Our essays relatively short around the 6,000 word mark - the problem with me is my ideas are too multi-layered (filled with paradoxes) and elaborative, (I could write a 100, 000 word essay on my current essay, I need to convey the complex topics and develop them within a tiny space. Therefore, I can't manage to write a simple straight to the point 4,000 word or 6,000 word essay - or should it be really straight to the point? (No room for complexity?)

I then try to compact complex concepts into one sentence, which works, but possibly requires takes a third of the essay.

How can I get a good grade with the essays I've got with 3,000-8,000 word essays?

What method is most appropriate for small essays?

for some reason small essays are an enigma, I can quite grasp their fundamental purpose / can't get a good grip on them

I think you need to stop blanket-posting for help.
While everyone on here is VERY helpful we can't help with everything. To reiterate what everyone else has said, you should try see a counsellor. Universities often have courses/ people you can talk to about essay formatting outside as well as within your department.
One of the skills of essay writing, and academia in general, is ordering what may initially seem like paradoxes. Often themes seem paradoxical when you haven't done enough reading; be honest with yourself, have you read around the topic enough? Given you seem to be working on many essays simultaneously this is likely to be an issue. Can you get any extensions?
Think of essay writing as a craft. 4-6k words isn't really a short essay. Many journals will restrict articles to around the 5k mark on topics considerably more complex than a masters essay.
You need to decide what level of knowledge you can assume and what you need to spell out.
Start by writing the main part and go back to the intro (and conclusion) when you're done....

Sinead, I know where you're coming from with this one. When I started my MA I'd have thought 12,000 words was enough to tackle a subject inside out, but by the time I actually came to write my dissertation, I'd realised you NEVER have enough room to do full justice to all the relevant ideas.

My subject area is philosophy, so you'll have to decide for yourself how applicable the following is, but my advice would be:

* Be realistic about what you can achieve and how much ground you can cover - scale back your ambitions if necessary.

* Keep a clear focus. Exactly what are you arguing for?

* Be selective. You don't need to consider *every* possible argument and counter-argument; just tackle a few well.

* It's OK to make reasonable assumptions you don't have time to defend - just be sure to spell them out.

* You don't have to *ignore* complexities/paradoxes etc., just don't get bogged down in them. It's OK to say things like "this essay is not the place for an examination of the controversy surrounding X (since my concern is just with Y), so in what follows I'm just going to assume such-and-such". In one of my (distinction-standard) essays I came right out with: "In order to keep the scope of this essay within manageable limits..." and briefly referred to certain material I'd be ignoring in order to tackle one narrow area in more depth. (I hadn't even *read* the wider material really, but I knew it was there, that it was relevant and that there was no way I was going to be able to tackle it in 4,000 words - so I said so.)

* Footnotes can make the difference between a so-so mark and an excellent one, since they enable you to show the examiners that you've researched and thought about the topic and are aware of issues/authors/arguments you just don't have the space to tackle in depth. For instance, at one time I had a thousand-word section on metaphor in one of my essays, but it just wasn't *that* important to the thrust of my argument; so I cut it out, leaving just a quick "Other thinkers have emphasised the role of metaphor" in the essay and adding a sixty-word footnote sketching two thinkers' views on the subject. (Be careful on word counts obviously, footnotes usually still count.)

In summary: keep a clear, fairly narrow focus in the essay and if there are complexities/controversies/assumptions you don't have the space to deal with, just acknowledge them briefly (maybe in footnotes) and move on with your main argument.

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That advice was excellent magictime!! Cheers!

The problem I am/was having was I have read about so many paradigms to display Masters/PhD thesis's (Open university practical books etc.) that all the paradigms are competing in my head, and my head is at a point of stasis.



Therefore, its undoing as I am doing it

Thanks Sinead, I hope I've helped.

I suppose one thing that's conspicuous by its absence in my advice is anything specific about structure and signposting.

It's never quite as simple as the old chestnut: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you’ve told them”, which suggests a simple 3-part 'introduction-argument-conclusion' structure, but that's still a good rule of thumb.

A good essay, even a shortish one, will have a lot of: "In part 2, I'm going to do so-and-so; this will enable us, in part 3, to assess the merits of such-and-such" and "Having established that so-and-so, let's now move on to consider the implications for such-and-such" and "However, there is still the lingering question (already touched on in part 2) of such-and-such" and "I will defer discussion of this question until part 4, by which time we will have a much clearer idea of such-and-such". Don't let your reader lose track of where you've been and where you're going.

Thinking in these terms will help you as well as your reader, because it will help you identify what's essential to the thread of your argument and what's tangential and can be safely relegated to footnotes and brief asides. If you can get all this clear in your mind at the planning stage, you'll save yourself a *lot* of time later on.

Can I add 2 pennyworth.

For a short essay, if you are trying to keep the word count down, I don't think there is so much need for the "tell em what you are going to tell them next".
Just get on with it.
Make sure that you have an introduction, a body and a conclusion.
The introduction sets the scene and demonstrates that you understand the context,
The body shows you understand the subject matter,
The conclusion shows that you can, well....., draw conclusions.

For a short essay i.e. 5k words - ish, you can assume the reader is taking it in a single sitting.
So you don't need flash backs & flash forwards, just make sure there is logical narrative flow.

In reports, you often see a section starting with "In the last section, we saw that..........."
and then a summary of something that you have only just read, a few seconds before.

This is fine in a 100k word Thesis but is unecessary padding in a short report.
After all, if the reader needs to revisit a previous section, they can do it for themselves.

The above is based on 20 years experience writing technical reports in industry where even 5k would be considered "a bit wordy".

Remember, "Brevity is the soul of Wit".

I know where Angus is coming from in the context of essays where word count is paramount, and maybe signposting isn't such a big deal in other subjects as it is in mine (philosophy, where it's obviously all about making complex arguments hang together). But when I came to select the writing sample to submit along with my PhD funding application, I went straight for the (4,000 word) essay that was best signposted - the one that I felt best demonstrated my ability to address a problem in a clear, insightful, carefully structured way.

It's not that it was full of passages summarising things I'd already said, just that I was careful to spell out the relevance of everything I was doing to the overall trajectory of the essay. I'm not sure it would have been a distinction-standard piece of work (or would have got me my funding) if I'd left the person reading it to figure out for themselves why I'd bothered to discuss X at such length, why I was ignoring Y, what exactly Z was supposed to demonstrate, why I thought A needed addressing before I could talk about B, etc. (It certainly wasn't an earth-shattering piece of original philosophy that cried out for a high mark; in fact it was my lowest-marked essay. But it did show that I knew how to piece together and pick apart arguments.)

Anyway, how's it going Sinead?