Writing instructions for an essay

How to write an essay?

Be­fore you start writ­ing an es­say, draft a short plan about what you are go­ing to write. This will help you in nar­row­ing down the topic and ap­proach. Re­flect on the ques­tion you want to an­swer with your es­say and how you are go­ing to re­spond to it. Try to achieve as clear and un­der­stand­able an ex­pres­sion and struc­ture as pos­si­ble in your es­say. Con­sider the length of the es­say from the be­gin­ning of the project so that you have enough space to ex­press ev­ery­thing you wish to in­clude. In­tro­duce the reader to the topic briefly and sum­marise your thoughts in the con­clu­sion at the end. Progress log­i­cally con­nect­ing mat­ters to­gether, stick to the rel­e­vant points, be crit­i­cal to­wards the source ma­te­ri­als, and, above all, bring out your own voice and per­son­al­ity in the text.

The most im­por­tant as­pect in writ­ing an es­say is to nar­row down the topic, to se­lect an ap­proach and an idea which are ex­pressed al­ready in the ti­tle. In your es­say, you can, for ex­am­ple, con­sider a theme, an ap­proach to a prob­lem or a com­par­i­son aris­ing from the source ma­te­rial. In ad­di­tion to the course ma­te­rial, you can use other ad­di­tional and sup­ple­men­tary ma­te­ri­als when writ­ing your es­say. Be crit­i­cal and aim at di­ver­sity when se­lect­ing the source ma­te­rial.

Ref­er­ences are marked in the text. You have to make a ref­er­ence ev­ery time when the text is based on a pre­vi­ously pub­lished re­search or when you are cit­ing text or pic­tures. As of­ten as pos­si­ble, ref­er­ences are made to the orig­i­nal re­search ar­ti­cles. How­ever, do not copy or ref­er­ence the source text di­rectly but write it in your own words. Copy­ing text di­rectly from a source or the in­ter­net is com­pa­ra­ble to cheat­ing in an exam! There­fore, try to dis­tance your­self from the source ma­te­rial and re­view it by re­flect­ing on it sub­jec­tively. When us­ing di­rect quotes, sep­a­rate the ci­ta­tion from the other text with quo­ta­tion marks or with in­den­ta­tion and make a ref­er­ence to the source of the ci­ta­tion. Closer in­struc­tions to mak­ing ref­er­ences are at the end of this guide­line in sec­tion Ref­er­ences and Draft­ing a list of ref­er­ences.

Essay layout and structure

In es­says, the line spac­ing is 1.5 and the font size is 12. In writ­ten as­sign­ments, the ba­sic model of the sci­en­tific es­say is used, which in­cludes a ti­tle page, ta­ble of con­tents and a list of ref­er­ences in ad­di­tion to the text.

1. Ti­tle page
The ti­tle page con­tains the ti­tle of the es­say, au­thor’s name, stu­dent num­ber, date and course name.

2. Ta­ble of con­tents

3. Text
The text con­sists of in­tro­duc­tion, body text, and sum­mary or con­clu­sion. The es­say should be based on the the­sis state­ment, i.e. to the goal of the text which is de­fined right at the be­gin­ning of the es­say within the scope of the as­sign­ment. The other parts of the text an­swer the the­sis state­ment. In the con­clu­sion, you should dis­cuss what is the pur­pose of the ac­quired in­for­ma­tion. Pay spe­cial at­ten­tion to the in­tro­duc­tion and con­clu­sion as they should, when read to­gether, give a gen­eral pic­ture of your es­say and bring the dis­cussed themes to­gether. If the es­say is over five pages, use sub-head­ings that pace and give struc­ture to the text. Pages are marked with page num­bers.

4. Ref­er­ences
The sources you have used are listed at the end of the es­say un­der their own (un­num­bered) head­ing so that the ref­er­ences in­clude the name(s) of the au­thor(s) of the ar­ti­cle/book, ti­tle of the ar­ti­cle/book (for ar­ti­cles, in­clude also name of the jour­nal, its num­ber, and the page num­bers of the ar­ti­cle), print­ing lo­ca­tion, and year. If you have used an on­line source, dis­close the au­thor, ti­tle of the ar­ti­cle, web­site ad­dress, and the date the data was re­trieved.

References in text

Al­ways when quot­ing a text di­rectly, sum­maris­ing it, or de­scrib­ing some­one else’s ideas or text in your own words, you have to cite the source. The sources are marked in the text with ref­er­ences and at the end of the es­say in the list of ref­er­ences. In this sec­tion, you will find in­struc­tions on how to in­di­cate sources in the text.

Ref­er­enc­ing a sen­tence:

The ref­er­ence can be placed in the mid­dle of the sen­tence, at the be­gin­ning, or in the end. If it is un­clear whether the in­for­ma­tion is still based on the same source, you can add link­ing ex­pres­sions, such as “Ac­cord­ing to the same source” or re­peat the ref­er­ence at the end of the sen­tence.

e.g.

“Whereas An­der­s­son (1988) has con­cluded that…”

“…whereas it has been con­cluded later on that… (An­der­s­son 1988, 1–13).”

An­der­s­son (1998) has said in her book that… Ac­cord­ing to the same source…”

If the name of the au­thor is not men­tioned, use the name of the pub­li­ca­tion in the ref­er­ence.

e.g. “(Eu­ro­pean So­cial Sur­vey, 2014)” or ”Eu­ro­pean So­cial Sur­vey (2014) is based on…”

Ref­er­enc­ing text in a same para­graph:

If the ref­er­ence is to a part of text that is more ex­ten­sive than a sen­tence, such an en­tire para­graph, the pe­riod of the sen­tence is placed be­fore the ref­er­ence and there is a pe­riod in the ref­er­ence.

e.g. “It has been con­cluded that… The find­ing is also sig­nif­i­cant as there are no ear­lier stud­ies on the topic. (An­der­s­son 1988.)”

Ref­er­ence with two or more au­thors:

– two au­thors: “Käyhkö and Malm­sten (1995) con­cluded…” or ”It has been con­cluded that… (Käyhkö & Malm­sten 1995).”

– three or more au­thors: (Ala­su­u­tari, Mark­ström & Vall­berg-Roth, 2014, 89–90)

The fol­low­ing ref­er­ences: (Ala­su­u­tari et al., 2014, 89–90)

Ref­er­ence when ref­er­enc­ing sev­eral sources at the same time:

The ref­er­ences are listed from old­est to new­est ac­cord­ing to the pub­li­ca­tion year and, if the year is the same, in al­pha­bet­i­cal or­der, and sep­a­rated by semi­colon.

e.g. ”This has been de­tected in sev­eral stud­ies… (Laine 1971; Hent­to­nen 1977, ta­ble 4; Aar­to­lahti 1987; Ranta­hal­vari 1987; Moisio 1999).”

If the text refers to sev­eral stud­ies/books by the same au­thor(s) pub­lished in the same year, sep­a­rate these ref­er­ences from each other with a comma and use lower case let­ters: (Kallio 1950a, 1950b) or (Kallio 1950a, b). If there is in­for­ma­tion on in which or­der the works have been pub­lished dur­ing the year, use this or­der, oth­er­wise list the pub­li­ca­tions al­pha­bet­i­cally ac­cord­ing to their ti­tle. Add small case let­ters also to the list of ref­er­ences to sep­a­rate the pub­li­ca­tions from one an­other.

If the same ar­ti­cle has been pub­lished twice (e.g. in a se­ries and an  an­thol­ogy) and you wish to ref­er­ence both years of pub­li­ca­tion: Christaller (1933/1966)

Ref­er­enc­ing an on­line source:

Ref­er­ence an on­line source in the text like an or­di­nary pub­li­ca­tion, with name and year. On­line doc­u­ments do not have page num­bers sim­i­lar to printed sources so they are not marked.

Us­ing page num­bers in ref­er­ences:

Page num­ber is marked in the ref­er­ence when ref­er­enc­ing a spe­cific point in a pub­li­ca­tion. This is nec­es­sary es­pe­cially when us­ing an ex­ten­sive pub­li­ca­tion as source ma­te­rial. If the ar­ti­cle is short, the page num­ber is not needed. When ref­er­enc­ing an en­tire ar­ti­cle or book, you do not have to mark page num­bers.

e.g. “…while later it has been dis­cov­ered that…” (Granö 1989, 10–13) -> use a dash be­tween the page num­bers, not the shorter hy­phen.

Sources in the list of references

In this sec­tion, you will find in­struc­tions on how to in­di­cate sources in the list of ref­er­ences.

Book source:

Kaukua, J. 2015.Self-aware­ness in Is­lamic phi­los­o­phy: Avi­cenna and be­yond. Cam­bridge: Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press.

Ala­su­u­tari, M., Mark­ström, A.-M. & Vall­berg-Roth, A.-C. 2014. As­sess­ment and doc­u­men­ta­tion in early child­hood ed­u­ca­tion. Abing­don: Rout­ledge.

Re­search ar­ti­cles:

Geiss, C. & Labart, C. 2016. Sim­u­la­tion of BS­DEs with jumps by Wiener chaos ex­pan­sion. Sto­chas­tic Pro­cesses and their Ap­pli­ca­tions, 126, 2123–2162.

Edited books:

Chris, J. 2009. Teach­ing as an af­fec­tive prac­tice. In the book H. Daniels, H. Lauder & J. Porter (eds.) Ed­u­ca­tional The­o­ries, cul­tures, and learn­ing: a crit­i­cal per­spec­tive. Lon­don: Rout­ledge, 165–176.

Mikko­nen, S. & Su­u­tari, P. (eds.). 2016. Mu­sic, art and diplo­macy: East-West cul­tural in­ter­ac­tions and the Cold War. Farn­ham: Ash­gate.

On­line source:

Er­vasti, H. 2015. Eu­ro­pean So­cial Sur­vey 2014: Finnish data. Ver­sio 1.0, 17.11.2015. Finnish So­cial Sci­ence Data Ar­chive: http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:fsd:T-FSD3068.

Kuva: Blogs.sal­ford.ac.uk