Speaker 1: So people are always asking me, Justin, how do you get better at writing essays, research, assignments, you know, big pieces of writing. And the answer is actually really simple. People that are good at writing are already writing this way. So it's a technique that is not really mine. It's I'm pretty sure this is kind of like the recommended way that you're actually meant to do this. But I don't really see many students doing it this way. And nine out of 10 times, they're not following this. And I think it's just because it's not really taught very well at school or even lower years of university so this is basically how you write pretty much any essay any text response or any kind of like article but before understanding the process we actually first need to understand where we're wasting most of that time and where students usually are struggling there are certain choke points or bottlenecks in the writing process one of those bottlenecks is the ideation stage in terms of what are the points that I'm actually going to try to communicate to answer the question or you know pull my point across or whatever it is that you're trying to do with this piece of writing and sometimes it can actually take even days to really figure out what are the key points that you're trying to get across. The next bottleneck is trying to figure out exactly how you're going to express all of those points and then how you're going to find ways to support it with parts of the text or research articles or literature or however it is that you're trying to support it but for every piece of writing that you're doing it always follows the format of an introduction where you're trying to just lay out your main points and then you go through the point and then you support it with some kind of evidence and then you just continue that process until you are just going point supported point supported point supported and you do that until all of your points are laid out. Towards the end, you can have additional discussion. You can try to bring some of those points together and compare them and contrast them and have more of a discussion. Sometimes you add your own personal reflection or opinion into that. Your personal reflection or opinion could be sprinkled in intermittently throughout each of the paragraphs beforehand. So this is where the structure is generally flexible, but the bulk of it is just about saying, okay, what is the point and then how am I going to support it? Good writers versus great writers the difference is that it's very fluent and it's very fluid the way that they discuss each of these points so someone that's very rigid would just say this is my point and this is the supporting argument and then you just continue doing that for someone that's a great writer they're able to do that with a level of sort of elegance in terms of their writing and that's one of those things that you do need to be reading a lot and analyzing the way other people write trying to write like you know your favorite writers and things like that this is a practice that you need to do to increase your overall acumen and that's not what I'm gonna be talking about I'm not gonna really talk about how you can write more elegantly because that's kind of a different process entirely but that is not also where the time is wasted and the points are lost for most students for most students the most time waste is either in procrastination because of thinking about man there's so much I need to write or is in figuring out how to actually structure the points in a way that actually makes sense what I often find is that students will just start either start writing and they'll just keep going and they just go okay here's the point and then here's what I can find to support it here's the point here's what I can find to support it and they'll just do that really linearly so the essay or the piece of writing just kind of gets built from the beginning to the end which might seem like kind of the natural way to do it but it's not the most effective way and it takes a lot of time and also you're more likely to procrastinate doing that because of the fact that it seems like an overwhelming amount of work. The better way of doing it is to construct your essay or assignment whatever your piece of writing in layers. So you'll hear me talking about layers a lot when it comes to learning I talk about different layers when you're studying all the time and those of you that watch my studying related videos you'll know that a lot of the techniques that I use revolve around this principle and it's simple it's just Just because that is easier for your brain to think in. Your brain is biologically wired with certain types of tendencies and when we use those tendencies to our advantage it becomes easier, when we fight against those tendencies it's harder, takes more energy, it feels like we're fighting uphill. So what do I mean by doing things in layers? So the first thing that you want to do is rather than starting with your points you actually want to get number one, if it isn't implicit enough already, you actually need to have a good conceptual understanding of the thing that you're writing about. So for example if it's a text, don't worry so much in the initial stages of preparing for the writing about exactly how you're going to write about it. Think more about getting a good understanding of the main themes and the main principles in the text that you're reading and especially how do those main themes connect and interact with each other. Once you have a good conceptual understanding and by the way you can study that exactly the same way that you would study maths or science. If you look at my other videos on study techniques or those of you that are going through the course you will know that the techniques I teach they are strangely very transferable across all of your subjects and that's because when it comes to learning it doesn't matter so much what subject you're learning or when you're learning it. The way your brain works in terms of processing and organizing information is generally pretty much the same no matter which subject that you're doing. So you can use all of those good techniques and you can get a really good conceptual understanding. What are the main points? How do the points interact with each other? Whether you're reading a research article, whether you're reading a fiction book, whether you're analyzing a movie, same principle. What are the main themes? How do they relate to each other? And go the extra step, which most people don't do, here's the pro tip, actually look a little bit about the author or the director or whatever, their background. Understanding a little bit about why they are writing about this helps make sense of why those themes were portrayed. If you imagine that you are about to make a movie or write a book, would you write about themes and principles that are not relevant to you at all. Probably not. You're going to write about something that is meaningful to you. And it's the same case for the authors that you're studying. There are things that happen in their lives and perspectives that they have that made certain perspectives and principles meaningful for them. Knowing about that allows the text or the movie or the research article to be something that you have a much more intuitive understanding of rather than just memorizing the different themes and other pieces of evidence around it, you can actually start drawing parallels and making sense of why the author is really trying to push certain points and when you understand why the person who created this is thinking the way that they do, you'll be surprised at how much easier it is to understand the flow of the text, what the key principles are and even why they use certain examples, especially for fiction where some of the examples they use often can parallel and mirror some of the experiences that they may have had in their own lives. They challenge you to find a text or something that you've studied at school, look at the author's background and try to look for parallels between the examples they have used in their own life and I think you'll be surprised at how much easier it actually makes it to understand how it goes. So that's stage one, getting an understanding of the conceptual flow. Why do we need to have this conceptual understanding? Because if you don't have this conceptual understanding, if there's a question that asks you to compare something, talk about a principle, back up a certain point. If you don't in your own head understand how it works, how are you meant to write about it? You need to have an understanding of how it all fits together in your own head first in order to use that information. If you don't understand how the main principles flow together and relate to each other and and you have just memorized it as like a list of themes and a list of examples, then you're going to find it really really difficult to have that excellent piece of writing that seamlessly flows between different examples and fluidly brings in different themes and different pieces of evidence to support it. You're going to find it difficult because you legitimately didn't know how it's connected. So step one is building that understanding and again using more effective studying techniques to do that rather than just rote memorization or please oh god no do not do this for English active recall and spaced repetition, you're going to find that process a lot easier and for those of you that are wanting a step by step walkthrough in terms of how to do that you can check the link down below for the course that I've made. Once we have done step one we are ready to move on to step two. Now starting from step two this is where we're really looking into the technique when you're sitting down and about to start writing. The first thing you want to do is instead of starting with the points you want to start with the questions, you want to start with the questions, you want to write down the series of questions in order where if these questions were answered they would form the main points of your argument. So there's a number of reasons that we do this. Number one, by starting with a list of in order the main kind of checkpoints you want to hit, it forces you to think about it from the perspective of the reader. It makes the flow much more logical. In fact, you can really get a good idea for exactly how you're going to structure your entire piece of writing without even thinking about what the points necessarily are. You don't need to know exactly what points you're going to write. And in fact, it's even better doing it this way because that leaves you open to thinking about different arrangements of points as you're writing. What are the questions that if I were to ask, this would create a very relevant discourse and a logical order for this article. So if we have an example here this is a piece of writing that I'm about to do. And so what you can see is that I have you know these main big headings for me just to outline which are the big areas of my text. Underneath this I've got the questions right so I'm starting with learning styles. This is a assignment, an essay that I'm going to be writing about different learning styles. This is part of my masters. These are the points that I'm going to be talking about right. What is It what are learning styles? Where did it come from? What does the research now say? Why is this a contemporary issue? How common is it? Where is the debate sitting so you can imagine that without really knowing about what the answers are? I can imagine that if I were to answer these questions, it would make for a really logical flow of events It's almost like I'm having a conversation with the topic directly. I'm imagining someone's teaching it to me so and while I am talking to the topic I'm asking the topic questions you know I'm saying so what are you? Where did your this idea come from? Okay what are we saying right now about it? You can imagine that this would be a logical way for me to have a conversation with someone if they were telling me about the topic and therefore I'm putting myself in the position of the readers perspective so I know what would make sense for a reader if I were to answer these questions, that is going to create a order of points that is easy to follow. And that's the most important thing. Now the additional benefit of doing it this way is that this questioning process doesn't take very long. I spent maybe 20 minutes on this questioning process. And by doing it in layers, each next step is a little bit easier. Doing a whole essay is daunting. I understand that. daunting for me as well. However, doing an outline of just the main headings and then just the key questions that I know I need to answer, that seems a lot more doable. So I'm more likely to do that. But because I've already started work on it, now I'm more focused. So the next time that I go into it, which is about to be for me imminently, all I need to do is go through these questions and all I need to do is answer them. And I know that if I answer these questions, I'll have the foundation of a really good piece of writing. And so now I'm going to go through and I'm just simply going to answer these questions. It gives my brain a clear focus, right? And we know that our brain works really well with focus. For example, I might say, think of an item that you own versus think of an item that you have in your bag. It's much easier for your brain to think when there are more narrow parameters. And that is exactly what this process is doing, is that it's narrowing your brain so it's less overwhelming and now the next stage will be step three where we're going to go through answer these questions and every time we answer a question we're going to just bring the evidence into it if we're doing a research piece we're going to find the relevant articles we're going to bring it into it to support our statements if it's a text response we're going to bring the evidence into it to support the statement and so this process is iterative process we were first thinking about what are the questions we need to answer in order to get the points and then focusing that into each aspect of it and then bring the evidence in. Fundamentally underpinned by a step before that which is conceptually and logically understanding what we're talking about. These are the ingredients to doing a successful piece of writing. Now often when I talk to students that are struggling with writing they're usually missing out on well they usually actually honestly missing out on this whole process completely and they're just literally just winging it which is probably what half of you people that are watching right now are doing but if they're not completely winging it what they usually missing is either number one that initial step of conceptually understanding the information first which means that it's really hard for them to think about it because they actually don't know the material very well or the issue is then the second aspect where they're not starting with these questions and so they're just trying to juggle all of these innumerable, many different points in their mind just trying to put it all together and piece it together to create something that sounds coherent and then you spend more time just trying to make it sound good and rearranging your points and then it's it's just a chaotic process it's like constantly there's just all these different points that you're shuffling around and trying to figure out how to make it sound good and then you're trying to figure out how to you know flow each sentence together and sometimes you'll be doing that as you're writing and it's like no that's just a lot of time is wasted there. Start with the frame, start with the questions, fill in the questions, take that and then bring the evidence in and once you've got that, you've got the flow, you've got the points, it makes sense. You might reorder a few things after you finish writing it if it makes sense to you and after that you then just go through and you clean it up, you change a few words around, you You add a few transitionary points and words and sentences to make it sound a little nicer and you just clean up your writing style and that's the kind of elegance aspect which I'm not going to go through because again it's a whole different thing but doing it this way will save you time. It's the way that I approach my research thesis which was like tens of thousands of words long. It's the way that I approach all of my writing. It's a way that I'm able to write a lot every single month and do it even though I'm busy and have other things going on I can manage my time I'm not really procrastinating and putting it off because it doesn't seem crazy overwhelming in my mind because I know that I can break it up into the stage I can do one stage on one day and I can do the next stage across two or three days is very achievable very focused and I guarantee that if you give this a go if you're not doing this already you will find that it's working for you so Let me know in the comments, is this the way that you write? If you like this video make sure to give it a like, if you have any feedback again leave a comment down below. If you want to see more of my content make sure that you hit the subscribe and if you even feel super committed you can click the bell notification as well. But anyway thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time. You