By Etukol March 18, 2021 - 11:03am

An essay is a written work that involves a methodological analysis and assessment of a certain topic or problem. For example, in the case of our NEISSER competition, you are invited to demonstrate and prove the "interestingness" of an experiment (although, I must say, this is a rather unusual formulation of the problem for an essay).

When writing an essay, it is easy to fall into one of two extremes - to describe facts, bypassing the interpretation (being afraid of its subjectivity), or, conversely, to describe your personal opinion without supporting it with facts. The art of writing an essay lies precisely in finding this balance, in the ability to express your position, logically summing it up and supporting it with rational, objective arguments.
Typically, a good essay describes and discusses several positions or points of view, and then, based on them, a conclusion is drawn that reflects the informed opinion of the author. Therefore, before writing an essay, you always need to formulate what you think about what you are writing about, what is your position, what idea you will defend. In the case of our essay, everything is simpler - in fact, the conclusion has already been made ("This experiment is interesting to me"), it remains to describe why.
It is worth starting work on an essay with a careful reading of its title or assignment. What are you being asked to do? Describe, compare, discuss? What is the question being asked? Do you understand all the terms at this stage? Based on this information, you can begin to think through the outline of the text. Before you start writing, please read and consider the information here carefully: https://wr1ter.com/blog

Next comes the turn of drawing up a plan and selection of material. Refer to the literature, try to get a rough picture of what you will be writing about. At this stage, you need to make an outline containing the main topics that you plan to cover. Perhaps this plan will be changed in the future. If your essay involves the analysis of a large number of sources (which is optional in our competition), after drawing up such an initial plan, it is worth starting to collect and organize links on its basis - in connection with which and what you will refer to.