How to write a linguistics essay

This week I'm busy marking first-year essays which asked the students to discuss the context and purpose of a set text with reference to the linguistic and graphic features of the text in 500 words (just a short one as a diagnostic assessment early in the semester). I have about 100 of them to mark in total and as usual I'm finding myself writing the same kind of feedback on most of them.

This genre of essay is often a tricky one for first-year students to figure out, because they don't have to do any extra reading and they haven't learnt much in the way of tools or technical terms by the end of week 3 when the assignment is due. It requires working out what they think the context and purpose of the text is and then making an argument based on the decision they make. It also involves working out what features of the text can be pointed to as evidence for their judgement about its context and purpose. On top of that, they need to be able to organise their ideas into a coherent essay using appropriate academic expression.

There are a few recurrent issues that I keep having to address in my feedback, and so I thought I'd make a list of tips responding to them. Perhaps future linguistics students might be able to benefit from this - essay-writing advice is usually too general to be able to help work out what an analytical linguistics essay requires.

• Work out what your answer to the question is in general terms. This will form the basis of your introduction and help you make a plan for the rest of your essay. For example, if the text is a book review and you think the context and purpose of the text is to summarise and evaluate the book and recommend it to readers from the academic community in the discipline of Russian history, your introduction might say something like "The book review of [book name] by [reviewer] is written with the purpose of providing a summary and evaluation of the book's contents and recommending the book to readers, in particular Russian history scholars." In one sentence, you have introduced the text and answered the question about the purpose of the text as well as its intended audience.
• Identify the features of the text that help you understand that the purpose of the text is to summarise, evaluate and recommend the book and that the intended readers are Russian history scholars. For example, there might be a paragraph of the text giving a chapter-by-chapter outline of the book; there might be lots of summarising, comparing & contrasting or evaluative language; and there might be lots of positive evaluations of the book, especially at the end of the text. Pick out one or two brief phrases from each of these features that would support your claim most strongly.
• Summarise the features you have identified in a general way so that you can include a brief and general indication of them in your introduction. This will be a signal to your reader of the points that you will cover in your essay. For example, you could follow the introductory sentence in point 1 above with something like this: "These contextual features of the text are evident from the linguistic choices such as summarisation, comparison, and evaluation."
• Your essay should always move from the general to the specific. The introduction should give a general overview of your argument and the points you'll make (as demonstrated above) and therefore should not include any specific examples or evidence. Save that for the body of your essay where you argue each point. This principle also applies to each paragraph in the body of your text (see below).
• Write a topic sentence for each paragraph stating a general point about the context and purpose of the text. For the book review example, you might have three paragraphs: one about the summarising and evaluating function of the text, one about the recommending function of the text, and one about the target readers of the text (depending on the specifics of the question asked). Your topic sentences should be linked back to your introduction and should just be observations of the text, e.g. not 'The text contains lots of evaluative words...' but 'The text has a primary function of summarising and evaluating the book. This can be see through the use of a chapter-by-chapter outline in paragraph 2, e.g. 'In chapter 1, the author... In chapter 2'.' I'm using fairly basic expression here just to give an example of the unfolding of meanings required in each paragraph. Start with the general (the main point for that paragraph), and move towards the specific (the examples from the text).