This series has focused on writing academic essays. Each article has discussed a particular aspect of preparing, reading and writing your essay and each topic has been covered in one page. If you print out or photocopy each of the articles then you will have 10 pages of information that take you through the theory and practicalities of successful essay writing.
Moving from a basic pass to an excellent essay
The previous nine parts of this series on writing academic essays have covered the common reasons why someone will fail an essay, and how to avoid those mistakes. They highlighted the importance of spending time trying to understand what the question is asking and then shared some ideas on how to plan your answer. They have provided you with practical advice on how to search the literature and then how to read and organise what you extract from the literature. If you follow these guidelines you will achieve at least a basic pass mark.
The series then moved on to show you ways of writing at a higher level, incorporating comparative analysis and the use of your own clinical experience. If you follow these additional guidelines, then you will move your essay from a simple pass grade to a ‘good’ pass.
This final article in the series discusses the importance of developing themes within the body of your essay that then form the structure of your conclusion. If this is built onto and into your ‘good’ essay, it will take it to the ‘very good’ or even ‘excellent’ pass.
Identifying themes
If you have been following the guidance in these articles then you will have identified about five sections in the main body of your essay. Each of these sections will have focused on a particular aspect of the question set. However, each of the sections will probably read as a ‘stand alone’, with no specific connections between them.
What you have to do now is to immerse yourself in what you have currently written and look for connections and themes that run between two, three or more of the various sections. The sort of themes that you are looking for will vary with different types of essay. There could be a theme regarding gender, age, acute ongoing illness, finance, resources, ethnicity, safeguarding, communication—the ideas are many and varied.
In a standard 3000-word essay, I would suggest that you look for three or four of the more important themes that are emerging. You need to be guided very specifically by the style and focus of the question and the module of study the assignment is covering. If, for example, the module is a clinically focused one, then you should look at some of the important clinical themes: communication, nurse–patient relationship, staffing or clinical assessment. If your current module is ‘legal and ethics’, then you need to be drawing out themes such as compliance, consent or information sharing. Once you are aware of the general nature of the themes, see how they are expressed in each of the sections you have written.
Drawing themes together
The next stage is to look at the five or so sections of the essay you have written. Using the thought processes discussed in the previous paragraph of this article you should have identified three or four core themes you want to take forward. Revisit how each of the sections are written; you may find that you need to change or adapt certain sentences to bring out the theme a little more. In the final sentence or two of each section make sure you communicate that emerging theme, basing your writing on your previous discussion and analysis of the literature. With subsequent sections you may find that the theme identified is unrelated to the previous one or that it has a number of similarities underpinning it. Your aim is to identify and highlight themes and threads that run through and join together the various sections of your essay.
Focusing the conclusion
If you have followed this process you should have about five sections, each with a theme or two identified in the last sentence. The final part is to stand back from your work and ask the question: what is this saying? What are the implications?
You now have to draw all the parts together to make a whole. This is not a summary that simply repeats what is in the essay—that would gain you very little in terms of extra marks. What you need to do in the conclusion is to identify the key points you have made in the body of the essay and discuss those findings in relation to the themes that you have developed. The conclusion might be making a statement, it might be asking questions, it might be suggesting a way forward. It is important that it doesn't say something that is not supported by the body of your essay, hence the importance of planning an answer that addresses the question, researching the literature and then identifying the emerging themes in each section.
Writing essay is not simply an academic exercise to satisfy the lecturer. In a practice-based profession such as nursing, it is evidence of the fundamental skill of accessing and interpreting the literature. Our conclusions from that process should then underpin our clinical practice.