Ready for the Ivy League Challenge?

Transcript

Welcome back to season two of the Ivy League Prep Academy Podcast. Equipping you to successfully pursue the college of your dreams. We believe everyone deserves to reach their full potential, and the admissions process shouldn't hold you back.

Last week we got into more of effective study strategies, and I hope you committed with me to never again use these average student strategies of just opening up your textbook and reading silently. Even if you add the highlighter, it's still mind numbingly boring and very, very ineffective. You'll spend lots and lots of time and learn very, very little, and you'll wonder why you work harder than everyone else but still get grades you're not happy with.

Today I want to talk about essay writing because it is a whole nother animal, right? The strategies and tactics for learning the big ideas and being able to repeat those big ideas on tests that is really, really critical for doing well in high school. And then the second piece that's just so different is this idea of how do you write papers? And it's interesting. As a teacher, I'm shocked at how many people hate when they get an essay for an assignment.

I'm really surprised because if you think about it, you can control so much in an essay on a test. You don't know which questions are going to be pulled out. You don't know what elements might surprise you, and it's all timed and you're by yourself.

There are all these restrictions that, in my mind, would make a test far less exciting and far more worthy of the disdain of the students. And yet more students really detest essay writing compared to test taking. I don't know.

I think it's shocking. In an essay, you have a lot of control over how you present yourself. You can take more time if you need it.

You can talk to people, you can get feedback, you can write before you edit, so you can continually improve that paper. And you know what? Maybe that's part of the issue. Maybe some people feel like they work so hard, they take so much longer to write that essay, but then the grade is still out of their control.

One time they remember hurrying right before the paper was due and just scratching something out, turning it in, and being shocked when the teacher was thrilled with the paper and it got an A. And then another time, they spent two weeks or three weeks every single day going back to that essay, trying to make it better. They turn it in knowing that this is their magnum opus, right? Like this is the greatest thing they've ever written, only to get it back and get a B minus or some really discouraging comments about how they need to redo it.

They didn't understand the prompt or whatever. Okay, I can appreciate that for sure. Of course, tests have some of the same problems.

But let's see if we can talk through some of the issues that can make this a lot easier. And before we dive into my strategies for writing these essays, let me give you one piece of neuroscience that I think is really important to know. Creative thinking and problem solving thinking happen in different pathways in the brain.

And you need to know that, because if you're working on your other homework and then you flip to the essay that you need to write, it's going to take your brain a long time to get out of those. Kind of processes of thinking that are designed for problem solving and into the new processes of thinking that are designed for creativity and articulation. You need to know that, because that's going to be really frustrating if every time right before you write your essay, you do numbers work that's all analytical, and then you try to shift immediately into creative work.

Yeah. You need to know that that transition is going to take some time. All right? So understanding that.

Now you probably know why most professional writers write early in the morning. There's a small percentage of professional writers who write late at night. There's almost none who write during the day.

There are some, but it's infinitissimally small okay. It's a very, very small percentage of great professional writers who write in the middle of the day. Almost all of them write in the morning, and then a smaller subsection write late at night.

The reason for this, I think I don't know. I'm not a professional writer, but in what I've read and what I've learned from professional writers, you need to get into a flow state where you can think more creatively. All right? And that happens early in the morning for some people, it happens late at night, and it rarely happens in the middle of the day when you're distracted with other ideas.

So knowing that, you can hopefully block out some time where you can be completely alone thinking and then getting into this mindset of just being creative and capturing your thoughts and your arguments in a constructive way. So if you want to know how I write an essay, and if you want to borrow anything here that might be helpful for you, I separate my essays into four distinct sections. Number one, research.

Number two, the outline. Number three, writing. And number four, editing.

The first thing that you want to do is the research. And this is where I'm old school, I know, but this is my strategy. And if you can duplicate this digitally without making photocopies, awesome, more power to you.

But this is how I do it. I like to read articles and print them up. I like to read articles and books and photocopy them.

I know it's shocking, and I know that's old school, but I like to do that because what I end up doing is I read through all the arguments for and against and all the different kind of perspectives around this big idea. And then I highlight in different colors evidence that supports different arguments that might show up in my paper. So I may end up with nine or ten or twelve different arguments.

And I know I'm only going to use three or four in my actual paper, but I know what evidence I have. And I can tell at a glance just by looking at my highlighted work. After I've done my research, I can look at a glance and see all the evidence that's there.

If I want to go one step further, I might even cut out the photocopied arguments and paste them onto separate papers. So one paper would be full of short statements that describe the argument and then the source, and then a photocopied and highlighted piece of paper taped on to the bigger piece of paper. All right? So it's just little chunks of paper taped on in order so that I can see the different arguments and I can see the evidence for and against them.

And that just man, it really brings all of the ideas right in front of me, and that allows me to move on to the second stage, which is figuring out my outline. Now, the outline requires creativity. So one of the reasons why you might have gotten an excellent score on the paper that you barely tried with and that you just pushed out at the last minute is because you told a great story, right? You were able to argue something effectively through an effective medium.

You told a great story, perhaps the essay that you worked so hard on but then ended up with a B minus or worse, grade was so hard because you weren't able to overcome the poor storytelling, that you weren't able to overcome the lack of an engaging medium within your essay. And so no matter how hard you tried, you just couldn't overcome the boring story. All right, so one of the things that I like to recommend is that you put a lot of time into the pre writing phase.

So for me, this is at least a day before you begin writing the story. Begin your big thinking. And if it's a bigger paper, you'll probably need more than one day.

You might want two of these days. And then, of course, we've already talked about how your brain needs to get into this creative flow. So pick a time that you can block out.

For most of you, that's going to be early in the morning, but for teenagers, that does happen more frequently at night. It doesn't matter which it is, but pick a time when you can be honestly focused. All right? Don't just choose late at night because you can procrastinate throughout the day.

One of the things that I like to do is go walking, move your body, especially out in nature, see the trees and the water and feel the air against your face. If it's cold, if it's hot, if it's somewhere in between, it doesn't matter. But get out in nature and walk.

Walking and thinking seems to have this magical ability to help you process those thoughts. Or at least it can. And if you need to, if you're someone who needs to speak it out loud you can walk and lecture at the same time.

Okay, lecture to an imaginary classroom and that can be really helpful. Also throughout the day, then. So you begin your day with this kind of thinking time.

And then throughout the day you're going to have little pockets of time, right when you're on the bus or in the car, when you're taking a shower, when you're brushing your teeth, whatever. You'll have five minutes here, eight minutes there. You'll have blocks of time where you can revisit that story and then just kind of mentally go through the arguments and think about what is more convincing, what's more compelling.

And then finally, after you've had time to think this through, you'll begin your outline. I would argue that the outline happens separately from the research, separately from the writing and separately from the editing. So I've already done the research.

I've got all the arguments in different colors on different pages in front of me, on my desk. I've done my outline. I can put together those arguments and create this story that just makes sense with all of the evidence there.

And then I stop because the next day, or it can be three or four days later, it doesn't matter. But the next work session is going to be my writing. And yes, I can spend time thinking and rearranging in my brain all of the different elements.

But the writing happens again in one big sitting. I sit down and I've blocked out. This time I can focus.

I'm by myself without distractions and I get the writing done in one go. Shocking. But if you've done this preparation, you can.

And then I'm done. And then finally, it's the editing. I do have a rule and I learned this rule from Cal Newport who has written several books about study strategies and about doing excellent work.

He's fantastic. But his rule that I adopted is for every 10% of your final grade that the paper is worth. Talk to another person about your paper, get his or her feedback and refine accordingly.

And that works during the outline stage and during the editing stage. Once you have written the paper, then you can go back and you can rearrange. You can edit, you can improve.

You can do all those things in the next major sitting. And sometimes that's going to take two. I do like to finish all of the editing at least a day or two before I turn it in so that I can print it out.

I can read it out loud. If I read it out loud, I'm going to find things that I don't find if I only read it silently, and I want to have one last run through right before I turn it in, that's at least 24 to 48 hours after my last kind of run through, right? I want to finish and then let it sit, and my eyes don't see it, and I don't think about it that much for a day or two, and then I come back and reread it because I might catch things again that I wouldn't have caught otherwise. Someone else can be that final run through as well.

You can give it to your best friend or someone else who has helped you with your thoughts or helped you through this process. But that is how I like to do essays. This helps us overcome some of the biggest problems with essays, which are, look, this is the time for writing my essay, but my brain just doesn't get into this mode.

And now it's 02:00 A.m. And I'm staring blankly at my screen with nothing to say and no ideas. Yeah, that can be infuriating.

That can be frustrating. Of course, who wouldn't feel overwhelmed and frustrated by that? But if you break down the different sections, there's four different distinct parts to an excellent essay, and you do those four distinct parts on different days, do not under any I mean, never put yourself in a position where you have to double up on those days. Get started at least four days early so that you can do each of those four sections on four separate days.

And if you do that, you'll begin to enjoy your essays. You'll begin to recognize that you can do outstanding work. You can make outstanding arguments and have excellent evidence for those arguments, as long as you do things in the right order and give yourself time in between.

So if you already have a strategy that works really well, continue to use your strategy and just add whatever I've given you to that strategy so you can improve it even more. But if you hate essays, then listen and relisten and take notes on this podcast. Adopt this strategy fully and watch yourself improve.

You'll be amazed. Essays should be wonderful, they should be exciting, and you should be really confident that you can create a compelling and interesting argument in your paper. As long as you follow the right strategy at the right time, you can write better essays, and you can do them faster when you follow the strategy.