Do you want to know how to write the perfect essay for university this semester and achieve a top 1% grade?
Then you’re in the right place.
On YouTube, you’ll find plenty of video tutorials and guides on writing essays and term papers. There, you’ll get tips like:
Start with the relevance of your topic and structure your arguments from weak to strong. Well, thanks, I didn’t really need a tutorial for that.
This article is different.
Here you’ll get 3 secret tricks that will make your term paper so good, your professor will hardly believe you wrote it yourself.
To achieve this, I’ll skip the generic tips and instead give you solid text examples that I, as a university lecturer, would mark as outstanding.
#1 Position your essay in a controversial debate
How to Write the Perfect Essay for University is a question many students grapple with. Your essay or term paper is always good when it’s interesting. It is even better, if it can teach the person who is marking it something new or change their thinking.
Imagine you’re a professor and at the end of the semester, you get a basket full of term papers. In this basket are 30 submissions.
10 term papers are graded with a C or worse. 10 term papers with B or so, and 10 term papers with an A, or whatever equivalent you have in your country.
This results in a nice bell curve in the grade distribution, as with all academic assignments.
To land among the top 10, you need to fulfill all the basics, like correctly and citing relevant sources, achieving a high density in writing, and dealing with a topic that is related to the topic of your subject or class.
With the following trick, however, you will manage to stand out even more among the top 10 and enter the top 1%.
And that is by making your term paper MAXIMALLY interesting.
You can do this by…
- Choosing your topic so that it is positioned in a scientifically and socially relevant (and even better: controversial) debate.
- Teaching your professor something they don’t already know.
- Developing a counterintuitive argument on a subtopic within this debate.
Okay, let’s go through these 3 things with an example. To make the learnings from this example relevant to you, simply apply the principles to your own field of study. Understanding how to write the perfect essay for university is essential for academic success.
Position your essay in a controversial debate
A highly controversial debate in my discipline is the topic of the Metaverse.
This is because the concept of the Metaverse so far is purely fictional.
The technology is not yet advanced enough for the characteristics of the Metaverse to be met in the foreseeable future.
Moreover, the Metaverse is hardly used in practice yet, and managers make jokes about others who are involved with the Metaverse.
On the other hand, there are voices that are very enthusiastic about the Metaverse and would like to set the course for its development now.
Try to describe this debate in your essay or term paper and the problems that arise from it. Be sure to use the most current and high-quality references possible, if this is requirement for your submission.
Like this:
“The term Metaverse refers to an environment that connects physical reality with a digital world (Mystakidis, 2022). Individuals can use digital avatars to enter Metaverse applications to facilitate social or business interactions (Duan et al., 2021; Park & Catrambone, 2007; Peukert et al., 2019; Yang & Xiong, 2019). In addition, Metaverse applications are characterized by four main features: (1) realism, (2) ubiquity, (3) interoperability, (4) scalability (Dionisio et al. , 2013; Mostajeran et al., 2022). Due to an ongoing discrepancy between technological feasibility and the conceptual requirements of these features, the term Metaverse is controversial. Dolata and Schwabe (2023) refer to this as a ‘constantly evolving socio-technical phenomenon that still needs to be defined’ (p.754).“
- Definition
- Social relevance
- Detailed description (as a basis for the controversy)
- Controversy
- Evidence for the controversy (as current as possible)
This way or similarly, you can build your argument in the introduction and deepen the same argument in the chapters of the main body of your essay or term paper.
Teach your professor something they don’t already know
Your professor has probably already heard of this controversy. If you now treat this topic on this general level in your essay, you will only be able to scratch the surface. Setting clear goals can help streamline your approach to how to write the perfect essay for university.
A much better strategy is to narrow the focus of your work so that you can teach your professor something new. He or she will perhaps have read a handful of articles on the topic of the Metaverse and have a superficial understanding of the subject.
Now choose a specific aspect within the controversy and deepen it in your manuscript. For our example, let’s take the topic of work.
Sure, the Metaverse is there for playing, trading, consuming, and so on, but also for working. A small subtopic of the whole debate is whether the Metaverse can represent a better technology that can make work easier for us, for example, compared to currently used tools like Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
Your professor has most likely not thought through all the use cases of the Metaverse. With your term paper, you now address exactly this one.
With a clever Google search into the research interests of this person, you can also make an assumption about which use case or subtopic might be particularly interesting for them.
All you have to do is narrow down the debate. This makes the topic of your essay extremely specific and thus interesting, as it is new to your professor.
“The commute to the workplace and office hours from 9 to 5 have given way in recent years to telework enabled by information technology (Baptista et al., 2020). Despite ad-hoc implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic, telework and collaboration over long distances have proven to be sustainable work arrangements (Hafermalz & Riemer, 2021). However, full-time telework has certain disadvantages. For example, social relationships, office gossip, but also interpersonal collaboration can suffer under remote work (Hafermalz & Riemer, 2020). To overcome the physical limitations of remote work, companies are using Metaverse applications for virtual collaboration (Dwivedi et al., 2022; Purdy, 2022).“
- Status quo on the topic of work
- Problem with the topic of work
- Argumentative link between work and the Metaverse
Develop a Counter-Intuitive Argument within the Subtopic
If you look at 5 random scientific articles on the topic of the Metaverse or Virtual Reality and work, you’ll quickly recognize a pattern.
It’s mainly about one thing: How can people collaborate better in these immersive worlds.
Okay, that’s an interesting question, but we said that we want to develop a counter-intuitive argument. The intuitive argument is that we will probably collaborate in the Metaverse. To get closer to the counter-intuitive argument, let’s turn the tables.
What if you don’t collaborate all day, but work alone? Knowledge work isn’t just about collaboration, but mostly about concentrated, uninterrupted solo work.
Couldn’t an immersive work environment also help in this case? How often does knowledge work suffer exactly because of constant distraction through forced collaboration in meetings, emails, notifications, and the temptation of the smartphone?
Here, I have tried to write down this counter-intuitive argument and support it with references:
“The existing literature underscores the potential of Metaverse applications to create innovative workspaces that increase social presence and promote effective collaboration (Bhagwatwar et al., 2018; Brünker et al., 2022). However, this paper aims to nuance the discussion on how Metaverse applications can compensate for the shortcomings of telework and video conferencing. In the current debate, the actual nature of knowledge work, namely undisturbed and concentrated solo work, is largely overlooked. If Metaverse applications are designed as an immersive twin of a traditional office workplace (Lee et al., 2022; Xi et al., 2023), companies will most likely forfeit the productivity gains achieved through the introduction of telework. Unfortunately, there is a tendency in the current literature to focus on virtually reintroducing elements of the traditional workplace, which we thought we had overcome with the widespread adoption of telework.”
- Status Quo (orange)
- Counter-Intuitive Argument (pink)
- Problematization (green)
#2 Analyze More, Describe Less
After you’ve implemented this first secret trick in your introduction in brief, the following chapters are about elaborating the counter-intuitive argument in detail. Striving for clarity and coherence is vital when learning how to write the perfect essay for university.
While you might conduct a small empirical study in a thesis, in an essay or term paper you primarily work with literature.
The mistake too many students make is to just describe this literature.
Authors X, Y, Z investigated in their study how… Author X calls this term such and such…
For an average essay or term paper, you’ll get by with that. But for a top 1% grade, you need more than that. You have to start thinking analytically, not descriptively.
What does it mean to be analytical? Here are some activities that are analytical:
ordering, breaking down, categorizing, classifying, comparing, connecting, contrasting, deconstructing, recognizing, representing, differentiating, distinguishing, dividing, explaining, identifying, integrating, inventorying, ordering, organizing, relating, separating, structuring. (Anderson et al. 2001)
You don’t have to do everything in an essay. Which of these activities could you perform to make your reflection of the literature more analytical?
- Could you break down different positions in the literature on working in the Metaverse?
- Could you categorize the potentials of the Metaverse for work?
- Or maybe identify the key prerequisites for implementation in companies?
Tables as a Secret Ingredient
Look at your specific aim in analyzing the literature and implement at least one of these activities in your chapters.
To present the result of your analysis activity as well as possible, use this simple tool:
A table (or several).
The great thing about a table is that, unlike running text, it already has the analytical activity built-in. To create a table, you automatically have to order, compare, identify, and so on.
An excellent example is Table 1 in the already mentioned study by Dolata and Straub (2023), where the authors juxtapose various interest groups of the Metaverse.
#3 Give Yourself an Editorial Review (x10)
I often wondered what the difference is between my abilities in academic writing now and those I had during my studies.
As a student, you don’t know what you don’t know and simply haven’t had much practice.
That’s also what still distinguishes me from a professor who has 20 years more practice.
Nevertheless, I have noticed a few things that I do differently now than I did as a student.
I was slow in writing and took my time with every sentence. This led to me sometimes only managing to put down a page or even less per day.
Yet, I then left that supposedly perfect sentence as it was and didn’t revise it further.
How I would write a perfect essay today
That’s no longer the case today.
When I write a scientific paper, each chapter goes through several, sometimes even dozens of revisions.
Take the introduction, for example.
I write it once from beginning to end. As well as I can. Then I work on the current state of research and the theory part.
What I have read in the meantime or have developed argumentatively has implications for the introduction. I go back and work on the introduction again.
The same happens after I have finished my analysis, and so on.
With each revision, I make the introduction a little bit sharper, each sentence a little bit denser. I add a new reference here and delete an unnecessary sentence there.
Round for round, the introduction gets better.
It helps just to let the text rest for a weekend.
When I sit down to it again, I have a new thought, and the “old text” doesn’t seem as perfect as it did 3 days ago.
Be Your Own Editor
In these revisions, you are your own editor.
Of course, you can enhance this effect by getting feedback. A fresh and foreign pair of eyes brings you an additional perspective.
The more feedback and input you can get for these revisions, the better. And if the feedback doesn’t come from others, then from yourself.
How often do you revise each part of your term paper?
Once?
Then you’ve found something where there’s still plenty of room for improvement.
Academic writing is revising.
Again and again.
Remember, mastering how to write the perfect essay for university is a journey, not a destination.
Understanding the requirements is crucial for knowing How to Write the Perfect Essay for University.