How I wrote 1st class essays at Cambridge University (how to write the best essay)

now this is a fantastic formula for writing the best essay it's got me a first every single year at University and this is what I see time and time again in students who score the highest marks hey guys welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name's Shane and I'm a recently qualified doctor and Neuroscience supervisor at Cambridge University and today we're going to talk about how to write the best scientific essay and we're going to be going through a worked example so I'm going to split this video up into five parts firstly

I'll give a general overview of the structure of an essay then I'm going to dive in a bit deeper and talk about the introduction the main body and the conclusion now this is a fantastic foolproof formula to writing the best essay so trust me if you follow this structure you're going to do fantastically so how should you structure your essay to make it fantastic well you need to have an introduction where you define the key Concepts and outline what you're going to be covering secondly you need the main body where you essentially talk about your

main points present supporting scientific evidence critically Analyze That evidence and then relating it back to the question then finally you should end with a conclusion which essentially draws up the whole argument into a summary and gives a nice verdict now let's dive in a bit deeper and look at each of these sections in turn right so let's start with the introduction the introduction is essentially a Gateway into your argument it's what has the most attention from the reader so you need to grab that right from the beginning so how can you achieve that with your

introduction well you need to firstly Define Concepts that are important in your essay so let's use an actual example past exam question from Cambridge University so the example I've chosen is this discuss the extent to which humans use negative feedback and feed forward mechanisms to control movement and this was from a neuroscience paper back in 2012. so what are the keywords there well the keywords for me would be negative feedback feed forward and movement so once you've read the question and decided what the key concepts are you need to now Define them so in my

introduction I would say Okay negative feedback is something like an automatic response to restore a change from a set value then for feed forward I might say something like it provides a mechanism to predict future changes and responses based on current sensory input now movement is a bit tricky because there's no point in just defining movement as is because well everyone knows what movement is what you can do is Define the importance of movement why is it important well for that you can say something like movement is required for survival by allowing us to run

away from predators and run towards our prey so defining the key Concepts in such a way immediately tells the reader you know what this person knows what's going on they can decide what's important in the question and they know what those features are so after you've defined the key Concepts move on and outline what your essay is going to cover and what your argument is going to be now a lot of students end up skipping this part because they feel like they're just going to repeat themselves later in the essay however don't do that always

outline what you're going to cover to set the examiner and the reader up to essentially know what to expect so for this example what would I write well I would use one sentence to convey my main message and the second sentence to essentially talk about the key points I'm going to cover that's going to lead me or lead the examiner to that final overall message so how would that look in this example well sentence one where you're conveying that overall message might look like this feed forward is used for Rapid movement and negative feedback is

used for slower automatic movement so that's your overall message and in sentence two you're going to tell the reader or the examiner this is how I'm going to get to that overall message so the key points you're going to cover you might say the essay will cover movements utilizing feed forward mechanisms negative feedback and those utilizing both so definitely in your introduction Define the key Concepts and outline what your overall message is going to be and what key points you're going to cover now let's talk about the main body this can be very tricky for

a lot of people because they often end up overlooking the big picture and the general ideas and get lost in the nitty-gritty details this again is why it's important to plan and already outline the key points in the introduction so for the main body my advice would be to stick to three key points select your best three key points and focus on just that and devote one paragraph for each key point so what's the best way to structure each of these paragraphs then well use the first sentence of the paragraph to convey the key point

so as an example it might look like this feed forward mechanism is key for Rapid movement very short very Snappy tells the examiner this is exactly what this paragraph is going to be about then in the second sentence provide important scientific evidence that backs up the point that you've just made so that might look like this this is shown by its importance in vestibular ocular reflexes where the eyes move equal and opposite to the head by predicting the change needed so not only have you just made the key points where you've also batted up with

scientific evidence to add substance to that point however don't stop at that go further in your third sentence critically analyze that piece of evidence essentially talk about how good was that study that led to that evidence is it valid is it reliable were there any confounding factors and importantly could it be improved and the final sentence of your paragraph you should always relate back to the question so that might look like this this therefore shows feed forward mechanisms are utilized widely in Rapid movements so think of the first and last sentences as the bread of

your sandwich and the scientific evidence and the critical analysis as the filling within your sandwich this is one of the best formulas for getting the top high marks within your essays examiners are going to love that you know evidence to support your point and they're going to love it even more when you actually critically analyze that piece of evidence two easy things that you can do within the main body to actually spice it up is use diagrams a lot of people are scared of using diagrams because they think you know what it's going to take

up a lot of time or it's not going to be assessed as well as if I'd written a good sentence that's just not true diagrams can be very easy and quick they convey a lot of information very quickly to The Examiner because you have to think that these people are mocking so many essays in a day and they just want to just quickly go through everything and if they can see that you know what this person has shown this diagram therefore I'm pretty sure that they understand what's going on here they're much more likely to

give you the mark and move on to the next paragraph so for example with negative feedback in that paragraph that I'm talking about it I might include a diagram rather than going into detail in terms of how negative feedback Works another good thing that you can do within the main body is using active subheadings so what are active subheadings active subheadings are essentially just a sentence that summarizes your whole paragraph by putting that right at the beginning underlining it essentially tells the examiner this is exactly what the paragraph is going to be about that again

this is exactly like the diagram in conveying a lot of information to the examiner and the reader very quickly right so now let's move on to the final aspect of the essay which is the conclusion so the conclusion has to summarize your whole argument bring it to a nice end and then give a verdict it's essentially a grown-up version of the introduction because if you think about it in your introduction you're just saying okay these are the key points I'm going to be making then in your main body you essentially spend all your time flushing

it out providing evidence analyzing it and then now in your conclusion you can finally give a mature well-rounded response that actually can assume that the reader has read all the detail and evidence and you can pretty much go to the Crux of the problem and end it nicely so for example in conclusion the evidence presented suggests that humans utilize both feed forward and negative feedback mechanisms to control movement but for different aspects feed forward for Rapid movement where time delays of negative feedback will be too costly and negative feedback for automatic movements and for refining

movements right so there you have it that was a worked example on how to write the best scientific essay and hopefully you get guys now have a very good formula for writing those first class essays if you've enjoyed this video please give me a like and smash that subscribe button and please do share with anyone you think is going to find this useful but that's it for me for today and I'll see you guys next time