Brief Summary
This video provides a comprehensive guide on how to effectively study sociology and write sociology essays. It covers a six-step planning system, referencing tips, advice for each section of an essay (introduction, body paragraphs, conclusion), and general study tips. The goal is to help students approach sociology studies and essay writing in a structured and less daunting manner.
- Six-step planning system for essays and projects.
- Referencing tips and tools.
- Section-specific essay writing advice.
- General sociology study tips.
The video introduces the topic of sociology and how to study it effectively. It aims to provide guidance on writing sociology essays, covering planning, referencing, section-specific tips, and general study advice.
The video introduces a six-step planning system designed to make essay writing less overwhelming. The first step involves creating an overview with the deadline, project details, and time allocation. For example, setting a start date (June 8th) and end date (June 10th) with specific times helps manage the workload. The second step includes breaking down the essay into components like the introduction, main body paragraphs (three to four, depending on word count), and conclusion, along with their respective word counts. The third step focuses on establishing working hours, such as working between 10 AM and 6 PM, and designating time for lunch to maintain a structured schedule. The fourth step involves calculating how much time to allocate to each component, using a 1,000-word essay as an example. By dividing the word count by the allocated hours, one can determine the number of words to write per hour. For instance, writing 181 words per hour makes the task seem more manageable. The video provides an overview of the six-step planning system to help reduce anxiety when tackling essays.
The video emphasizes the importance of referencing in sociology essays. It advises using university referencing guides, often found on library websites, to understand citation styles for various sources like articles, journals, books, and web pages. A key tip is to maintain a running list of references, especially for long projects like dissertations, to avoid plagiarism. Google Scholar is recommended for easy referencing; by clicking the quote mark symbol, users can access different referencing styles like Harvard.
The video provides specific tips for each section of an essay. For the introduction, it suggests outlining the essay's scope, defining key terms, and presenting the argument, which can be refined later. For the body paragraphs, the recommendation is to first jot down notes and bullet points to identify main arguments and points. Then, search for literature to support these points, ensuring arguments are justified and guided by academic sources. The video stresses the importance of incorporating personal opinions while grounding arguments in literature. To avoid merely regurgitating existing work, the advice is to write down personal points before consulting literature, shaping arguments based on findings. For the conclusion, it advises against introducing new points and instead summarizing the essay's argument, possibly including recommendations for further research to provide a strong finish.
The video offers general study tips for sociology, starting with the importance of taking frequent, short breaks to avoid eye strain and fatigue, especially during large projects like literature reviews for dissertations. Blocking out specific times for specific subjects or dissertation sections helps maintain concentration by preventing the mind from switching between topics. The Pomodoro Method, which involves working for a set time (e.g., 50 minutes) followed by a short break (e.g., 10 minutes), is also recommended for those who struggle with long study sessions. The length of work and break intervals can be adjusted based on individual concentration spans.
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Transcript
Full transcript of “How To Write An AMAZING Sociology Essay *FULL BREAKDOWN* | University of Bath #BelongAtBath”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 [Music] hey guys welcome to another video and today we're going to be talking all about sociology how to study it um what's the best ways to study how to write an essay all that stuff because i've been getting some questions [Music] okay so the breakdown of this video is we're going to move from the beginning stages to the end stages of writing essays so number one we're going to be looking at planning the essay number two we're going to be looking at references number three we're gonna be looking at tips for each section of the essay and then number four we're gonna be looking at general tips for sociology studying it before i get started don't mind the noise outside my room is right
0:45 in front of a busy road so you might hear some cars passing through but anyway that's beside the point let's get on with the video so the first thing we're going to want to do is plan now the system that i use has six steps and this sounds like a lot but when i break it down and show you an example as well it's gonna be a lot easier and be less overwhelming because when you write an essay looking at a blank page you know blank page syndrome is a real thing you know so when you're starting out a blank page and having to write 3 000 words or 2 000 words or something like that it can be quite daunting so that is why i came up with this six step system which hopefully will help you to break it down this system will work for any pretty much any project that you're gonna do so step number one you're gonna want an overview of exactly the deadline you're doing the project you're doing
1:31 the essay you're writing to allocate the time and the dates that you're going to be working on it so for example here i have the start date being the 8th of june and the end date being the 10th of june and i also specify the time so i know exactly how much time i want to spend on this essay that i'm writing i also want to know how many words i'm going to be writing and then what you're going to want to do is to break down the different components so in an essay this will be the different parts and paragraphs of the essay so you want introduction you have your main body paragraphs so you might have three or four it depends on you know the number of words that you're going to need and also the conclusion and you also want to break down the word count so it's not as daunting you don't go into the paragraphs thinking how much do i need to write but having
2:18 the number of words already there makes it so much easier and a lot more easy to tackle then the next thing you're going to want to do is establish your working powers when you're working on an essay or anything for that matter it's very very easy to just work all day and work until the late hours and personally i work best between you know like 10 and 6 o'clock so i try to keep my working time between those times so as you can see i've also designated and now for lunch so i know exactly how many hours i have to work on the essay then the next step is very simple what you're going to do now is to work out how much time you need to do each of the components so here we're using an example of a thousand word essay all you want to do is divide the word count by the number of hours you have allocated to do this essay now if
3:04 it's a project or if it's a dissertation like i'm doing right now it could be the thousand word essay could be just one section of my dissertation or one section of the project you can adapt it to anything you're doing and now i know exactly how many words i have to write per hour at least in order to finish on time so by looking at this you know a thousand word essay at first seems like a little bit daunting because it's very hard to write a good consolidated condensed essay in a thousand words which is not very much at all but by seeing that i only have to write 181 words per hour which is not that much at least it becomes so much easier while it seems a lot easier anyway so um hopefully this will help you feel a little bit less nervous about tackling an essay so before we move on to the next section here's an overview of the
3:50 six step planning system that i use to plan my essays so the next part of studying sociology slash writing a sociology essay is about references now unless you've been doing references in school already like doing references it might come as a little bit of a shock to you now it seems really complicated at first but most universities will have a dedicated referencing guide page on their website or on their library website so this for example is the bath library website and on the referencing page we have lots and lots of tips on how exactly to cite and reference different types of articles journals books reports webpages etc etc my biggest tip to you is to keep a running list of references when you're doing an essay especially
4:36 when you're doing something like a dissertation which is going to be like 10 000 words you need to keep a running list of references because you might get pain lines if you don't reference properly especially if it's something like a dissertation obviously some lecturers might be a little bit more lenient when it comes to like shorter pieces of work but it's always good to have a good referencing habit you know on day one and a bonus tip is to use google scholar for referencing especially if the reference is really long so what you want to do is you go on to google scholar find the journal or the book or the article that you want to reference and then click on the little quote mark symbol and then you will see the list of the different referencing styles and you can pick the one that you want to use so the one we use at bath is called harvard so now we're going to move on to each of the different sections of an essay so in
5:23 the introduction my tip would be to just write down exactly what you're going to do in the essay you're going to want to define terms you're going to want to lay out your argument so obviously you're not going to have your entire argument formed and that's okay you can always go back and tweak it and evaluate at the end when you're done and for the body paragraph of an essay i like to write notes and make bullet points before so i know kind of exactly the things that i'm looking for things that i'm going to write my main arguments and my main points and then i will search the literature and look for articles and journals and authors that back me up and that make my point you know legit and not just plucking something out of thin air
6:10 which can be very tempting to do but when you're doing an academic piece of work it's good to be justified it's good to be guided by the literature because this is something that you really focus on when you do your decision you need your arguments to be backed up you need your research to be justified but of course don't be afraid to let your arguments shine through because when you get used to looking at the literature and backing your points up you almost tend to forget that you have your own opinion and you're not just regurgitating what other authors are saying what i do in order to combat this is to write down my points first without looking at literature and then looking at literature afterwards and maybe shaping my points around what i found instead of going for your literature and finding my point from there and then finally when we come to the conclusion make sure you're not just
6:55 repeating what you said also don't include any new points um that's something that i tend to do i'm very guilty of this so make sure that your conclusion is literally just a summary of your argument and maybe some recommendations for research that you think will be helpful but basically just make sure you round off your essay with a good strong point now in terms of general tips my first tip is to take small breaks often when you're doing a big piece of work for example i'm working on my literature review right now for my dissertation let me know in the comments if you want a video on my journey and my tips for doing a dissertation i think that would be really interesting to document but when you're doing a big piece of work you can get tired very easily from staring at the screen and i find that even though i work in front of a window and i love having a
7:40 lot of light staring at the screen right in front of me my laptop is here off camera is very straining on my eyes so i will try to get up you know pace around my room go to the kitchen get a drink get a snack um or do some quick exercises on my yoga mat and in between so i find that's very helpful something i also find very helpful is to block out time to dedicate to a specific subject to a specific part of my dissertation so that i'm my mind is not switching from subject to subject and i also mention this in my previous video so check that out if you haven't already but i find that really helpful to keep my concentration and another tip is to use the pomodoro method if you don't enjoy doing things for a long block of time so that means like 50 minutes on 10 minutes off or you can
8:27 even do half an hour on five minutes off so it depends on you and how long your concentration can go on without breaking so hopefully these tips were helpful in writing a sociology essay in terms of you know studying sociology these are the tips that have helped me so i really hope they can help you as well but with all that said that is the end of the video and i will see you next time and as always comment below if you have any questions or anything related to both or sociology i will be more than happy to answer them but anyway i will see you in the next video bye
