Education Superbook #1 Book 11. Academic Writing Guide

When you write an essay on anything, the presumption is that you are not just summarizing and regurgitating existing knowledge. You're spozed to have your own unique viewpoint or a different perspective on the issue at hand.

When I write this book, I'm not in school or part of academia. I can say anything I want in any format I want. If I was in academia, they would want a certain format that roughly corresponds with the scientific method, even for social science subjects.

They want what they call a literature review, a list of existing academic literature you presumably read that you built on in your essay. This literature you use is basically two lists in your article:

1.) A list of References, the books you read.
2.) A list of footnotes, mostly quotes you used from others.

Pick a topic. The best way to pick a topic in any subject while at school or in life is to gravitatie towards what naturally, intuitively interests you. You can be a good brownnoser and do what the teacher wants or you can be cool, unique, creative and interesting and pick out your own ideas.

The paradox or lie of academia is that it is made up of free thinkers encouraging the free flow of ideas but it's not true. Most teachers and professors want you to stay in the lines so to speak. They don't want you to go beyond existing knowledge with your own ideas because everything is supposedly scientific, even the artsy stuff and their job is to teach a packaged subject. They're accountable to spoonfeed you the existing stuff and not let you go off and explore your own whims.

If you do, they might think you're a loose cannon who does not have a grip on the stuff they're teaching you.

The truth is that most great discoveries and inventions are made by loners and teams of people that are not part of the mainstream knowledge system but for now, you're in school trying to get some credential so I'm telling you to play their game.

You can write good essays with clear, simple arguments just don't write out of intuition much. Always build on someone else's ideas. Document it.

Find the academic journals in your field. See if you can find them online. If not, find them at the academic libraries at a college. Public libraries rarely keep hardcopy academic journals onsite.

These journals are your life as a college student and your future if you want to get a doctorate. Your career ambition is basically to get articles published in the journals in your field so study them then write articles the way they want them.

If you want to be a free thinker, start a blog, create podcasts and videos and try to get into alternative talk radio like Coast-to-Coast AM or rense.com.

To me, writing academic papers in the so-called social sciences is stupid because they miss the whole point which is about individuals like you and me thinking up stuff then writing it out. They want you to do some kind of study then get some significant results by crunching the numbers.

Look through the existing literature.

Try to put your own spin on it or critique the existing knowledge to say why you think it's not very good.

Make up your arguments or points.

When you're critiquing other people's ideas, use logic to make your case.

Loads of people who write articles mistakenly think that using big words makes them sound sophisticated and advanced. The best writers try to be as simple and clear as possible and try to make themselves invisible. I don't want to hear somebody's little story about something. I just want the facts and a logical-sounding essay.

Constantly edit your work.

Take the time to put in a few references and footnotes. Even if you didn't use any and just wrote the thing off the top of your head, it's no sweat to get a book then copy some of the quotes from that one book that the author footnoted. It makes it look like you did a bunch of research all over the place.