Essay Writing: One Secret and Three tips – Guest post by Professor Nick Barber
It is an honour for me to welcome Professor Nick Barber, Professor of Constitutional Law and Theory at the University of Oxford, to my blog.
Professor Barber is a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford and Associate Dean (Research) at the Oxford Law Faculty.
He has lectured extensively on constitutional law and theory in many countries. He has published many papers in these areas, and his book - The Constitutional State – was published in 2011, and has been widely reviewed. His second book, The Principles of Constitutionalism, was published by Oxford University Press in summer 2018. His most recent book, The United Kingdom Constitution: An Introduction was published in the Clarendon Law Series in late 2021. Both The American Journal of Jurisprudence and The Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies have published collections of essays on his work.
He was founder editor of the United Kingdom Constitutional Law Blog, and he was a co-author, with Jeff King and Tom Hickman, of the blog post that sparked the litigation in Miller, a post which first advanced the arguments eventually adopted by the High Court and Supreme Court. Alongside Richard Ekins, he is co-director of The Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Government.
Professor Barber’s post below shares a key secret to effective communication and compelling essay writing, as well as three excellent tips! I am sure you will enjoy reading it.
Essay Writing: One Secret and Three tips
by Professor Nick Barber
The Secret
There’s a simple secret to successful essay writing – indeed, to successful communication in general. It’s a secret that’s hidden in plain sight, one often spoken, but rarely heard. And it is this: think about your audience.
Effective communication is manipulation. You have an audience who is, let’s assume, willing to listen to you, and your task is to make them think and feel what you want them to think and feel. You need to decide where the audience should be at the end of the process and plan how you will get them there. To do this, you need to consider where the audience is starting from, their current beliefs and knowledge, and identify the types of argument and the presentation that will sway them. Above all, you need to put yourself in their place.
To see the truth of this, think about the lectures you’ve attended: which were the best and which were the worst? The best lecturer identified the information you needed to know, communicated it in a way that helped you understand it, and made the material interesting. You probably left the lecture feeling that the topic was absorbing, you were smart, and the lecturer was a nice person. In contrast, the worst lecturer will have made the material opaque and boring, it will have been hard to see why the lecturer picked the material, and hard to see how anyone could ever find anything interesting to say about it. You probably left the lecture thinking the topic was dull, you didn’t get it, and with a vague but definite sense of antipathy towards the lecturer. The first lecturer thought about their audience, the second lecturer (unless they enjoy inflicting pain) did not.
The secret is applicable to everything you write, including law essays. When you’re writing a law essay, think about who your audience is and what you want them to think. Normally, you’re writing for your tutor or the examiners. You want them, I expect, to come away from reading the essay thinking that you’ve understood the material, you have something interesting to say, and, indeed, that they like you. To reach this point, put yourself in their position. You know that they know the material, you know that they have read many essays on the topic. So, you need to include enough bare information to show you understand the material, but, as your reader already knows that information thoroughly, you need to show something more. What is going to raise your mark is critical engagement with the material, rather than mere recitation, and, moreover, critical engagement that is clear and easy to read. If you have made it easy for the reader to understand your argument, the reader will warm to you – make it hard, and the reader might well conclude that there is not really an argument there at all. Your tutors and, even more so, your examiners will not be prepared to dig all that deep to unearth your argument.
That is the secret. I have a few tips to help you get your audience where you want them, but these are all just elaborations of the core message: be sensitive towards those who are listening to you or reading your work.
Structure
The first tip is to think hard about the structure of your essay – and to let the reader know that structure. Clear, strong, structure is important in two respects. First, it helps you, the writer. In the last section I wrote about the importance of having something to say, something interesting. That can be a challenge; it’s not easy to find something interesting in every topic on the law course. One way you can help yourself find interest in the material is through clear presentation of your, and other people’s, arguments. Forcing yourself to set things out in a clear, sensible order will help you spot problems. If you find your language is becoming vague or evasive, this may be because there is a problem in that area of law, a difficulty that you can help solve. Ask yourself why you are struggling to explain it; is it just a matter of needing to re-read the set texts, or is your difficultly a symptom of something more interesting? If so, explaining and resolving the difficulty may, in itself, provide the core of your essay. Second, a clear structure helps your reader. All essays should have a strong introduction that explains the question they are addressing and which sets out a plan for its resolution, a middle which is divided into a series of sensibly ordered paragraphs, each making a defined point, and a conclusion that draws it all together. It should be easy to read, and the reader should know from the outset what you are arguing and where you are heading. A well-structured exam essay is likely to lead to a happy and grateful examiner.
The Rule of Three
There are lots of good ways of structuring an essay, or arguments within an essay, but, if you are in doubt, three-stage arguments are often helpful. Here are a couple of examples. Some law essays work well as: (1) problem; (2) flawed proposed solutions; (3) my solution. The author sets up a legal difficulty, discusses how others have sought to resolve the problem, but have failed, and concludes by providing a solution that builds on the successes and failures of the second stage. Or how about: (1) the present state of the law with its problems; (2) the causes of these problems; (3) the remedying of these problems, drawing on the causal analysis made in the second stage. This also works for more abstract essays: (1) argument; (2) counter-argument; (3) synthesis. The author sets out an argument, presents the critiques of that argument, and then concludes by defending, or (better still) modifying the initial argument in the face of those critiques. The three-stage model is not the only way to structure things, and might not always be appropriate, but it is a handy tool to have when you are writing an essay and groping for a structure. I suppose it is satisfying because there is: (1) the setting up of the problem; (2) engagement with the problem that fails to bring closure; (3) closure.
Be Nice to Your Villains
Often, perhaps always, you will want to refer to the work of some scholars or judges with whom you disagree. This is part of giving your essay a critical edge. It can be tempting to go in hard, to expose your villains for the fools and rogues that they undoubtedly are, but this is almost always a mistake. Partly, of course, this is just a matter of civility: we shouldn’t be rude or mean to people, even if they are academics. But this is also a matter of tactics. If you introduce someone’s work in your essay you need to convince the audience that there is a point to the inclusion. If you make your interlocutors sound like idiots, your audience will wonder why you are requiring them to consider their work. Worse, your audience might suspect that you are misrepresenting the interlocutors’ work to make it sound silly, or even, worse still, might start to sympathise with the subject of your critique. A far better way to deal with villains is to make their arguments sound as persuasive as possible. Then, when you show the flaws in their reasoning, your audience stays on your side: after all, as you’ve done the best that can be done to make the reasoning attractive, your subsequent critique of that reasoning appears both fair and decisive.
There you have it. One secret and three tips to help you make use of the secret. Now you need to start writing, and the more you write, the easier it will become. But please, please, once you have become an eminent professor, a senior judge, or the head of the law firm, never forget that poor audience, patiently listening to you.
