Notes to Third year students on writing a Psychology essay.

The essays in Third year have two important purposes. First, to give you experience
of presenting and critically evaluating psychological material. Second, to stimulate
you to supplement material from the lectures with further material from your own
reading.

Below are some general guidelines on how to write an essay in Third year. Your tutor
may have additional specific guidelines for your essay. Always make sure that you are
clear as to what your tutor wants to see in the essay or does not want to see in the
essay.

Answer the essay question set.

Make sure that your essay is relevant to the essay question and that your essay
attempts to addresses this question. Read the essay question or essay title carefully,
identify critical words and decide what exactly the title or question is about. Often the
essay question or the essay topic is so broad that it is impossible to address all aspects
of it. In that case make clear at the beginning of your essay which topics you are
going to address. Ideally, your tutor should point out and give advice on the various
aspects of the essay question. Make sure that you know how to address the essay
question before you start writing and if necessary ask your tutor for further
clarification.

How to structure your essay

A good essay has a clear structure, containing an introduction, the main body of the
answer, a conclusion and a reference list.
Introduction. Begin with an introduction of the essay question or topic. Briefly
explain what is meant by the question, give some background information and give
definitions of terms in the essay question, if necessary. Briefly sketch how you are
going to address this question in your essay.
Main body The next section of the essay is the main body of the answer in which you
present your material and arguments. To address the essay question you will need to
discuss research studies that contain empirical evidence relevant to the question. The
suggestions for reading that you receive together with the essay question will be
useful sources. The expectation is that you read at least a number of the suggested
papers and use these in your essay. You will also be expected to search the literature
for other relevant recent articles.
When you present information from a paper in your essay, it is important that you do
this in your own words. Do not present the information from the paper as a verbatim
quotation, useless in those exceptional cases where exact wording of a phrase is
crucial. Make sure that you present relevant details of a research paper clearly and
accurately in your essay, and that you make clear how this information is relevant to
the essay question.
One way of summarising research studies is to use the ‘mini-abstract method’. That
is, you describe the aim of the study, its method, its results and the conclusions drawn
by the authors and use one or two sentences for each section. If a particular study is
important for your argument, you describe it in more detail.
Try to link the various research papers that you discuss in your essay. If your essay
discusses more than one topic, try to make clear the transition from one topic to the
next. Try to avoid that your essay reads merely as a list of studies with no attempt to

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connect one research paper with the next or no attempt to link empirical evidence to
the essay question.
A good essay attempts to critically discuss the empirical evidence in favour or against
the essay question and to describe clearly how evidence presented in a research paper
is related to the essay question or to a specific aspect of the essay question.
Concluding your essay. Conclude your essay by summarising the main points that
you have presented earlier on in your essay. Try to evaluate the evidence (e.g. was the
information in support of the essay question strong or weak) and try to justify your
evaluation. Important at this point is to relate the information that you have
summarised back to the essay question. Try to come to some sort of conclusion, even
if with the current state of evidence the question can not be definitely answered. You
should also briefly remind your reader of the content of the essay and how it led you
to that conclusion.

Referencing
In the text it is critical that you paraphrase the work of others correctly. Always make
clear whether an idea is your own or whether you are paraphrasing someone else’s
idea. In the latter case, mention the source.
Correct referencing of the research papers or other sources that you present in your
essay is important. You are expected to follow the American Psychological
Association (APA) reference format. For explanation and examples of the APA
format see the Level 3 Handbook, the examples provided for your practical report
writing by Dr DeBruine or visit http://www.wooster.edu/psychology/apa-crib.html.
All the papers, books or websites that you have cited in your essay should be listed in
the reference list at the end of your essay, ordered alphabetically on the surname of
the first author. Papers or books that you have read as preparation for the essay, but
that you did not mention in the essay, should not appear in the reference list.

Some further specific dos and don’ts for writing an essay

1. Do use past tense.
2. Don’t use the word “this” without a noun, i.e. “This suggests that….” Instead use
“This argument suggests that…” or “These data suggest that….”
3. Do use “and” in text, “&” within brackets and in the Reference list when giving
the names of two authors (of a list of up to six authors first time, then use First author,
et al., year). “Carey and Phillips (1999) have argued that…. “ or “Some researchers
have argued that…. (Carey & Phillips, 1999)”. Note that in the last example the full
stop comes after the brackets, not before.
4. Do not use phrases like “in a paper published in 1979”….or “in a paper in the
Journal of Irreproducible Results…”.
5. Do not present page numbers in your citations in text, unless you use a quotation.
6. Use formal language and avoid causal terms like “a lot” when you could be more
specific.
7. Capitalise proper names. When in doubt, check whether the authors of the papers
you are reading capitalise that word in their papers. For example, “The
prosopagnsosic patients were required to…” or “The Alzheimer’s disease patients
were required to….”
8. Whenever reasonable avoid secondary citations (“cited in”) but be honest. Use
something like (Carey, 1999, cited in McGeorge, 2002). Or “Carey (1999, cited in
McGeorge, 2002) argued that ……”. In this example, only McGeorge (2002) should
appear in your reference list. Please note that some tutors do not accept secondary

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citations, unless in exceptional circumstances. For example, when a paper is written in
a language that you cannot read. Check with your tutor whether they accept secondary
citations.
9. PROOFREAD. After you finish writing your essay, put it away for a day or a few
hours and then read the whole thing to find careless mistakes.