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Jordan-Peterson-Essay Writing Guide

Unit 1: short fiction i, ap english literature and composition, university of toronto schools - toronto-on, recommended for you, students also viewed.

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Dr. jordan peterson’s, essay writing guide, you can use this word document to write an excellent essay, from beginning to end, using a ten-step process. most of the, time, students or would-be essay writers are provided only, with basic information about how to write, and most of that, information concentrates on the details of formatting. these, are necessary details, but writing is obviously far more than, mere formatting. if you write your essay according to this, plan, and you complete every step, you will produce an essay, that is at least very good. you will also learn exactly how to, write an essay, which is something very valuable to learn., to start writing your essay, go to the next page, for part one:, introduction., jordan b peterson, part one: introduction.

What is an essay?

An essay is a relatively short piece of writing on a particular topic. However, the word essay also means attempt or try. An essay is, therefore, a short piece written by someone attempting to explore a topic or answer a question.

Why bother writing an essay?

Most of the time, students write essays only because they are required to do so by a classroom instructor. Thus, students come to believe that essays are important primarily to demonstrate their knowledge to a teacher or professor. This is simply, and dangerously, wrong (even though such writing for demonstration may be practically necessary).

The primary reason to write an essay is so that the writer can formulate and organize an informed, coherent and sophisticated set of ideas about something important.

Why is it important to bother with developing sophisticated ideas, in turn? It’s because there is no difference between doing so and thinking, for starters. It is important to think because action based on thinking is likely to be far less painful and more productive than action based upon ignorance. So, if you want to have a life characterized by competence, productivity, security, originality and engagement rather than one that is nasty, brutish and short, you need to think carefully about important issues. There is no better way to do so than to write. This is because writing extends your memory, facilitates editing and clarifies your thinking.

You can write down more than you can easily remember, so that your capacity to consider a number of ideas at the same time is broadened. Furthermore, once those ideas are written down, you can move them around and change them, word by word, sentence by sentence, and paragraph by paragraph. You can also reject ideas that appear substandard, after you consider them more carefully. If you reject substandard ideas, then all that you will have left will be good ideas. You can keep those, and use them. Then you will have good, original ideas at your fingertips, and you will be able to organize and communicate them.

Consider your success over the course of a lifetime. Here is something to think about: the person who can formulate and communicate the best argument almost always wins. If you want a job, you have to make a case for yourself. If you want a raise, you have to convince someone that you deserve it. If you are trying to convince someone of the validity of your idea, you have to debate its merits successfully, particularly if there are others with other competing ideas.

If you sharpen your capacity to think and to communicate as a consequence of writing, you are better armed. The pen is mightier than the sword, as the saying goes. This is no cheap cliché. Ideas change the world, particularly when they are written. The Romans built

reference material on one screen, and your essay (or even two versions of your essay, side by side) on the other.

Having this extra visual real estate really matters. It will make you less cramped and more efficient. A good keyboard (such as the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic keyboard) is also an excellent investment. Standard keyboards will hurt your hands if you use them continually, and the less said about a notebook keyboard the better. Use a good mouse, as well, and not a touchpad, which requires too much finicky movement for someone who is really working. Set up the keyboards so you are looking directly at their centers when you are sitting up straight. Use a decent chair, and sit so that your feet can rest comfortably on the floor when your knees are bent 90 degrees. These are not trivial issues. You may spend hours working on your writing, so you have to set up a workspace that will not annoy you, or you will have just one more good reason to avoid your tasks and assignments.

A note on use of time

People’s brains function better in the morning. Get up. Eat something. You are much smarter and more resilient after you have slept properly and ate. There is plenty of solid research demonstrating this. Coffee alone is counter-productive. Have some protein and some fat. Make a smoothie with fruit and real yogurt. Go out and buy a cheap breakfast, if necessary. Eat by whatever means necessary. Prepare to spend between 90 minutes and three hours writing. However, even 15 minutes can be useful, particularly if you do it every day.

Do not wait for a big chunk of free time to start. You will never get big chunks of free time ever in your life, so don’t make your success dependent on their non-existent. The most effective writers write every day, at least a bit.

Realize that when you first sit down to write, your mind will rebel. It is full of other ideas, all of which will fight to dominate. You could be looking at Facebook, or Youtube, or watching or reading online porn, or cleaning the dust bunnies from under your bed, or rearranging your obsolete CD collection, or texting an old flame, or reading a book for another course, or getting the groceries you need, or doing the laundry, or having a nap, or going for a walk (because you need the exercise), or phoning a friend or a parent – the list is endless. Each part of your mind that is concerned with such things will make its wants known, and attempt to distract you. Such pesky demons can be squelched, however, with patience. If you refuse to be tempted for fifteen minutes (25 on a really bad day) you will find that the clamor in your mind will settle down and you will be able to concentrate on writing. If you do this day after day, you will find that the power of such temptations do not reduce, but the duration of their attempts to distract you will decrease. You will also find that even on a day where concentration is very difficult, you will still be able to do some productive writing if you stick it out.

Don’t kid yourself into thinking you will write for six hours, either. Three is a maximum, especially if you want to sustain it day after day. Don’t wait too late to start your writing, so

you don’t have to cram insanely, but give yourself a break after a good period of sustained concentration. Three productive hours are way better than ten hours of self-deceptive non- productivity, even in the library.

All of the paragraphs have to be arranged in a logical progression, from the beginning of the essay to the end. This is the fourth level of resolution. Perhaps the most important step in writing an essay is getting the paragraphs in proper order. Each of them is a stepping stone to your essay’s final destination.

The fifth level of resolution is the essay, as a whole. Every element of an essay can be correct, each word, sentence, and paragraph – even the paragraph order – and the essay can still fail, because it is just not interesting or important. It is very hard for competent but uninspired writers to understand this kind of failure, because a critic cannot merely point it out. There is no answer to their question, “exactly where did I make a mistake?” Such an essay is just not good. An essay without originality or creativity might fall into this category. Sometimes a creative person, who is not technically proficient as a writer, can make the opposite mistake: their word choice is poor, their sentences badly constructed and poorly organized within their paragraphs, their paragraphs in no intelligible relationship to one another – and yet the essay as a whole can succeed, because there are valuable thoughts trapped within it, wishing desperately to find expression.

Additional levels

You might think that there could not possibly be anything more to an essay than these five levels of resolution or analysis, but you would be wrong. This is something that was first noticed, perhaps, by those otherwise entirely reprehensible and destructive scholars known as post-modernists. An essay necessarily exists within a context of interpretation, made up of the reader (level six), and the culture that the reader is embedded in (level seven), which is made up in part of the assumptions that he or she will bring to the essay. Levels six and seven have deep roots in biology and culture. You might think, “Why do I need to know this?” but if you don’t you are not considering your audience, and that’s a mistake. Part of the purpose of the essay is to set your mind straight, but the other part, equally important, is to communicate with an audience.

For the essay to succeed, brilliantly, it has to work at all of these levels of resolution simultaneously. That is very difficult, but it is in that difficulty that the value of the act of writing exists.

Considerations of Aesthetics and Fascination

This is not all that has to be properly managed when you write an essay. You should also strive for brevity, which is concise and efficient expression, as well as beauty, which is the melodic or poetic aspect of your language (at all the requisite levels of analysis). Finally, you should not be bored, or boring. If you are bored while writing, then, most importantly, you are doing it wrong, and you will also bore your reader. Think of it this way: you get bored for a reason, and sometimes for a good reason. You may be bored while writing your essay because you are actually lying to yourself in a very deep way about what you are doing and why you are doing it. Your mind, independent of your ego, cannot be

hoodwinked into attending to something that you think is uninteresting or useless. It will automatically regard such a thing as unworthy of attention, and make you bored by it.

If you are bored by your essay, you have either chosen the wrong topic (one which makes no difference to you and, in all likelihood, to anyone else) or you are approaching a good topic in a substandard manner. Perhaps you are resentful about having to write the essay, or afraid of its reception, or lazy, or ignorant, or unduly and arrogantly skeptical, or something of the kind.

You have to place yourself in the correct state of mind to write properly. That state of mind is partly aesthetic. You have to be trying to produce something of worth, beauty and elegance. If you think that is ridiculous, then you are far too stupid at the moment to write properly. You need to meditate long and hard on why you would dare presume that worth, beauty and elegance are unworthy of your pursuit. Do you plan to settle for ugly and uncouth? Do you want to destroy, instead of build?

You must choose a topic that is important to you. This should be formulated as a question that you want to answer. This is arguably the hardest part of writing an essay: choosing the proper question. Perhaps your instructor has provided you with a list of topics, and you think you are off the hook as a consequence. You’re not. You still have to determine how to write about one of those topics in a manner that is compelling to you. It’s a moral, spiritual endeavour.

If you properly identify something of interest to you, then you have put yourself in alignment with the deeper levels of your psyche, your spirit. If these deeper levels do not want or need an answer to the question you have posed, you will not possibly be interested in it. So the fact of your interest is evidence of the importance of the topic. You, or some part of you, needs the answer – and such needs can be deep enough so that life itself can depend upon them. Someone desperate, for example, might find the question “why live?” of extreme interest, and absolutely require an answer that makes life’s suffering worth bearing. It is not necessary to ensure that every question you try or essay to answer of that level of importance, but you should not waste your time with ideas that do not grip you.

So, the proper attitude is interested and aesthetically sensitive.

Having said all that, here is something to remember: finished beats perfect. Most people fail a class or an assignment or a work project not because they write badly, and geta D’s or F’s, but because they don’t write at all, and get zeroes. Zeroes are very bad. They are the black holes of numbers. Zeroes make you fail. Zeroes ruin your life. Essays handed in, no matter how badly written, can usually get you at least a C. So don’t be a completely self-destructive idiot. Hand something in, regardless of how pathetic you think it is (and no matter how accurate you are in that opinion).

If you can’t do this, then you have to do some more reading (which you will likely have to do to complete the essay anyway). There is, by the way, no such thing as reader’s block. If you can’t write, it is because you have nothing to say. You have no ideas. In such a situation, don’t pride yourself on your writer’s block. Read something. If that doesn’t work, read something else – maybe something better. Repeat until the problem is solved.

Reading List

Indicate here what you have to or want to read. These should be books or articles, generally speaking. If you don’t know what articles or books might be appropriate or useful, then you could start with Wikipedia articles or other encyclopedic sources, and look at their reference lists for ideas about further reading. These sources are fine as a beginning.

If you find someone whose writing is particularly interesting and appropriate, it is often very useful to see if you can find out what authors they admired and read. You can do this by noting who they refer to, in the text of their writings or in the reference list. You can meander productively through wide bodies of learning in this manner.

Assume you need 5-10 books or articles per thousand words of essay, unless you have been instructed otherwise. A double-spaced page of typing usually contains about 250 words. List your sources now, even if you have to do it badly. You can always make it better later.

Notes: (see next section for Notes on Notes):

Reading 10 (repeat if necessary).

Notes (repeat if necessary):

A Psychological Note and some Notes on Notes.

While you are reading, see if you can notice anything that catches your attention. This might be something you think is important, or something that you seriously disagree with, or something that you might want to know more about. You have to pay careful attention to your emotional reactions to do this.

You also want to take some notes. You can place your notes below the readings you listed above.

When you are taking notes, don’t bother doing stupid things like highlighting or underlining sentences in the textbook. There is no evidence that it works. It just looks like work. What you need to do is to read for understanding. Read a bit, then write down what you have learned or any questions that have arisen in your mind. Don’t ever copy the source word for word. The most important part of learning and remembering is the recreation of what you have written in your own language. This is not some simplistic “use your own words.” This is the dialog you are having with the writer of your sources. This is your attempt to say back to the author “this is what I understand you are saying.” This is where you extract the gist of the writing.

If someone asks you about your day, you don’t say, “Well, first I opened my eyes. Then I blinked and rubbed them. Then I placed my left leg on the floor, and then my right.” You would bore them to death. Instead, you eliminate the extra detail, and concentrate on communicating what is important. That is exactly what you are supposed to be doing when you take some notes during or after reading (after is often better, with the book closed, so that you are not tempted to copy the author’s writing word for word so that you can fool yourself into thinking you did some work).

If you find note-taking in this manner difficult, try this. Read a paragraph. Look away. Then say to yourself, out loud, even in a whisper (if you are in a library), what the paragraph meant. Listen to what you said, and then quickly write it down.

Take about two to three times as many notes, by word, as you will need for your essay. You might think that is inefficient, but it’s not. In order to write intelligibly about something, or to speak intelligently about it, you need to know far more than you actually communicate. That helps you master level six and seven, described previously – the context within which

PART FOUR: THE OUTLINE

At this point you have prepared a list of topics, and a reading list. Now it’s time to choose a topic.

ENTER TOPIC HERE

Here’s another rule. When you write your first draft, it should be longer than the final version. This is so that you have some extra writing to throw away. You want to have something to throw away after the first draft so that you only have to keep what is good. It is NOT faster to try to write exactly as many words as you need when you first sit down to write. Trying to do so merely makes you too aware of what you are writing. This concern will slow you down. Aim at producing a first draft that is 25% longer than the final draft is supposed to be. If your final work is to be 1000 words, then write that (or four pages) below. The word document will automatically add 25% to the length you specify.

Now specify the length of your essay.

ADD 25% TO THE ABOVE LENGTHS

Now you have to write an outline. This is the most difficult part of writing an essay, and it’s not optional. The outline of an essay is like the skeleton of a body. It provides its fundamental form and structure. Furthermore, the outline is basically the argument (with the sentences themselves and the words serving that argument).

A thousand-word essay requires a ten-sentence outline. However, the fundamental outline of an essay should not get much longer than fifteen sentences, even if the essay is several thousand words or more in length. This is because it is difficult to keep an argument of more than that length in mind at one time so that you can assess the quality of its structure. So, write a ten to fifteen sentence outline of your essay, and if it is longer than a thousand words, then make sub-outlines for each primary outline sentence. Here is an example of a good simple outline:

Topic: Who was Abraham Lincoln?

Why is Abraham Lincoln worthy of remembrance?

What were the crucial events of his childhood?

Of his adolescence?

Of his young adulthood?

How did he enter politics?

What were his major challenges?

What were the primary political and economic issues of his time?

Who were his enemies?

How did he deal with them?

What were his major accomplishments?

How did he die?

Here is an example of a good longer outline (for a three thousand word essay):

• Topic: What is capitalism?
• How has capitalism been defined? o Author 1 o Author 2 o Author 3
• Where and when did capitalism develop? o Country 1 o Country 2
• How did capitalism develop in the first 50 years after its origin? o How did capitalism develop in the second 50 years after its origin? o (Repeat as necessary)
• Historical precursors? o (choose as many centuries as necessary)
• Advantages of capitalism? o Wealth generation o Technological advancement o Personal freedom
• Disadvantages of capitalism? o Unequal distribution o Pollution and other externalized costs
• Alternatives to capitalism? o Fascism o Communism
• Consequences of these alternatives?
• Potential future developments?

Beware of the tendency to write trite, repetitive and clichéd introductions and conclusions. It is often useful to write a stock intro (what is the purpose of this essay? How is it going to proceed?) and a stock conclusion (How did this essay proceed? What was its purpose?) but they should usually then be thrown away. Write your outline here. Try for one outline heading per 100 words of essay length. You can add subdivisions, as in the example regarding capitalism, above.

Write outline here:

PART FIVE: PARAGRAPHS

So, now you have your outline. Copy it here:

OUTLINE COPIED HERE

Now, write ten to fifteen sentences per outline heading to complete your paragraph. You may find it helpful to add additional subdivisions to your outline, and to work back and forth between the outline and the sentences, editing both. Use your notes, as well. Use single spacing at this point, so that you can see more writing on the paper at once. You will format your essay properly later.

Don’t worry too much about how well you are writing at this point. It is also best at this point not to worry too much about the niceties of sentence structure and grammar. That is all best left for the second major step, which is editing. You should think of the essay writing process as twofold. The first major step is the first draft, which can be relatively quick and dirty. For the first draft you can use your notes, extensively, and rough out the essay. If you get stuck writing anywhere, just move to the next outline sentence. You can always go back.

The second major step is editing. Production (the first major step) and editing (the second) are different functions, and should be treated that way. This is because each interferes with the other. The purpose of production is to produce. The function of editing is to reduce and arrange. If you try to do both at the same time then the editing stymies the production. It’s not faster to combine them, nor is it better, and it is bound to be frustrating.

Here is an example of writing associated with an outline question: (note: places where references are necessary are indicate as (REFERENCE, 19XX). How to format these references will be discussed later.

Outline sentence: How has capitalism been defined?

Something as complex as capitalism cannot be easily defined. Different authors have each offered their opinion. Liberal or conservative thinkers stress the importance of private property and the ownership rights that accompany such property as key to capitalism (REFERENCE, 19XX). Such private property (including valuable goods and the means by which they are produced) can be traded, freely, with other property owners, in a market where the price is set by public demand, rather than by any central agency. Liberal and conservative thinkers stress efficiency of production, as well as quality, and consider profit the motive for efficiency. They believe that lower cost is a desirable feature of production, and that fair competition helps ensure desirably lower prices.

The World Socialist Movement (REFERENCE, 19XX), an international consortium of far left political parties, defines capitalism, by contrast, as ownership of the means of production by a small minority of people, the capitalist class, who profitably exploit the

working class, the genuine producers, who must sell their ability to work for a salary or wage. Such socialists believe that it is profit that solely motivates capitalism, and that the profit motive is essentially corrupt. Modern environmentalists tend to add the natural world itself to the list of capitalist targets of exploitation (REFERENCE, 19XX). Thinkers on the right tend to regard problems emerging from the capitalist system as real, but trivial in comparison to those produced by other economic and political systems, real and hypothetical. Thinkers on the far left regard capitalism as the central cause of problems as serious as poverty, inequality and environmental degradation, and believe that there are other political and economic systems whose implementation would constitute an improvement.

It took two paragraphs to begin to address the first outline sentence. Notice that the essay begins without referring to itself. It is better to tell the reader what the essay will be about and how the topic will be addressed than to meander around stupidly at the beginning of an essay, but it is still better to grab the reader’s attention immediately without beating around the bush.

Once you have completed ten to fifteen sentences for each outline heading, you have finished your first draft. Now it is time to move to editing.

PART SIX: EDITING AND ARRANGING OF SENTENCES WITHIN PARAGRAPHS

Copy the first paragraph of your first draft here:

Paragraph 1:

Now, place each sentence on its own line, so it looks like this (this example is taken from the first paragraph on capitalism, above):

Something as complex as capitalism cannot be easily defined.

Different authors have each offered their opinion.

Liberal or conservative thinkers stress the importance of private property and the ownership rights that accompany such property as key to capitalism (REFERENCE, 19XX).

Such private property (including valuable goods and the means by which they are produced) can be traded, freely, with other property owners, in a market where the price is set by public demand, rather than by any central agency.

Liberal and conservative thinkers stress efficiency of production, as well as quality, and consider profit the motive for efficiency.

They believe that lower cost is a desirable feature of production, and that fair competition helps ensure desirably lower prices.

Now, write another version of each sentence, under each sentence, like this:

Now you are going to try to improve each of those paragraphs. Copy them again here, unchanged (you are doing this so that you can easily compare the improved paragraphs to the originals, so that you can be sure they are truly improved, before you keep them):

New paragraph 1 (copy):

New paragraph 2 (copy):

New paragraph 3 (copy):

New paragraph 4 (copy):

New paragraph 5 (copy) (etc.):

Start with paragraph 1. Break it up into single sentences, as you did before. Now check to see if the sentences are in the best possible order, within each paragraph. Drag and drop them, or cut and paste them, into better order.

You can also eliminate sentences that are no longer necessary. When you are satisfied with the first paragraph (which means that the sentences are necessary, short and punchy, and in the correct order) then go ahead to the next paragraph and do the same thing.

PART SEVEN: RE-ORDERING THE PARAGRAPHS

Now, copy all of the new, improved paragraphs that you have edited here:

New improved paragraph 1:

New improved paragraph 2:

New improved paragraph 3:

New improved paragraph 4:

New improved paragraph 5 (etc.):

Now you are going to try to improve the order of those new, improved paragraphs. Copy them here, again, unchanged.

New improved paragraph 1 (copy):

New improved paragraph 2 (copy):

New improved paragraph 3 (copy):

New improved paragraph 4 (copy):

New improved paragraph 5 (copy) (etc.):

Now look at the order of the paragraphs themselves (as you just did with the sentences within each paragraph). It may well be that by now in the editing process, you will find that the order of the subtopics within your original outline is no longer precisely appropriate,

and that some re-ordering of those sub-topics is called for. So, move around the new improved paragraph (copies) above, until they are ordered more appropriately than they were.

• Multiple Choice

Topic : Unit 1: Short Fiction I

Subject : ap english literature and composition.

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