struggling with psychology essays

I feel really frustrated about my psychology essays marks because I had no progress in my last term!

I always received some comments like this:
- unclear sentences or confusing sentences
- not exactly answer the question
- some grammar errors (this has been improved a lot though)

BTW I am an international student so sometimes I really feel confused about the essay question. I don't know how to find the main point I should answer from the question.

Can anyone help with this? Many thanks!

I feel really frustrated about my psychology essays marks because I had no progress in my last term!

I always received some comments like this:
- unclear sentences or confusing sentences
- not exactly answer the question
- some grammar errors (this has been improved a lot though)

BTW I am an international student so sometimes I really feel confused about the essay question. I don't know how to find the main point I should answer from the question.

Can anyone help with this? Many thanks!

With unclear and confusing writing, the first advice I can give is to ask somebody to read it before you submit it. Ask a friend who doesn't do your course (so they don't copy you!) just to check on your grammar and clarity.

Paragraph structure also helps. Make sure that your paragraphs are a good length (usually 3-6 sentences) and that they only contain one overall theme or idea.

Sometimes writing can become unclear when the sentences are too long, so check whether this might be the problem.


If you're ever unsure what the point of the question is, you can probably speak to your tutor about it. (Having said that, you have to be careful not to look like you are being lazy and asking them to tell you exactly what to do)

I would possibly write down an interpretation of the question and a plan of how to answer it, and then ask the tutor whether they would mind looking at the plan to check whether you have understood the question.

hard to comment without seeing a sample essay, however they seem like common problems. I struggled a bit with all three until second year. Its definitely worth: (a) making sure you cover the whole reading list, and go beyond it if you have time (b) not wasting words by going off topic. Unlike at alevel, you don't get extra marks by "describing" studies or theories, so its not worth doing so unless your covering a theory that isn't so common. If you read through the reading list it should become really clear what questions and debates there are in the literature, and give you ideas about how to pursue the essay.

I know you are right but actually we don't have a reading list for every essay!And so you mean 'evaluation' is more important than 'description'? Because sometimes I got the question saying 'please describe ....' But I feel it difficult as I have no idea what to evaluate. I google 'evaluation of ...' but always got few papers. Any idea about this?Thanks!

Okay well for a start academic researchers don't publish essays - they publish original research or research reviews. So to get discussion/evaluative information, you can either look for reviews of a topic (search "review" AND key-word for topic), or you can look for recent primary research, and the introduction before experiments will contain a brief review of the literature and may include some evaluation points. A good way to see what the best articles in a topic are, is to search the key-word of the topic, then sort the papers by those most highly cited will be the most important ones.

You shouldn't really get a "describe" questions for long essays (i.e. those over 40 minutes long hand-writing times). Otherwise a good describe question will be those that have the best understanding of the issues, that have read the most research in the area and provide the best summary.

I see...so the important thing is to show the understanding of a topic but not just put everything I have read on an essay.