This week is also very practical as we systematically looked at the process of writing a good academic essay. Although I have written some essays during middle school and high school, I always felt like I was not taughton how to do that – we kind of just figured our way through, even if the writing pathway we eventually settled on wasn’t necessarily the most productive one.

This week’s lesson was therefore very helpful for me, as I learnt a lot about constructing the skeleton of an essay, which turned out to be much more important than I originally thought. The way I prepared for an essay was quite lazy – I would have a document called “idea bank” and then another document called “actual essay”. In the research document I would note down some links to some articles but never annotate them; having one sentence summarising it was the max that I would do. I am also pretty sure that the order I did my essay was wrong – I would come out with a research question or a thesis myself first before I delve into deeper research. After I construct the thesis, I would also write out some points that I want to make in my essay, and then look for sources that match my ideas. I think this lazy method was able to work for my previous assignments because they were quite simple and generic, which luckily makes the questions I came up with reasonable. But now, I realised that as I step into higher education, I should really change my way of doing it. From the lesson, I learnt that a real good thesis must come from research, not my own head – I have to see what scholars have studied, proposed, and asked, and whether any of this can relate to my interest or experience. I also learnt that a good way of doing this was to construct a ‘network of academic sources’, and choose some from it to make an annotated bibliography, where we summarise, cite, note, and highlight the academic studies.