In 1953, Alex Osborn developed the idea of brainstorming – an approach to problem solving which facilitates the raising of different ideas and perspectives, however strange or unusual they might first seem. This approach very much encourages thinking around an issue from different perspectives, developing novel ‘outside of the box’ ideas. In the 1960s Tony Buzan, who was frustrated with traditional note-taking, developed a visual way of connecting ideas which became known as mind-mapping (Buzan, 1993). In mind-mapping the core topic or focus is typically placed in the middle of a page with links branching from it to show connected ideas and thoughts. This method for generating ideas and for representing their relationship have been used in education for several decades now and could help you with your essays.

      These tools can help with our academic work. Brainstorming can provide the permission and context for generative and creative ideas, whilst mind-mapping can enable a fun and visually appealing way of helping to plan our essays and check what we know about a topic for a forthcoming exam. But perhaps they are most effective if we are aware of potential limitations, or misuses. Blue-sky thinking about our essay topic is great – but our essays have to address the precise essay topic and the core literature. Visually appealing representations of ideas are a brilliant idea, but do remember that language itself can often represent much more subtle nuances of how things inter-relate than lines alone can, however multi-coloured they may be.

      How to really make it your own

      What does it mean to make it your own?

      This sounds obvious, but it isn’t – especially as most of us have never been taught how to take notes from source materials. If we do receive such tuition, it is most likely hurried, obvious and focuses on the practical ephemera (have your laptop ready and organise your digital files) as much as on the intellectual substance of note-taking. But there is an intellectual challenge in note-taking that is easily underestimated – if we don’t recognise that, we could be in trouble. If you give note-taking the respect it deserves – seeing it as a challenging and creative part of writing your essay – you will be able to do it much more effectively and this will enhance your essays.

      Think of all the online and hard-copy sources of information that you have found to be relevant for the essay you are thinking about right now. Immediately, you may have some notes you took down in class; there may be lecture slides or printed notes; there’s probably at least one textbook, and most likely some additional references. If you have read all of these, they won’t form your essay, but they certainly can inform it. Sources, however good they are, will not ‘tell us what to write’, but they will contain arguments and details that we can weave into our own argumentative essay. You are the Hercule Poirot or the Sherlock Holmes of your essay, marshalling the evidence and weighing up the different interpretations. Don’t become less than that. You are the person who can demonstrate in this very essay your own intelligent engagement with the complex and contradictory ideas and evidence in front of you.

      You may feel that it is all very well being told that you should make it your own and be given a sense of how creative and heroic that can be, but how on earth is it done? Use the examples below to help you get a vivid sense of what it looks like when sources are used poorly and effectively. From this you can build an understanding about how you can really have a sense of sources as resources, which are there for you to use in constructing your essay. To do this means that we are being intelligently proactive, coming to the sources with a sense of what we are looking for. We are not so rigid that we fail to learn anything, but nor are we so passive that we are waiting for what we read to dictate what we write.

      How to move beyond word substitution

      In a famous scene from the US sitcom Friends (www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1tOqZUNebs), Joey tries to make his letter of recommendation sound ‘smart’ by using a thesaurus to substitute words. Using this technique, his original sentence ‘They are warm, nice people with big hearts’ becomes ‘They are human prepossessing homo sapiens with full-sized aortic pumps’. It’s unlikely that you would use any form of word substitution quite so blindly, but it is amazing how often intelligent people use word substitution to ‘make it their own’ – or at least to look like it’s their own. One problem with taking someone else’s writing and substituting words within it is that plagiarism software will detect word matches even if there are word substitutions sprinkled throughout the passage. If you change too many individual words within the original sentence structure, your writing will look odd – nearly as odd as referring to people as having ‘full-sized aortic pumps’. Fundamentally, swapping words in other people’s writing means that you are cheating yourself out of something really remarkably precious – the opportunity to think, to think about a discipline that you are interested in. Why not give up on word substitution scams – they don’t convince anyone – and instead really make it your own? Table 2.6 provides some suggestions for overcoming the main obstacles to making it your own.

Table 2.6

      Use the examples below to get a sense of how you can make the source material that you come across your own. For the two examples provided, look at the target passage and then at the attempts of the authors to make it their own. Attempt one relies on swapping words, which is one of the most common ways in which people try, and fail, to make source material their own, whereas attempt two really engages with the ideas.

      Example one

      Imagine that you need to complete an essay entitled ‘Outline and evaluate Kelley’s Covariation Model of Causal Attribution’. You would not be alone in finding this model quite technical and, at least in part, tricky to articulate clearly. Then you stumble on the following text:

      Target passage

      Kelley followed Heider in suggesting that identifying the broad location of the cause – internal to the person or external to them – was a crucial goal of our attribution reasoning. Kelley also subdivided the category of external to distinguish stimulus (a recurring feature external to the person) from circumstance (something specific to this instance of the behaviour). For Kelley, we all (ideally) follow a causal analysis that is similar