Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's 10 Step Guide to Clearer Thinking Through Essay Writing

• Essay writing is more than just a thing to do to get grades in college. It's a practical method for clarifying your thinking and learning to articulate yourself.
• An essay is a relatively short piece of writing on a  particular topic. However, the word essay also means attempt or try. An essay is, therefore, a short piece written by someone attempting to explore a topic or answer a question.
• The 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.
• It is important to think because action based on thinking is likely to be far less painful and more productive than action based upon ignorance.
• Here is something to think about: the person who can formulate and communicate the best argument almost always wins.
• If you learn to write and to edit, you will also be able to tell the difference between good ideas, intelligently presented, and bad ideas put forth by murky and unskilled thinkers.
• Those who can think and communicate are simply more powerful than those who cannot, and powerful in the good way, the way that means "able to do a wide range of things competently and efficiently."
• Don't ever underestimate the power of words.
• People's brains function better in the morning. Get up. Eat something. You are much smarter and more resilient after you have slept properly and ate.
• Do not wait for a big chunk of free time to start. You will never get bug chunks of free time ever in your life, so don't make your success dependent on their non-existence. The most effective writers write every day, at least a bit.
• Realize that when you first sit down to write, your mind will rebel.
• Three productive hours are way better than ten hours of self-deceptive non-productivity, even in the library.
• An essay, like any piece of writing, 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. Each sentence should be properly arranged and sequenced inside a paragraph, the third level of resolution.
• As a rule of thumb, a paragraph should be made up of at least 10 sentences or 100 words. This might be regarded as a stupid rule, because it is arbitrary. However, you should let it guide you, until you know better.
• You have very little right to break the rules, until you have mastered them.
• You break a rule at your peril, whether you know it or not.
• 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, or you need to think more about it. If your paragraph is rambling on for 300 words, or more, it's possible that it has more than one idea in it, and should be broken up.
• All of the paragraphs have to be arranged in a logical progression, from the beginning of the essay to the end. This is the fourth level of resolution. Perhaps the most important step in writing an essay is getting the paragraphs in proper order. Each of them is a stepping stone to your essay's final destination.
• The fifth level of resolution is the essay, as a whole. Every element of an essay can be correct, each word, sentence, and paragraph--even the paragraph order---and the essay can still fail, because it is just not interesting or important.
• An essay necessarily exists withing a context of interpretation, made up of the reader (level six), and the culture that the reader is embedded in (level seven), which is made up in part of the assumptions that he or she will bring to the essay.
• For the essay to succeed, brilliantly, it has to work at all of these levels of resolution simultaneously. That is very difficult, but it is in that difficulty that the value of the act of writing exists.
• If you are bored while writing, then, most importantly, you are doing it wrong, and you will also bore your reader.
• You must choose a topic that is important to you. This should be formulated as a question that you want to answer. This is arguably the hardest part of writing an essay: choosing the proper question.
• Having said all that, here is something to remember: finished beats perfect. Most people fail a class or an assignment or a work project not because they write badly, and get D's or F's, but because they don't write at all, and get zeros. Zeros are very bad. They are the black holes of numbers. Zeros make you fail. Zeros ruin your life. Essays handed in, no matter how badly written, can usually get you at least a C. So don't be a completely self-destructive idiot. Hand something in, regardless of how pathetic you think it is (and no matter how accurate you are in that opinion).
• 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 doesnt' work, read something else--maybe something better. Repeat until the problem is solved.
• Assume you need 5-10 books or articles per thousand words of essay, unless you have been instructed otherwise.
• When you are taking notes, don't bother doing stupid things like highlighting or underlining sentences in the textbook. There is no evidence that it works. It just looks like work. What you need to do is to 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. The most important part of learning and remembering is the recreation of what you have written in your own language.
• Take about two to three times as many notes, by word, as you will need for your essay. You might think that is inefficient, but it's not. In order to write intelligibly about it, you need to know far more than you actually communicate.
• Here's another rule. When you write your first draft, it should be longer than the final version. This is so that you have some extra writing to throw away. You want to have something to throw away after the first draft so that you only have to keep what is good.
• Production (the first major step) and editing (the second) are different functions, and should be treated that way. This is because each interferes with the other. The purpose of production is to produce. The function of editing is to reduce and arrange.
• There is almost nothing a novice writer can do that will improve his or her writing more rapidly than writing very short sentences.
• Don't be tempted to use any word that you would be uncomfortable to use in spoken conversation.
• Read each sentence aloud, and listen to how it sounds. If it's awkward, see if you can say it a different, better way. Listen to what you said, an then write it down. Rewrite each sentence. Once you have done this with all the sentences, read the old versions and the new versions, and replace the old with the new if the new is better.
• If you force yourself to reconstruct your argument from memory, you will likely improve it. Generally, when you remember something, you simplify it, while retaining most of what is important. Thus, your memory can serve as a filter, removing what is useless and preserving and organizing what is vital.
• You are not genuinely finished until you cannot edit so that your essay improves. Generally, you can tell if this has happened when you try to rewrite a sentence (or a paragraph) and you are not sure that the new version is an improvement over the original.