Objectives
The 4-5 page essay is intended to serve three main purposes:
- To help you to clarify some of the main concepts of the course. There’s nothing quite like having to write an idea down to help you clarify and organize your thoughts.
- To help you keep ‘up to speed’ on the lectures. Fully understanding the concepts covered in the Short Essays will help you to appreciate some of the more subtle points in subsequent lectures.
- To give you practice in writing. Leaning how to write well is a skill that takes years to develop. The Faculty of Forestry has placed special emphasis on helping students learn to write well. Forestry 100 is a required course for nearly everyone in the Faculty of Forestry. So in this course we emphasize writing skills. Lots of practice combined with appropriate feedback is the best way to learn to write well. The Short Essays are intended to provide you with lots of practice; the Graduate Teaching Assistants and the English Assistants can provide you with feedback. David Godsall’s A Writing Guidebook for the Natural Sciences, published by the Faculty of Forestry, can help you understand the basic principles of good writing. Universities, especially UBC, have higher standards for writing than do high schools. If this is your first or second year at UBC, you must learn to write acceptably well (if you haven’t already) as soon as possible.
Content
For each short essay assignment, a question will be announced in class. Your essay will be your answer to the question. Format: Please ensure that each of your essays conforms to the “Standards for all assignments” on page 5 of this course syllabus.
Hints
- State your main idea in the first paragraph (preferably in the first sentence).
- Don’t be afraid to use the first person. For example, feel free to write something like this: “In this essay, I argue that … “ or “I cannot support Leopold’s conception of the ‘biotic community’ for the following reasons.”
- Try to get used to writing in the active voice, as compared to the passive voice. For example, “We discovered that…” is using the active voice, while, “It was discovered that…” is using the passive voice. If you use the active voice, you will have a better chance of making your essay sound fresh and interesting (which might influence your grade); the passive voice tends to sound boring.
Use David Godsall’s A Writing Guidebook for the Natural Sciences to help you with sentence structure, paragraph structure, and essay structure.
