Essence of a Psychology Essay
Just as interesting psychology is, writing psychology essays could be equally exciting and rewarding. It is important to understand the essence of such essays. Generally, these essays play an important role in examining your understanding of course content, analytical and critical skills, and the ability to resolve real-life situations.
Key Tips on how to Write a Psychology Essay
When writing a psychology essay, you should consider a number of factors. In psychology, these factors come in handy when it comes to how to write an essay. Such factors include:
a) It is critical to adequately evaluate the essay question. This involves analyzing the essay requirements in order to determine its expectations. Such expectations encompass essay scope and required details.
In this, you should study the essay question to determine what issues you are required to address and their respective parameters.
It is important to understand that psychology essay questions usually seek to examine the application of a broad body of knowledge.
To establish the pertinent issues and the applicable knowledge, you must break down the essay question into different parts and subparts and then prioritize them appropriately.
b) It is important to conduct a preliminary research before deciding on essay topic. This is quite essential in understanding the underlying issues, related themes, and available evidence.
Before coming up with the essay topic, conduct a small-scale research to help brainstorm on relevant content and the best approach.
If it is a take away essay, you should commit adequate time to conduct a basic research on the essay topic in order to establish the area in which the essay should focus on.
The acquired insight should be used to refine the essay topic as well as develop the essay thesis. This is critical in helping determine the scope of the essay.
c) Reflect throughout your essay. Reflection is very important in ensuring that the essay demonstrates your ability to apply the acquired knowledge.
Such reflection can be achieved through the use of avid examples and available data. In this, personal opinions should be avoided at all costs. You should ensure that all opinions are founded on facts and credible evidence.
Still on reflection, you are supposed to use language in a manner that helps your essay tell a story in the simplest way possible. You should employ the correct diction levels to ensure that your communication and narration are up to the expected standards.
d) Ensure that the essay has the right format. Paper format is critical in producing top quality work. Ordinarily, psychology essays should adopt the correct format and structure.
This looks at the parts of an essay (introduction, body, and conclusion) as well as paragraph and sentence structures.
Paper format also looks at elements such as first page, page numbers, headings, in-text citations, and reference list. You should ensure that your paper essay adheres to the right format to the latter.
Notably, in most cases, psychology essays utilize the APA paper format. It is therefore important to familiarize yourself with the format before embarking on constructing the essay’s argument(s).
Approach in Writing a Psychology Essay
The approach you adopt when writing your psychology essay is important in determining the quality of the work produced. Such an essay must exhibit all elements pertinent in an essay. In realizing this, the below steps are important.
a) Develop the essay topic. This should be the first step and should seek to determine what will be covered in the essay. It must be framed to effectively answer the essay questions.
As earlier mentioned, developing the essay topic should consider the requirements of the essay question. The topic must be within the right scope to ensure that it addresses all the relevant issues.
This step is critical in shaping essay arguments and should be founded on some research.
b) Collect pertinent evidence. This entails collecting data essential in answering the essay question. After determining the essay topic, you should go ahead and conduct an in-depth research to gather data and evidence essential in supporting the argument(s) put forward by the essay topic.
Such a research should encompass resources such as internet sources, library sources, and interviews with experts. It is important to take basic notes when collecting the evidence to help trace back the source if need be.
Importantly, all data collected must be from credible sources.
c) Develop essay outline. Developing essay outline would focus on coming up with a rough essay structure that incorporates different points supporting the question under study.
The process of constructing an outline entails grouping together information from different sources to develop basic themes that can be used as points to advance the psychology essay argument(s).
It is important to ensure that only data and evidence from credible sources is utilized. The points developed should be ranked based on their strength.
d) Write the essay. This step entails compiling all the evidence (points) to form one coherent narrative. As earlier noted, this is usually done in paragraphs that advance respective themes/arguments.
Writing a psychology essay is an art. With this in mind, it is important to ensure that there is a free flow of ideas in the essay. This looks at adhering to the correct structure, whether it is the essay parts or within paragraphs.
e) Proofread the essay. Proofreading the essay is important in ensuring that all mistakes are eliminated. This should look at grammatical errors and the flow of ideas. To achieve this, you should go through your essay at least twice.
f) Referencing. This step focuses on essay structure and formatting. It is a critical skills when it comes to how to write a psychology essay.
Usually, APA is the conventional format for psychology essays. However, there are exemptions and you should therefore ensure that your essay has the correct paper formatting, may it be APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, etc.