it jumps or twists or turns.
• Be firm and respectful but also concede to the work of others and to your own limitations. E.g. “I would like to argue that”, but, in conclusion, “My essay has failed to acknowledge…”
• Forget the marks and the nature of the work as an “assignment” and have fun. The best writing emerges from play, from spontaneity, from the sense it is written because you had fun.