How I got a First Class in EVERY Essay at University (Part 1) | The Best Essay Technique

what is going on guys my name is kenji and welcome back to my channel it was the first time you're watching one of my videos i am a third year medical student studying at king's college london uh as some of you might know that i actually have a degree in biomedical science today is a tuesday and i have a 3000 word essay to write and because of that i thought it'd be a really good idea to take you guys through how i write my essays i'm gonna be showing you guys the exact method that i

use to write all of my essays in biomedical science and it's also actually the exact same method that i use to write my first publication which should be right there and this exact same method that i used to write my first publication and all of my essays all my assignments in medical school as well so without further ado let's get started [Music] right so the first thing that i do when starting to write an essay is i open up two microsoft word documents so let's go ahead and do that right now um so here's the

first document i have um here's the second one as well um the first document i'm going to name sa notes so i'll just put that in the middle uh sa notes and in the second word document i want to call that um essay okay once i have that done i then go on to start dividing my essay into the relevant parts so i want to have an introduction i'm going to have a main body and also a conclusion and also at the end i'm going to have my references okay and what i want to do

is i want to copy copy this format um into my essay notes page and i'll explain what this is in just a second okay so the two pages i have the first page is my essay notes page the essay notes page is essentially where i want to put all of my notes um so when i do some research and i find something interesting or something quite profound which i think um really needs to be in the essay i'm going to come over here and then copy that you know part of the text into this essay

notes essentially what it's going to produce after a while is one huge document with all of the relevant information on the essay topic which i think really really needs to be included and then the second document is going to be um where i actually write the essay and i'll show you guys exactly how i write the essay later on using the essay notes but as a summary the essay notes page is to collect all of the information that i need to write the essay and the essay page is where i actually go on to write

the essay itself right so once that's done it's time to start actually looking for information which i'll need to produce this essay so what you want to do is go to to pubmed so if you go to google and you type in um pubmed uh it's the first thing that comes up i'm not entirely sure if you guys have heard this before but essentially what pubmed is is a database of all of the research papers currently um out there right now um so it's kind of like a google i guess you can say for um

research papers and the thing is when you're writing essays university um you don't want to use textbooks anymore you don't use wikipedia you don't lose websites anymore i remember the first essay that i ever wrote in university i got 40 and the past mark was 40 so i just about passed and the reason why i got 40 is i didn't use any research articles i just used like literally um like websites and books and stuff like that but the thing with these resources is that they're not up to date and if you use something like

pubmed you get all of the research papers that are really up to date and from really good journals as well okay so what you want to do is go to the search bar and type in whatever topic you're currently on so for example right now my topic is on erectile dysfunction following prostatectomies so i want to write the topic right here erectile dysfunction uh prostatectomies prostatectomy and then what it should do is give you a list of all of the research papers that are currently out there right now as i said it's very very up

to date and what you want to do is come up here and click sort by um make sure that it's on best match and then what you also want to do is click free full text because obviously student budget i don't have a type of student loan to be paying for papers and paying to read papers okay so what you want to do is go through um you know all of these different papers read the titles and see what is best to start on what i do recommend start on is to start by reading review

papers and then once you have a general idea of what the topic is through review papers you want to then go on to actually look at clinical trials and primary papers to kind of explain what these are a review paper is basically a paper which is written by someone who didn't do any research themselves they didn't do anything in the lab so it's kind of like a summary of the topic and it's a really really good way to get started when trying to you know scope a topic and understand what is going on before you

move on to the specific papers uh which will be the primary papers the primary papers is different so primary papers are novel things that people have done so these are people who are in the labs doing research you know you know on the actual cells doing experiments themselves and they write this into a primary paper so this is their own like unique work this is all the um you know brand new work that they did themselves um which is what you want to go into later on once you have a good idea of the whole

topic as a whole so what you want to do is also start off by clicking review as i said all of these right here will be a review of the whole topic so you want to spend uh maybe a couple of hours maybe you know reading up to like you know five to ten review papers um so what i'll do for example is um click click this uh this first thing because that sounds quite interesting and it sounds like it covers the topic that i want you want to then try to get access to this

paper so click on um full text links over here in the corner so i'll go ahead and click that once that's clicked um you should have the whole paper just right here in front of you sometimes you don't sometimes you need to do a bit of digging it's fine paper but normally it's quite easy to get the paper and then what you want to do is download the pdf copy so you should go so you should be able to find pdf somewhere normally it's in the top right corner here but if it's not you can

just save it as a pdf yourself what i'm going to do is make a new folder on my desktop i'm going to call this um let's say essay within the essay folder i want to make a new folder called papers so this is exactly where i'm going to store uh store all of my research papers everything that i read will be stored in this folder right here and now what i do personally is to save it by number um so i'll explain why later on when i do that but i want to start by calling

it number one and i'll save it in there so i should have it on my desktop now so i'm going to open up those papers and there it is that's my first research paper saved okay so what you want to do is as i said to find maybe five to ten different uh review articles and uh start doing some research start doing some reading um what i tend to do now is to get the highlighter and go through the whole paper and you know highlight anything that i think is really important something that i think

definitely should be in the introduction the main body or the conclusion so let's say i found this first um this first paper right here really really intriguing very very profound i think definitely has to be in there what i'll do is i'll highlight it and then once i go through the whole paper you know once i've read it and i've highlighted everything i need to know i then come back to the paper and copy it so i click copy text and i'll paste it into the essay notes document where as i said i'll have all

of my research information that i think is very relevant so go in there and i'll paste it um the annoying thing is that it kind of messes up the format so you want to quickly just fix the format right here make sure it's in a bullet point um and there we are that's our first um you know sort of information that we think will be really really relevant for the introduction what is really really important as well is to make sure that you um you remind yourself where you got this information because once you have

the whole you know essay notes completely done you want to know where you got the information from because when you come back to referencing it and referencing where you got this information from you're going to end up forgetting unless you have a method or a system to remember where you got it from uh so what i do is i put in brackets the number so as i told you before i named the first document or the first paper by number so the first one i named number one so because i got this information from that

paper i'm going to come back here and put brackets one so now now i know straight away that this first bullet point came from from that paper called number one so when i when i need to reference it later on i can just come back to the paper and you know go back to name the paper and know exactly where i got the information from so you want to do this for the introduction the main body and conclusion as well um to get more of an idea of what you want to write about once this

is all done once this is all written up then you start reading primary papers so when you feel like you have a good idea of you know what the topic is about of what you want to write you want to come back over here and um go back to where we started from but instead of clicking a review you want to remove the review and look for primary pages itself you can you can either click clinical trial here or you can go through the papers just normally and look for whatever looks like a primary paper

so for the purposes right now we're going to click clinical trial and we're gonna start off by um reading the titles and again looking for something that stands out looking for something that we think will be relevant for our study okay so as i said right now i want to find trials i want to find you know novel things in the field you know whenever you write a paper you want to have you know the most up-to-date information so sometimes it is relevant to go back maybe 50 years to get the information about you know

how let's say prostatectomy started for erectile dysfunction so you want to start off by you know having a few old papers which maybe were the first papers ever written on this topic then you want to move on to more recent topics and then in the main body at least you want to start talking about the most latest information or the novel clinical trials which we have right here so again what i want to do is find the trial this trial number one sounds quite relevant so i'm going to click on it and what i want

to do is to do the exact same thing and save it as a pdf copy go through the trial take all the relevant information highlight it and then copy into the main body or the introduction and that's the first step in getting what we want so there are essentially two ways to find the most up-to-date papers the first is what i just mentioned so you know going on to pubmed and searching for clinical trials or looking through um the homepage and finding the most relevant information which you think will be the primary papers the second

way of doing it is to get these these kind of primary papers from the actual review papers so if we go back to the paper that i first started off with so over here is the review paper that we first started off with and what you can kind of do is kind of cheat and steal the papers that they reference themselves so let's say i um i was reading this paper here and it became very obvious that you know this paragraph over here over here was talking about a primary paper let's say that they were

referencing like a clinical trial that you know that they think is very important to know about what i want to do is then go to where they referenced it themselves so i'll click on the number right here so number 11 and that should take you to their references and right here it gives you the title of that primary paper that they're talking about so it's a nice little kind of little way to um to cheat and to go straight to the private paper they're talking about as i said because it is a review article they

should normally reference quite a few um primary papers which makes it a lot easier for you because they kind of do the hard work for you they review papers kind of do all of the research for you and you can go and steal their clinical trials steal the primary papers they talked about and then go copy the title um and head back to pubmed open up a new pubmed screen and then copy that copy the title that they have and that should take you straight away to the primary paper again download it as a pdf

have a read of it and see whether or not it's relevant to add to your essay so let's say that all of the research is done normally this takes me quite a few hours to get my essay notes completely you know filled up to a level where i think that i'm ready to write the paper but let's say that um it's all done now i'm going to take you guys through to my essay notes that i've already done i started this a bit earlier on so i already do have like quite a bit of essay

notes already so i want to open up my essay notes just now okay so here we are um so what i want to do straight away is open up my essay notes in combination with my essay itself this makes it very easy to have a look at um what i've written in my essay notes and to rephrase this and you know write it in a way that makes sense into my introduction um so it allows me to do two things at the same time it is quite useful to have a secondary monitor so as you

can see over there i normally work with my laptop straight onto my monitor so i have my essay notes up on my screen and then on my laptop i have my essay itself but for the purposes this video and also like if i'm in the library or if i'm somewhere without my screen this is exactly what i do so what i want to do is to start writing the introduction itself um so the thing is you want to make sure that you don't place your eyes you know plagiarism is a huge university so what you

want to do is have a read of your essay notes and as you're reading your essay notes you want to rephrase it and make it into your own words so it's not um it's not taking off the copyright so i'm just going to do that right here so i'm going to write prostate cancer is um one of the most common malignancies uh in males and is being diagnosed uh more than ever before okay so this is just as a quick example okay so let's say i've gone through um and i've done this for the whole

introduction um let's just say that you know the introduction is completely written what you want to do is as you're writing this introduction you want to also start to um to reference um it's a lot easier to reference as you go along um because you know you you know exactly where you're getting the papers from um it saves a lot of time rather than coming back to the end and you know doing all your references at once so i want to show you guys now exactly how i do my references what you want to do

before you start is to talk to university and to make sure that you have the right essays the right referencing style that they use um so i normally tend to use vancouver if they don't specify a lot of the times in university they will let you choose whatever you want and i highly recommend the vancouver system a lot of people use the harvard system as well but the thing was the thing with the harvard system is that i just don't find it as clean because the references are actually in your in your writing whereas in

the vancouver system you use a number instead to reference and also it kind of um it loads your word count overall as well okay so in order to reference what you want to do is to make an account with refworks there are loads of different referencing softwares out there i just prefer to use refworks since what i've used my whole life so we're gonna go to refworks uh login to refworks as you can see refworks.com um make an account i'm just gonna log in straight away to my account and then once you're logged into the

website um you can see all um these are all my references i've used in the past you want to go back to your microsoft word document and log into refworks on the actual document you do have to kind of install this as a plugin you want to make sure you have refworks on your word um i'm not gonna go through this right now go into refworks and should have all of the information on there about how to do this okay so once you make an account with refworks refworks essentially what you want to do is

to come into microsoft word uh click the insert tab up here and then click uh get add-ins then what you want to do is to search for refworks itself then click add and this is going to add a new panel on the side which is going to be your citation manager which is going to allow you to um to cite all of the references that you want to do what you want to do is then go back to pubmed and for each paper you add and the each paper you want to write and citate what

you want to do is to um to save it as a citation so i'll show you how to do that right now so let's say i really wanted to use this i missed a review paper over here what i'm going to do is click um send to um so just to quickly show you guys how i got here again in case you forgot um let's go back to the first page so let's say yeah so let's say i really wanted this paper i searched for it i found it what you want to do is to

click on it straight away and then go to send to and then click citation manager and then click create file what you want to do is to make a new folder for all of your citations all these citation files and don't worry if it's making some making much sense now it will make sense eventually so go back to your essay file that's the folder we made earlier on you want to make a new folder called citations and then save all of your citations here so because we named the first paper number one i'm gonna call

this number one as well what you want to do after this is to go back to your refworks in the actual website and what you wanted to click off that is import so click import in the bottom right over there as i did you want to then uh choose the file that you just saved so go back to where we've saved so citations number one um make sure that it's on to uh pubmed and that's pubmed as well and then click import what this is gonna do is it's gonna download and import the reference and

reference it exactly as it should be so you don't have to do anything after that and then click view last imported folder and this right here is the citation that we just um imported so as you can see there's a title there's all of the authors the source as well and pretty much all the information you need to know when referencing um a paper what you want to do now is to go back to your microsoft word and then find it exactly where it should be so it should just pop up right here at the

top as mine did over here and then you want to go to where you want to add the citation and then click quick cite so as you can see um it's generating a citation so it's added a number here for you of exactly where um what the citation is and then down in the references below it's added it uh to your reference list um so you know so you kind of have to go back and forth and do this for every single paper you cite but what you'll find like you cite multiple sentences for the

same paper so now that i have this already um saved as a citation let's say i wrote something else in the next page so let's say i wrote a different sentence just um just over here you can go straight back to this area here click quick site and it'll cite that sentence for you so once you've saved one citation you can reuse it constantly you don't have to keep going back and forth but you do have to do this for every new paper that you find and yes it can be time consuming in my dissertation

in my final year in biomedical science it took me hours to get my citations right because i had over 100 citations um once you get this done for a 3000 word essay it shouldn't be too bad and you should be able to do it in in no time hopefully so that is pretty much it guys i want to show you guys to give you guys a feel about how i like to do my essays so i'll take you guys through how i do the research how i then use the research to write the information um

itself onto my essay and then finally how i um reference all of this and complete the essay um so i really hope this has been informative for you guys i know it's a bit confusing try it out for yourself you kind of have to do it yourself to get an idea what it's like um if you have any questions at all please let me know down below and i'll be happy to answer them for you make sure you subscribe maybe make sure you give this video a thumbs up if you found it useful as well

good luck on your essay and i'll see you guys in the next one