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[heydude6]

This isn't the usual life advice topic. I'm not here to talk about relationships, domestic affairs or money problems. I'm here to talk about something that is a bit simpler, something that may hopefully be easier to resolve. (Disclaimer: Beware of high school drama and walls-of-text)

So, I've never been good at writing English essays, that is a fact that has never escaped me. But this only became a serious problem in high school. I wasn't awful mind you, my first (and as far as grades are concerned "best") essay was a 79% (that's a B+ and one percentage away from an A- for those of you who still receive letter grades), but compared to the nineties and high-eighties I'm used to getting, this was cause for alarm.

"Ok, so 79%. I'll learn from my mistakes and write an essay with marks in a more acceptable range" was what I thought. I got another essay, wrote it, felt pretty confident and when I handed it in... I got a 74%.

This became increasingly worrying and the next essay I wrote was a big struggle for me. Miraculously and to my surprise, I managed to get a 76%. What really annoyed me though was how my teacher wrote about how much my writing had improved over the year, even though the marks didn't reflect that. Sure it was better than my last essay, but it pales in comparison to my first one.

Despite all of that, I was actually optimistic about the next year. I believed that I would take the lessons that I learned from the previous year to heart and write essays that I could actually be proud of. Unfortunately, I got one of the worst possible teachers in the school.

At first I didn't see what all of the fuss was about. He wasn't mean, and he was the type of guy I could relate to pretty well, but the problem was that he was an incredibly hard marker.

Still, I didn't know what was coming and I began to work on my essays harder than I ever did the previous year. I started to work on the essays in-class (by writing on sheets of paper when I wasn't writing on computers), I constantly asked the teacher questions (to be fair, he was pretty skeptical about my ideas, something no other English teacher has been since), I got standing ovations whenever we had to act out Shakespeare to make it more engaging for the class, but most of all...

I managed to break my procrastination habit! Whenever something was assigned, I would go home and immediately work on it every single day. Unfortunately, this hard work wasn't producing the expected results and my marks had been lower than ever (no mark going over a 74). When I was writing what I considered to be my best essay yet, I ended up getting the worst mark I ever had on an English essay (73 to be exact).

After this I was brocken. I had two more essays left that year, but the first one was handed in extremely late and it was also pretty rushed, while I didn't hand the other one in at all. My report card mark for English was a 64 that year.

I never fully recovered from that. Despite getting a better teacher (a lot better, I probably won't write about it in the OP though, I've been writing this for too long now), my attitude towards essays has been fatalistic. The course just gets harder the higher up you go in grades and the new expectations can be quite overwhelming. One example is that it is now expected of you to re-read a book again and write down every single quote that might be useful to you. I think this is insane! Addding on to that are things such as sickness which makes you miss possibly important classes as well as research that essentially says that I was screwed over by events way in the past (in a nutshell, I've had writing problems since I was old enough to start doing writing assignments. The fact that we are only now addressing them in high school is a tragedy), and you get a person who believes that the deck is hopelessly stacked against them. In the dwarf fortress sense I "don't care about anything anymore"

The immediate consequence of this is that I've lost all the good work habits I acquired in the previous year (this is the lost work ethic I was referring to in the thread title) and my procrastination is worse than ever. I usually end up having only around 2 days to write an essay. I've written two essays with this new teacher and they are 73 and 74 respectively.

I haven't completely given up though. I've tried a lot of things this year... English tutors, talking to teachers, a private English professor, Google, but they all failed.


Now that the exposition is out of the way I just want to say a few final things. This isn't a topic about how to write a good essay (it differs in each country), but about how to regain those positive work habits I had in the previous year. It's just that it was such a nightmare putting them into practice and to get such a marginal reward destroys my will to return to them.

[nenjin]

Sacrifice fun.

Without fun pressuring you to finish, you can get OCD about polishing your work.

I can't really relate, unfortunately. Writing is something that has always just come to me naturally. Punctuation and grammar aside, I've never had to struggle to write an essay. I'd just bang them out days or weeks in advance of the due date and spend the last couple days polishing and refining it.

But essentially if you don't convince yourself you can improve, no amount of tactics is going to yield a better grade.

(As an aside....I caught several typos and misspellings in your text. Good writers read what they write obsessively, trying to improve it, trying to articulate their point better, trying to present their work in the best possible light. Not for a grade per se, but because you want to express yourself in text the way you express yourself in your head. It's why if you check my edit histories I have dozens and dozens of edits per post.)

[Taffer]

Solving procrastination is rarely only a matter of willpower: often the willpower is there, but the environment isn't sufficient. It's hard to quit smoking when your coworkers go on smoke breaks, for example, and it's hard to lose weight when your social circle eats out often. Control your environment, don't just try to increase your willpower. Make distracting yourself harder: you can block certain websites, for example, or uninstall video games. Consider blocking Youtube, and deleting your Facebook/Twitter accounts if that's "socially acceptable". Reward hard work: I'm obsessive about timers: I don't sit down to work for "a few hours", I sit down to work for "precisely 25 minutes", and then I use another timer for a short break.

To be honest, though, procrastinating on assignments and essays isn't really a tremendous problem, provided that you're still getting them in and not failing. It's far from a great system, but it still often works well enough, even if it induces stress. Few people continue procrastinating in the face of tough deadlines. The subtler and far more dangerous kind of procrastination is when you're putting off things that have no deadline. Procrastinating on improving a relationship with somebody, or procrastinating on exercising, to use just two examples. I hope you find a better work ethic, but ultimately--in my opinion--procrastination isn't a big problem when deadlines are involved, yet that's the only kind of procrastination people tend to worry about. Procrastinating on all of my assignments isn't something that I regret: it's everything else that I procrastinated on.

[wobbly]

So I'm not sure how much of this will relate to your own situation but thought I'd post just in case. I'm a chronic procrastinator who's a fair bit older than you. I never did solve my procrastination issues, but I did manage to run a marathon, do some basic ice climbing & now play competitive chess at state level among other things. Basically I worked out that if I really care or enjoy it enough to do it I will. If I don't no amount of me telling myself I should do it, works for me. Maybe the same for you, maybe you find a better solution. Anyway I'll ask a few idle questions.

How much do you need/want or will find useful better english grades or essay writting skills?
Is it for yourself or is it family/friends pressuring you over it?
Do you have the same problem in subjects more in-line with your interests?
etc. etc.

Even if the answers are yes or you plan to plug on through anyway it's worth asking them because when you tell yourself to start working on your essays you'll have a lot easier time convincing yourself to start if you're sure in your head it's something you actually want. If that's the case remind yourself of those reasons if you find yourself about to not do the work. Out loud if you think it'll help.

If it's no to those questions & you're planning to force yourself anyway you'll need to come up with some convincing (to you) reasons why your doing it.

[Tiruin]

This isn't the usual life advice topic. I'm not here to talk about relationships, domestic affairs or money problems. I'm here to talk about something that is a bit simpler, something that may hopefully be easier to resolve. (Disclaimer: Beware of high school drama and walls-of-text)[...]

First of all, don't think about it as drama--generally that gives an impression of something superficial, when it isn't (or at least that's how I've commonly seen how 'drama' is seen in many places o_O), and this 'walls-o-text' is rather expressive rather than being an actual wall of text.

So, I've never been good at writing English essays, that is a fact that has never escaped me.

This is notably a skill, and not a fact that you will never be, or currently will ever be, good at writing English Essays. This skill is influenced by many things, instead of one particular area of study which determines how good you are.

I'm unsure how the grading system is there, but I'm inferring that your marks in the essay pertain to the subject matter rather than your skill in writing essays in particular; if your teacher or instructor notes down a significant improvement in how you do things, it's good to ask them, as this is an indication of several distinct changes of how you presented your work. ;3

Reading after the parts of you being broken...added details are needed there for better advice (I could note that there's a connection to your motivation there, however that's more of an inference due to that gap of what happened there).
Also

I've had writing problems since I was old enough to start doing writing assignments. The fact that we are only now addressing them in high school is a tragedy

Writing problems in what way? How you convey what you have in mind? That what you're writing isn't exactly equal to what you're thinking? Or is it more along physical characteristics like handwriting or such?

I haven't completely given up though. I've tried a lot of things this year... English tutors, talking to teachers, a private English professor, Google, but they all failed.

Don't give up.
Next: Don't assign failure.
Others in the teaching field aim to help you improve yourself, but if the aim is to fix a perceived problem--what's best is getting down to understanding what the problem actually is, and in my perception it's something underlying that 'wall o' text' there that isn't directly mentioned. :O
In part, maybe it's also coming from an expectation that the graded mark equals a holistic measure of your skill in a certain, general aspect (ie making essays INSTEAD OF An essay written in a certain manner). Notably: Your prowess in writing is generally influenced by how expressive you are, and how open you are in working with ideas; I'm wondering if your concern here is something more...external than a personal problem. External as in it's attached to other things determining things you see.

As an aside, this is a very good topic to bring up with your local Guidance Counselor, as I assume every university usually has one or a few serving the different departments or schools/courses of the university; they're pretty much trained and knowledgeable about abstracted characteristics that underlie how you interact both with academics, and your skills and talents. :3

[TheBiggerFish]

PTW.

[i2amroy]

A) Essay writing (I know you said this wasn't a topic about this, but here's just some general tips that apply regardless of what style your area prefers):
Honestly the only way to get better is to write... a lot. Personally I used to be the kinda person who got okay grades on essays, up until I had a teacher in middle school who made us write a short essay every single week of the entire year. I hate, hate, hated it, but a few years later I looked back and realized that because of that I had actually become really good at writing essays (I made sure to send the teacher a thank you email, which I hope made up for how much of a horror I was in the class ). Writing, getting feedback, and practicing the skill of essay writing over and over is the only real way to get better. That said I can drop a few pieces of advice that I learned over my years of slavery in the world of essay writing.
1) Spell check/grammar check. If you're ever losing points on these than you have nobody but yourself to blame. They exist, use them.
2) Think about what you are going to be writing about (and the argument you are going to be making, if one exists) before you ever set words to the page. Writing off the cuff works great in the world of creative writing, but an essay requires a little bit more structure. You should have at least the basic supporting points in your head by the time you write your first word, and now that you have the basic points down, you can use the opening paragraph to structure the order that you will address the points in.
3) Writing in big blocks. I know people who swear by writing a little bit every day, and it works great in more creative writing. But I'm not lying when I say that my smoothest, best-flowing, and highest-scoring essays had their first drafts written in a single 4-6 hour session. Small chunks get things done, but like a good conversation everything fits together the best if it happens together, rather than the first two sentences now and the next two a week from now.
4) That said, give yourself at least three days to write an essay if you want the best work. Write the essay on day 1, then take day 2 off completely. Don't even think about the essay. Then on day 3 go back and read what you wrote. I guarantee that you will find things that don't sound their best.
5) If at all possible get someone to look at your actual drafts (not just listen to your ideas) and give feedback on them before you turn them in. Ideally this should be the person grading it, but if you don't want to do that (or they don't want to give direct feedback), then any other person will work (though preferably it should be someone with fairly good essay writing or logic skills). Ask them to give you honest feedback about the parts that aren't working, and make sure to tell them that you promise that no matter what they say you won't be offended. In fact it might be worthwhile to actually ask them straight out what part of the essay they thought was the worst, because I can guarantee you that, like in reading it yourself two days after it's finished, there will always be something that they don't think is perfect.

B) Work Ethic:
Along with environment, honestly the only real good piece of advice I have for work ethics is to make things into habits by starting them, and ensuring that at least for the establishment period you don't give yourself any exceptions (after the establishment period I find the strategy that works best for me is to actually give myself X many "exception cards" for each habit, which I can spend to give myself an exception and that refresh yearly or quarterly). Of course the doing things regularly enough doesn't necessarily play that well with the writing in big chunks aspect from above, but it is possible to establish habits on a weekly basis (every tuesday is homework night, etc.) rather than a daily one. That said keep in mind that weekly habits will take much longer to establish before you can let yourself take a break. Daily habits can usually be established fairly firmly in as little as 3 weeks, but for a weekly habit you are probably going to need to hold yourself to the idea for at least a couple of months before you allow yourself to take a single exception from the habit.

C) Quotes:
Honestly I've never really liked quotes, and at least in my experience here in the southwestern US they are only really serious business in high school english. In college you are generally assumed to know when a quote would be helpful and when just the idea itself or a reference is going to be enough, so it's not as important to simply memorize quotes. That said here's the ways that I survived that period of time:
1) If you see a really good quote as you are reading then write it down with a note where it's from. In some more extreme cases you might want to actually consider memorizing the best few quotes dependent on your teacher; a memorized quote won't always be able to be used in every essay topic, but being able to whip out a good quote even without the book to reference is a sure-fire way to score big points with most english teachers when you get a topic that you can use it on. (In that respect try to memorize quotes that fit a wide variety of topics and without overlap to get the best use out of them).
2) If you find that characters or the author is talking about a particular topic note down the topic and the current page number. If you find more dealing with the same topic, note those pages next to the topic as well. This means that when you need a quote addressing a particular topic you can quickly see a list of pages to skim through and find a good matching quote from, granting you a little bit more flexibility than #1 does (though requiring you, of course, to have the actual book at hand for reference).
3) In a worst case scenario you can always skim the source for quotes to find one that matches your topic. This doesn't work as well with quotes from literature (a 500-page book is not a fast thing to "skim" without something to help you like #2), but it works great with research papers where you have a larger number of smaller sources. Teachers always say that you should read the world and then write your paper based on what you find, and that's certainly the best way to actually construct your argument in the first place. However in terms of quotes/sources it's much, much easier to do the actual writing the other way around. Once you have done some basic reading to frame the argument the right way in your head, start to write the topic, then go and find sources that support what you want to say instead. Assuming you aren't crazy in your argument than there should be plenty sources out there that match your arguments already, and then you can just pick and choose the best of those to actually reference or quote as needed.

[TheBiggerFish]

(Since I have the whole 'cannot into sources' problem, any tips for how to actually search for secondary sources?)

[nenjin]

Search for online texts, news stories. Any history text book is a secondary source, any news report is a secondary source (someone being quoted who was present for a thing describing it would be a primary source within a secondary source.)

Alas, this generally means going to the library. Non-govermental authoritative sources generally do not offer their work for free so just trawling the internet for what you need won't satisfy rigor. Wikipedia does not qualify since the author cannot be considered a reliable source (the links within a wiki article can lead you to a good secondary source though.) Wikipedia articles are a good place to start looking though, to get an idea what actual sources you could try to reference.

If you're in a college course that seriously requires well-sourced materials, they may or should give you access to scholastic databases. (JSTOR, for example.) That has all the primary and secondary source material you could ever ask for but it's generally restricted to either a campus network or usernames/passwords given out by courses. (You can generally read abstracts for free but those are good for fuck-all except getting an idea of what you're looking at. Some offer varying levels of free access.) I only really encountered that stuff in Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology, Journalism and History courses though. English courses seemed a lot less concerned with "hard research" like that.

Quotes

Be observant enough to know when someone can say it better and more succinctly than you. A well-executed quote is still worth points to college professors. Forget dropping pithy/motivational/enigmatic quotes, that is very much high school writing. Focus instead on quotes that encapsulate ideas (generally the theme or focus of your essay) and that set you as the writer up for drilling into those ideas.

[TheBiggerFish]

Yeah, but the actual nitty-griity 'what do you put in the search bar to get relevant results' was/is what's giving me trouble...

Mostly with JSTOR, in fact.

[birdy51]

My sole contribution is the recommendation that you get a second pair of eyes on your work and glue them there. Ask that they help tear your works apart piece by piece. This is because I think you actually do pretty well at creating a point and your original post sort of frames that nicely. When it comes down to it, you can write. It's just a matter of discovering what is the most difficult part of that process for you.

[nenjin]

Yeah, but the actual nitty-griity 'what do you put in the search bar to get relevant results' was/is what's giving me trouble...

Mostly with JSTOR, in fact.

Uh.....what are you researching?

And basically any research involves reading abstracts and filtering results for stuff that is both relevant to your topic and supports your points. Or at least provides you data points to expound on.

[TheBiggerFish]

High school English is terrifying.

Then again, I don't have to do that anymore.

[nenjin]

I guess I can give you a couple example without really knowing what you're aiming for....

Say your English professor has given the assignment "Write a 2,500 word essay on the transition to Enlightenment Era writing of European authors"

You might just start with a brief overview of the period and literature via a wikipedia article, so you can get up to speed. The article might say something like say something like "...writers of the time began to transition away in large numbers from religious ideology as the basis for their works, capitalizing on the the momentum generated by the later Renaissance-era movements. Secular, rational and humanist viewpoints became more prevalent in popular literature than ever before." Maybe it includes a sourced author.

So you hit up JSTOR, start searching for "Enlightenment literature", "Enlightenment movements", "18th century literature", "18th century literature and religion", "secularism", "humanism." Maybe you search for a couple authors mentioned in the wiki article, to see if their peer-reviewed materials are in the JSTOR database.

You start reading abstracts and, if you don't already have a point in mind for your essay, start synthesizing one out of the more interesting abstracts you find, and go into the full articles and start reading. You drill down into it, the whys, the whos, the context. At worst you accumulate enough information to write a dry, factually accurate account of history, and you get a high C/low B/mid B if your professor isn't too demanding. At best, you see a trend or notice a moment that seems especially pivotal (or at least reference another scholar who noticed it) and state an opinion or give an analysis, and you get a high B up to an A.

(Not always though. I once thought I convincingly argued that The Merchant of Venice was not, as is popularly believed, a condemnation of racism and hatred against Jews in Shakespeare's time. I argued it was kind of a racist work itself because the character of Shylock and how he embodied a lot of the traits Jews are usually stereotyped with, how he's unlikable and like his persecutors, unable to give anyone mercy either. Maybe Shakespeare was saying "regardless of how people act they should be treated with mercy", and he used common stereotypes of Jews with Shylock to make that point. My Medieval History Professor and TA, however, disagreed with me so much they gave me a shit grade, probably because they thought I was being racist.)

[gimlet]

My tip for search engines:  after the general words to get you near the topic, add terms that you think *would be in the results*.  If you can think of a phrase, or even a 2 word combo, that would help a lot too - put those in quotes.   So, say I was looking for supply consumption of a us ww2 tank division, I start with that - (not in quotes in the search bar) "supply consumption of us ww2 tank division".   Hmm, some general stuff, I add "per day" at the end of the query - BAM the top results are starting to show numbers.   If that didn't get decent results  I'd have tried "per week" or "per month" next in case that was how figures were generally calculated.

Or I want to know average amount of mercury in the earth's atmosphere - I try "percent of mercury in atmosphere" - ok results look kinda general, and a lot are about the planet mercury, so I put "earth's atmosphere" in quotes.  Not a lot of help,  I put the whole thing in quotes, still not great.  I look down the list of results for some hints for terms - I see "mercury pollution" and "mercury levels", so I try a new search with just "mercury pollution" in quotes, hmm a lot of results about water, I add "atmosphere" at the end, hmm a bit better but looking through the results I see some of the best have "atmospheric mercury" in the title, so I add that in quotes at the end, BAM top result is a promising looking "[PDF]The Global Atmospheric Mercury Assessment:" by some UN agency, pull it up, TOC gives a chapter "atmospheric transport and process", skim through,   page 27 gives the payoff " Levels of gaseous elemental mercury are typically between 1.1 and 1.7 nanograms per cubic meter in areas remote from large sources in the southern and northern hemisphere, respectively. In East Asia, the regional atmospheric level is as high as 4 nanograms per cubic meter. Locations close to sources, such as near an old silver mine at Almaden, Spain, have reported peak atmospheric levels as high as 5 micrograms per cubic meter, or
over a thousand times higher than the relatively high background levels in East Asia".

Now if I wanted more detailed results like that, I would probably add "nanograms per cubic meter" to the search, 'cause I see that's how it's measured, etc...