TOMI'S GUIDE TO PHILOSOPHY ESSAYS
FAQ
How can I write a good essay?
In a word: clarity. Lots of other things matter too. It matters whether your arguments are any good. It matters a lot whether you have demonstrated that you understand the topic. It matters an awful lot whether you’re actually answering the essay question. But these things, in a way, are secondary. If I can’t tell what you’re on about, then it’s almost certainly not a good essay. And if I find it very easy to tell what you’re talking about, then even if what you’re saying is wrong, at least it’s easy to tell where it’s wrong. So, if you’re writing clearly, you’re going to learn, which is what we’re really after.
There are other things too, but clarity is the one thing I want to emphasise. It’s probably the most frequent thing that comes up in practice, anyway.
What else matters?
Well, as I said, you really do need to make sure you’re actually answering the essay question. So, decide what you think about the topic, say it, and then argue/for defend what you say. That’s usually how it works.
It matters to have good arguments. What’s a good argument? Well, to be honest, usually a clear one. It also helps if you’re using logic correctly. Mostly (unless you’re doing a logic course with me) this will just be informal. When you use proposition X to get to proposition Y*, you should make sure that Y really does follow, or at least gains some support, from X. If Y only gets support from X but doesn’t follow, you should be aware of this.
For example, if (i) it would be a very good thing to give to charity, this arguably supports (ii) it is right to give to charity and wrong not to give to charity. But while (ii) arguably gets some support from (i), it doesn’t logically follow unless you appeal to other premises as well.
You should also try to understand what you’re talking about. Making sure you’re writing clearly will help with this. If you find you can’t write clearly about something, that might be because you don’t understand it. At this point it’s often a good idea to go back to the relevant parts of the readings. If it still doesn’t make sense to you, consider asking me about it. (See “what are the rules for asking you about things?”)
Finally, be concise and make your points efficiently. I consider additional words in your essay to be a cost, not a benefit. The cost is often worth it: you need to use more words in order to talk about more things. But if you use more (or longer) words without talking about more things, you’re giving up something for nothing. Conciseness matters because concise writing is effective writing.
*Wait, what’s a proposition?
It’s basically a thing that can be true or false. Sentences are also like that, but sentences are in particular languages, and propositions are more like “the thing that a sentence expresses”, which isn’t in a particular language. (Two sentences in two different languages, or sometimes in the same language, might express the same proposition, e.g., “my house is big” and “mi casa es grande”.)
What are the rules for asking you about things?
You can email me any time. I’ll try my best to reply promptly, but how prompt I can be depends on what else I’ve got going on at the time. Sometimes I’ll be looking for a distraction from my work and I’ll reply in fifteen minutes. Sometimes it’ll take a few hours. Sometimes it’ll be a day or two. If you’ve been waiting for more than two days, you should email me again and politely ask for a reply. I get a lot of emails. Your earlier one might have slipped my mind.
If I’m running office hours during the term (if I am, you will have been told this), you can show up to my office during that time without arranging anything and talk to me in-person about the course material. Or, regardless of whether I’m running office hours or not, you can send an email asking to meet me in-person. I can’t exactly make a promise about this, but usually I can meet you at short notice, sometimes even within the hour, if you’re prepared to walk down to my office. I’m often in my office anyway, and I’m usually close by otherwise. If I’m not around, I’ll let you know when I will be next, and I’ll try to help you by email in the meantime.
Your problem doesn’t have to be that specific. For example:
FINE: “Dear Tomi, I have a question about Sobel’s response to the demandingness objection to consequentialism. If I’m understanding him right, he says that non-consequentialism is also demanding because it requires people to be left to die, so it’s misleading to say that only consequentialism is demanding because it requires you to save them. But I feel like I’m missing something. Surely you can only be required to do things. It can’t really be required of you that other people do things, I mean that doesn’t really make sense. So I feel like what Sobel says doesn’t really work. But it can’t be that easy, right? I mean, this is obviously a good paper. I think there’s got to be more to it. Can you say anything helpful about this?”
ALSO FINE: “Dear Tomi, I have a question about sense and reference. I think I understand that the morning star sort of means a different thing to the evening star. But I don’t really get it. Could we meet and talk about it?”
ALSO FINE: “Hi Tomi, I hope you’re ok! I’m a bit confused about the Kant reading. I mean, what’s a maxim? Is it just something you do? I don’t really get it.”
ALSO FINE: “Dear Tomi, I’ve been working on this week’s essay on the non-identity problem. I just wanted to check I’m understanding the problem correctly. Here’s what I think it is:
.If you make future generations better off, different people will exist.
.If different people will exist, then you don’t make any individual person better off.
.So, if you make future generations better off, you don’t actually make any individual person better off.
Is that basically right, or am I misunderstanding things?”
NOT FINE: “Dear Tomi, I’ve been writing on the mereology question. But what I don’t understand is which is the right view supposed to be? Is it mereological nihilism?” [You can send this email, but I’m not going to give you the answer you’re looking for, and even if I did it wouldn’t be useful for you!]
Some of this writing advice is different to what I’ve been told before!
Sorry. I guess there are disagreements about effective writing. This is my opinion about what’s best. But I think most of these opinions are fairly widely shared among the (anglophone) philosophy profession. At least it’s not too far off the norm, I think. Especially in other subjects, your instructors might say that other standards of writing might apply. You should listen to those instructors when it comes to their subjects (and to philosophy instructors with different opinions to me, when they’re teaching). But for my subject, when I’m teaching, this is my advice.
Ten common traps students often fall into:
1) Talking about the literature too much, and not spending enough time explaining what you think.
It is important to read and cite the literature, and you will usually want to do this some of the time in a successful essay. However, the point of a tutorial essay is not to convince me that you’ve done the readings. The readings are suggested because they are likely to help you understand the general topic, but you don’t always need to refer to every reading in your essay.
The reason this matters is that every word spent talking about what someone else thinks is a word you’re not using to explain what you think. And while it’s important to do a bit of both, a first-class essay has to involve some of your original ideas and thoughts. That’s what we’re really here for. Honestly, I don’t care that much what Thomson, Chalmers or Searle think about the topic. I want to know what you think.
2) Using complicated words for no real reason.
You do sometimes need to use complicated words. Occasionally, you just can’t get by without saying “supervenience” or “hypothetical” or even “epicycle” (although I think I have never needed to use this last word, myself!)
But most of the time, you don’t. Using big words has disadvantages as well as advantages. It often makes it harder to understand what’s going on. And that means the all-important clarity of your essay can suffer. When I can’t understand easily what’s going on in my students’ essays, maybe seven times out of ten it’s at least partially down to them using big words. Don’t do it. Write plainly wherever possible. Your goal should be that your essay, if read out to some random person, would make sense and they would know what you’re on about. Sometimes that isn’t possible (we’re doing complicated stuff after all), but that’s the ideal.
You might have had situations before where it made sense to use complicated words in schoolwork in order to demonstrate that you know them. (Especially if you’re an international student and you’ve taken the TOEFL or a similar English language test, you might have been taught to sprinkle a few big words in to show that you know how to use them.) But a tutorial essay isn’t about impressing me with your vocabulary. I already know that you’re smart and you have good language skills, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. So don’t worry about whether you sound sophisticated.
I’m guilty of this kind of thing myself, including in published work. I think we all are from time to time. But it’s something to be avoided where possible.
3) Writing an introduction that doesn’t explain what you’re going to talk about and what you’re going to say about it.
Writing a good introduction is important because of – you guessed it – clarity. If you have a brief, understandable explanation of what you’re going to say, then I’m much less likely to get lost while reading your essay. Of course, when you start the essay, you probably don’t know exactly what you’re going to do. That’s fine: just write something like [FILL IN WHAT I’M GOING TO DO], start doing the thing, then come back when you’re done with everything and fill it in.
Most of the first-class essays I’ve seen have good introductions. It’s possible to come back from a bad one, but it’s hard.
Basically, what you want to do in an introduction is to very briefly explain what you’re going to talk about (usually included very brief definitions or explanations of the key terms)
EXAMPLE:
4) Discussing arguments without ever endorsing a position.
This isn’t exactly a mistake. But it’s usually not the best way of writing a philosophy essay. One of the things I want to see from you is an overall assessment of what we should take away from the stuff you’re talking about. Usually, the easiest way to do this is to just commit to a position and argue for it. It’s ok if you’re not really sure that the position is correct. (If you are sure which position is correct, you’re probably overconfident.)
The position in question doesn’t need to be of the form “Theory X is correct/incorrect”. It could be something like “Argument Y for Theory X is mistaken”. What’s important is that this position gives a full or partial answer to the essay question you’ve been given.
By the way, I did this one all the time when I was an undergraduate, and it’s one of the main reasons why my essays weren’t very good.
5) Not being clear about which position you’re arguing for.
This is obviously connected to the above trap. Even if you’ve made up your mind which position you’re batting for, this doesn’t help me unless you write it down clearly. Ideally, you should make this clear in the introduction.
6) Changing your mind during the essay.
It’s quite normal to start an essay believing one thing and come out the other end believing another. That’s absolutely fine, but the tutorial essay you send me should be coherent. The only fix for this, sadly, is to spend more time going through your essay after completing your first draft. Also make sure that you update your introduction so that it reflects what you actually did, not just what you were planning to do when you started.
7) Writing unnecessary things to increase your word count.
You might write down (for example) what seems like a good explanation of a concept, but then worry that what you’ve written is too short. Don’t worry about this. Short is good, while fluff is the enemy of clarity. And clarity is what makes a good essay. I strongly prefer a clear, concise essay of 1,000 words to a less clear, less concise essay of 2,000 words which says basically the same thing.
8) Not taking opposing arguments and positions seriously enough.
Perhaps you’ve got an essay question on interpersonal aggregation. John Taurek says that it doesn’t make sense to talk about the aggregate of the pain of several people. You think this is crazy. You think to yourself: “more people in pain means more pain. Duh!”
It’s fine to think this, and perhaps you’re even right about it. (Then again, perhaps not.) But if your essay question is to investigate whether Taurek is right, you can’t just dismiss his view. You need to provide arguments against it. So, ideally, you need to try and understand where he’s coming from and then think of an argument that might be persuasive. Or, if you can’t understand where he’s coming from, you need to say more about why the position just can’t be right. What you shouldn’t do is just say that it’s silly. If you absolutely have to do this, find an implication of the view that seems silly, and then say this this is unbelievable.
9) Trying to engage with every opposing argument and position.
This one is sort of the opposite of the previous point.
Sometimes, philosophers say things that seem crazy. David Lewis famously thinks that possibilities correspond to real objects and states of affairs that are spatiotemporally isolated to us. (On this view, perhaps Star Wars really takes place “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” – from a certain point of view.) Graham Priest thinks that there can be true contradictions. I think that it would be better if everyone were just barely happy, provided there were a heck of a lot more of us.
Sometimes, you have to engage seriously with views like this. The essay question might make you do it. But other times, you don’t. If you think that a view is crazy, it’s the main opposition to your position, and it’s not of central relevance to the essay topic, it’s ok to put it to one side. Just say quickly why you don’t think this view is right and then explain that you’re going to set the view aside for the purposes of this essay. It’s fine to do this! It’s very important to go in-depth on certain arguments and positions. That often means that you can’t talk about everything. In general, depth is usually better than breadth.
10) Bullshitting.
My older brother, who also studied philosophy (as joint honours), used to tell me that he had a trick for criticising virtually any view in metaphysics or even in philosophy more broadly: just say that it “comes with too much ontological baggage”.
What the heck does that mean? In some contexts, it might amount to something meaningful, important and true. But if you just say it about any old view, then it becomes “something that sounds vaguely philosophical, but which doesn’t actually mean very much”. In other words, it’s bullshit.
There is something meaningful that it might often stand for. Maybe the view you’re criticising implies that there are lots and lots of different kinds of entities in the world, and in general you think that this is a bad feature of a metaphysical theory. If this is what you think, say it. The advantage of putting it this way is that it’s clear what you take the problem to be, and it gives you space to expand on what you mean.
It might sometimes be appropriate to say that a view has “too much ontological baggage” without further elaboration. For example, you might be mentioning problems of this sort which are generally well-known. But it’s usually not appropriate in an undergraduate essay. First, because its meaning is not clear, and second, because you are not supposed to write from a place where you can assume all the stuff that’s generally well-known among professional philosophers. (That would probably include, among other things, most of the content of your course.)
My brother thought that this sort of thing helped his marks. Personally, I doubt it. I think probably his marks were good because he’s a clever person, a good writer on the whole, and he did the readings.