Essay Advice For Undergraduates

This advice is aimed at students just beginning their undergraduate degrees in Film Studies. Though many of the points might seem rather obvious, these have been the most common issues that I’ve come across having marked many undergrad essays over the last few years. The advice is designed purely as that; this is in no way a guaranteed recipe for academic success, but rather a few comments based upon the recurring problems I see in the work I mark, and more or less how I approached this kind of work when I was an undergrad (and, all things considered, I did alright). I'm going to use an example essay question entitled ‘Describe Some Of The Functions Of Editing In The Films Of Jan Svankmajer’. I’ve done this in the hope that there isn’t a real essay question out there that I'm going to be giving answers away to. If you don’t know who Jan Svankmajer is, don’t worry, I'm only going to refer to this fictional essay question as demonstration.

Structuring

Let’s assume you have an essay of 2500 words. My personal advice is to be simplistic and anal about breaking it down into even chunks. Let’s say 500 words can form both your introduction and conclusion (in themselves, they are basically summaries that read along the lines of ‘this is what I'm going to look at and why it’s important’ and ‘this is what I have looked at, and it proves my point nicely’). This leaves you 2000 words to break down into 4 points. Some essay word counts will be shorter, some will be longer – but the key here is to try and divide the essay into a few points (generally 3 to 5 is enough) of more or less equal length. You don’t need to be so rigid when you actually write it –some points will warrant more words, others less. It’s a guide to make sure you don’t fall too short of the word count or go massively over. I can assure you in no uncertain terms that, even if you say you’ve written the correct word count, we can tell by looking if it’s not (we have some 30 other essays on our desk that we can compare yours with, after all).

Try to think about each of your points as a sub-question and take 500 words to try and answer it. This way, all your points have a purpose in the overall argument. In our Svankmajer example, for instance, we could structure it in one of two ways; either by looking at four films and discussing the editing in each, or by looking at different approaches to editing exploring how his films fit into these categories. I'm going to go with the latter. So my first section will look at continuity editing, perhaps asking something along the lines of ‘does Svankmajer use much continuity editing in his films, and if so, to what end?’ The sub-questions don’t need to be ground-breaking, they’re purely for you to help you focus your attention; you won’t keep them in the text of the finished essay. So, I will then identify moments of continuity editing in his films and discuss the relevance – for instance, Picnic With Weissman uses establishing shots in order to link the otherwise disparate events going on. This creates a sense of unity between the different areas of action even though they rarely overlap with each other directly. I might then look at the possible influence of Soviet Montage on the films’ editing (Svanmajer made films in Communist Czechoslovakia so the influence is quite probable). I can then discuss moments when two images are edited together to create particular mental association that are unrelated to the spatio-temporal unity of continuity editing. I might then talk about the rhythm of Svankmajer’s editing, its relationship to the music score, or maybe the fact that as stop-motion animation, his films are edited on a micro-level of the frame-by-frame process. The actual specifics are unimportant. What is important is that each point builds upon the last, that I don’t simply repeat myself as I work through these different editing modes.

Description And Analysis

Undergraduate essays have a tendency to conflate these two concepts and it is important that you understand the difference between the two - and what their relationship is. Description is a necessary part of the process; you always need to be sure that whoever is reading the piece knows what specific sequence you are looking at. But description is only the ground floor. You describe all of the pertinent details that you need to in order to make sure that the reader is on the same page as you, but then you move on to analysing them. Your description of the framing of a sequence should be in service of analysing the purpose and function of the framing in the particular sequence (who’s in the frame, who isn’t, how does this steer our understanding of the shot?). But likewise, analysis doesn’t work without description. Many an essay has been written that leaps straight into analysis without providing any kind of context – the person marking the essay will most likely have seen the film you’re writing about, but they won’t know what moment you’re discussing unless you tell them.

Incorporating Other Peoples’ Work

First year degree students tend to slip into two camps when it comes to using references; either, you quickly find a bunch of quotes that agree with what you’re saying and stick them in, or, you intentionally set out to disprove or disagree with an existing position. While both of these approaches are perfectly valid in terms of the overall academic practice of essay/article writing, it’s not the best way to start out with your first few essays. The former approach can look simplistic and give the impression that all you’ve done is scour books for quotes, rather than actually reading anything. The latter is unadvised on the basis that, as an undergrad, you’re highly unlikely to be able to mount a particularly convincing argument – you end up looking arrogant if you criticise a well respected academic with a poorly conceived criticism. The best approach is to summarise and incorporate: read an article or chapter, make sure you’ve understood the position and argument of the piece, then put forward that argument in a succinct paragraph. This paragraph then becomes a linking point in your overall argument. For instance, we can look in the Peter Hames edited collection Dark Alchemy: The Films Of Jan Svankmajer and read articles by Michael O'Pray and Roger Cardinal. Summarise the gist of what each author is claiming and spend no more than a couple of sentences on each. Do they agree or disagree with each other in any significant way? Where does your own claim sit in relation to their ideas? The point here is to demonstrate that you get what they're saying, but don't spend any more time on them than necessary. The fear for most students is that this approach will get them in trouble with plagiarism. As long as you make it quite clear which ideas are yours and which ideas are taken from another source, then you shouldn’t have any problems.

An Essay Is Not A Review

Though it might pain many of you to accept it, the fact is that we really don’t care much about your opinion of a film. Unless the question is very specifically asking you to evaluate a film (which is rare), you should always avoid telling us what you personally thought about it. There are a great many platforms from which to voice your personal opinion about a film; from blogs, message boards, youtube videos, or just ranting with your mates down the pub. An academic essay, however, is not the place for it. Of course, the way you personally perceive a film will affect the way you approach the particular question, a certain degree of subjectivity is unavoidable. But what you need to make sure to avoid is the attitude of ‘I loved it, so it must be good’, or the more common and infinitely worse ‘I hated it, so it must be bad’.

What makes a film student different from a film fan or film critic is that you need to have a wide and varied appreciation of all modes of film; outside of your own comfort zone of the films you happen to enjoy watching. For many film students, this is the major learning curve of the degree. You are not being asked to evaluate a film, you are being asked to identify certain pertinent details about a film, extract them and interrogate them in order to enhance our understanding of the film. Indeed, you (or your parents, or the government on the understanding that you’ll pay them back) are paying a huge amount of money to come to University and study film; there’s precious little benefit in just coming and doing exactly what you’d do coming out of the cinema on a Saturday night. You can hate Citizen Kane with the fiery passion of Hell, which is perfectly fine from the point of view that every person is free to their personal preference. But a film like Citizen Kane doesn’t achieve its status by accident. People didn’t sit around a table, randomly pulling film titles out of a hat in order to decide which are the most important cinematic works. Even though you might hate it, as a film student, you need to be able to identify the film’s achievements – if you can’t see them, you’re probably taking the wrong degree.

Finally, it is important to always be clear on what the essay question is asking you to do. Our example here is a pretty straightforward and open one, but other questions can be quite specific in what they're after. If the question is 'How is Psycho a prime example of Classical Hollywood Storytelling?' don't spend your time talking about Hitchcock's other films or the avant garde film movement of the 1920s. Demonstrate your knowledge of Psycho and the narrative devices of the Classical Hollywood period. It might seem painfully obvious, but there are always students that just don't seem to pay any attention to what is being asked of them. Don't be one of them!

                                                                                                                                     - P. S.