How To Write An Essay On Books
An essay is a written elaboration on a question or topic. Therefore, writing an essay is an excellent way to summarize a subject that is addressed in one or more books.
The first step in creating an essay is choosing a topic. This can be a self-formulated question or a theme that you encountered while reading a book. Next, you begin your literature research by reading at least one book on the topic. You should highlight all relevant passages in the book and take notes on your thoughts about them.
Following the literature research, you can establish the structure of the essay. For this, you should formulate various subtopics and questions that you want to address in the essay. You can use these subtopics as section headings to organize your essay. Additionally, you should write an introduction to the topic and the structure of the essay and conclude with a summary and a brief conclusion. Furthermore, it is advisable to include a list of the sources used so that you can reference the individual topics at any time.
If you read multiple books on a topic, you should compare and contrast them. First, you should find consistent definitions for the key terms and technical vocabulary that the authors use. Then, you should compile all the theses from the authors regarding your topic and define any disagreements. This will allow you to highlight and analyze the discussion between the authors by justifying and comparing their theses.
When writing the essay, you should summarize the key statements from the books you have read in your own words and connect them with your own knowledge. Try to evaluate the statements and verify their accuracy. You should also discuss contradictory statements and theories from the authors. Utilizing additional sources can be helpful to look up any unresolved questions. Moreover, you should explore the authors’ statements further and consider them from various perspectives. Think about the possibilities and consequences that arise from them.
Once you have completed the essay, you can memorize it and transfer it to long-term memory. It is helpful to create a mind map for the essay that includes all the topics and keywords. For each subtopic, draw a main branch and attach all the keywords related to that subtopic. This will give you an easily understandable overview of the structure and content of the essay. You can then memorize the keywords from the mind map using the loci method. This way, you can mentally walk through the route of your loci method while recalling the essay and add the corresponding context to each keyword. In this way, you will have the entire content of the essay readily available in your mind.
To further transfer the essay into long-term memory, you should store it in your knowledge base and review it regularly using spaced repetition. If you even want to memorize the exact wording of the essay, you can do so paragraph by paragraph using Anki. Create an Anki card for each paragraph, with the topic of the paragraph on the front and the text of the paragraph copied on the back. Then, you can memorize these cards using Anki’s spaced repetition method.
