Peterson Essay Writing Guide Notes

Part One: Introduction

Jordan Peterson put out an essay writing guide in which he outlines a ten-step process detailing how to produce an essay that is at least “very good”.

• Primary reason to write an essay is so that the writer can formulate and organize an informed, coherent, and sophisticated set of ideas about something important.
• Action based on thinking is likely to be far less painful and more productive than action based upon ignorance. Writing extends your memory, facilitates editing and clarifies your thinking.
• You can write down more than you can easily remember, so that your capacity to consider a number of ideas at the same time is broadened. Once those ideas are written down, you can move them around and change them, and you can reject ideas that are substandard after you consider them more carefully.
• Consider your success over the course of a lifetime. The person who can formulate and communicate the best argument almost always wins. If you want a job, you have to make a case for yourself. If you want a raise, you have to convince someone that you deserve it. If you are trying to convince someone of the validity of your idea, you have to debate its merits successfully, particularly if there are others with other competing ideas.
• If you sharpen your capacity to think and to communicate as a consequence of writing, you are better armed. The pen is mightier than the sword, as the saying goes. There is no cheap cliche. Ideas change the world, particularly when they are written. The Romans built buildings, and the Romans and the buildings are both gone. The Jews wrote a book, and they are still here, and so is the book. So it turns out that words may well last longer than stone, and have more impact than whole empires.
• Do not wait for a big chunk of free time to start. You will never get big chunks of free time ever in your life, so don’t make your success dependent on their non-existent. The most effective writers write every day, at least a bit.
• Realize that when you first sit down to write, your mind will rebel. It is full of other ideas, all of which will fight to dominate.

Part Two: Levels of Resolution

• An essay exists at multiple levels of resolution, simultaneously. First is the selection of the word. Second is the crafting of the sentence. Each word should be precisely the right word, in the right location in each sentence. The sentence itself should present a thought, part of the idea expressed in the paragraph, in a grammatically correct manner.
• As a rule of thumb, a paragraph should be made up of at least 10 sentences or 100 words.
• Rules are there for a reason. You are only allowed to break them if you are a master. If you’re not a master, don’t confuse your ignorance with creativity or style.
• A paragraph should present a single idea, using multiple sentences. If you can’t think up 100 words to say about your idea, it’s probably not a very good idea.
• All of the paragraphs have to be arranged in a logical progression. Each of them is a stepping stone to your essay’s final destination.
• The fifth level of resolution is the essay, as a whole.
• You should strive for brevity as well as beauty.
• You should not be bored, or boring. If you are bored while writing, then, most importantly, you are doing it wrong, and you will also bore your reader.
• You may be bored while writing your essay because you are actually lying to yourself in a very deep away about what you are doing and why you are doing it. Your mind, independent of your ego, cannot be hoodwinked into attending to something that you think is uninteresting or useless. It will automatically regard such a thing as unworthy of attention, and make you bored by it.
• You have to place yourself in the correct state of mind to write properly. That state of mind is partly aesthetic. You have to be trying to produce something of worth, beauty and elegance.

Part Three: The Topic and the Reading List

• You can begin your essay writing process two different ways. You can either list the topics you have been assigned, or list ten or so questions that you might want to answer.
• If you can’t write, it is because you have nothing to say. You have no ideas. In such a situation, don’t pride yourself on your writer’s block. Read something. If that doesn’t work, read something else, maybe something better. Repeat until the problem is solved.
• List your sources and notes
• While you are reading, see if you can notice anything that catches your attention. Take notes.
• When taking notes, don’t bother to do stupid thing like highlighting or underlining stentences in the textbook. What you need to do is read for understanding. Read a bit, then write down what you have learned or any questions that have arisen in your mind. Don’t ever copy the source word for word. (oops). This is a really good point, and also falls into the trap of “time spent is not value created, and struggle is not proof of virtue”. Admittedly I do fall into this trap a lot, and I need to do a. better job of making a point of rewriting the content in my own words for greater understanding. Maybe if I reframe note-taking in my mind as like “I hear you, and this is what I think you’re saying” to the author. Peterson suggests trying reading a paragraph, looking away, then saying out loud to myself what the paragraph meant. Then write that down.

He recommends taking 2-3x more notes than words that you need for your essay. You’ll need a lot of material from which to refine and create an essay. You need to know a lot more than you communicate.

Part Four: The Outline

• Your draft should be longer than the final version.
• Write an outline. You must write one and get your argument across.
• Outline should be 10-15 sentences.
• After you finish the outline, make sub-outlines for each primary outline sentence.

Part Five: Paragraphs

• 10-15 sentences per outline headline for each paragraph.
• There are two steps: Production and Editing. They interfere with each other, so you should focus on one, then the other.
• Grab the reader’s attention asap, tell the reader what the essay will be about but the essay shouldn’t refer to itself
• When you’ve completed 10-15 sentences for each heading then you can move on to editing.

Part Six: Editing and Arranging of Sentences within Paragraphs

Copy each sentence down with a space underneath, then write another version of each sentence underneath. Read each sentence out loud and see if it feels right. See if you can say it a better way, if you can, write that down.

After you do that, try re-ordering the sentences within the paragraphs. Think about if the sentences are in the best possible order. Eliminate anything that is unnecessary.

Part Seven: Re-Ordering the Paragraphs

Lay out all your paragraphs, you might find that the ordering of subtopics you originally had is not ideal.

Part Eight: Generating a New Outline

You should have a decent second draft by now. The next step in the process might feel unnecessary. Try to write a new outline. Don’t look at your essay when you do this. If you can reconstruct your argument from memory you’ll likely improve it, and what this is doing now is distilling it.

Part Nine: Repeat

If you want to take it to the next level you can repeat the rewriting and reordering process. It’s probably good to wait a few days to do this. You’re not genuinely finished until you can’t edit so that your essay is improved.

Part Ten: References and Bibliography

Cite your sources or people will accuse you of plagiarism. The conventions of the American Psychological Association are commonly used, use the last name of the authors of the source in parentheses after the sentence.

There are also conventions covering the use of a direct quote.