Yogyakarta, 27th March 2020 – Research center Center for Digital Society or CfDS Fisipol UGM held another online discussion with the theme ‘Digital Discussion #14: Impressive Essay Writing 101’ in March, 27th 2020. The discussion was held in the WhatsApp Group with 168 participants from various faculties and universities. This time, Digital Discussion by CfDS invited the speaker of this discussion, Anisa Pratita Mantovani, LLM as the Manager of Research CfDS which later called as Mbak Tita, and the moderator Made Bayu Agus Sudharma as the Event Staff CfDS that moderated the discussion.
Digital Discussion #14 was started at 07.00 p.m., it began with the explanation of the group’s rules and introducing the speakers by the moderator. After the participants introduced themselves, to energize the WhatsApp Group, moderator started to do some question and answer about the theme with them. “I wanted to ask something to all of you, Smart People, what is the basic thing that we should concern about in writing an essay?” Mas Bayu asked. From some of the responses from participants, most of them answered about writing structure, rules of language, topics, and data retrieval process.
“To write a good and interesting academic essay, there are two things that should be concerned by the writers. First, the substance in the essay, and second, discussion line or writing line in essay,” Mbak Tita responded the moderator. Before that, Mbak Tita also explained the reasons for the essay writing assignment given by the lecturers. According to her, there were several considerations about why writing the essay is very important. It could be the tools to find out how deep our knowledges are about the assignment’s topic, to identify and choose the literatures, to assess how our thinking framework in pouring ideas into essay, and to analyze whether our main argument is backed up by the right literatures and right theories. “Therefore, the academic essay that potential to get a good score is an academic essay that could answer all of that four questions,” Mbak Tita said.
After that, the speaker explained about how to looking for writing topic when a deadlock occurs. According to her, an interesting topic was started by an interesting problem formula. “If the topics are hitz but the problem formula is just ordinary, it would not be interesting,” Mbak Tita explained. Then she explained that there are several ways to looking for good problem formulas. First, increase the knowledge about the big theme that would be discussed in the essay. Second, discuss the writing topic with friends or consult it to the people who have an interest in the topic. Third, read the accredited and indexed journals that put further possible research. The speaker also explained the three initial processes in writing an essay, there were brainstorming, breaking it down and building it up, and writing as thinking.
After knowing the steps before writing an essay, Mbak Tita showed how to write an essay’s structure in a form of a picture. Then Mbak Tita also emphasized on writing references and citations to avoid plagiarism. She explained about several things to avoid plagiarism, there were understand the writing topic, write the quotes neatly, use a good references and citations system, and use the plagiarism check software.
After those explanations, moderator opened two question and answer sessions. Both of them are full with good questions from the participants. Mbak Tita as the speaker answered all of the questions sequentially and clearly. She even gave some examples of essay writing and materials about writing an essay as the study guide. Because of the limited time and the enthusiasm of the participants to ask, the discussion was closed formally and for the participants who still want to ask are welcome to contact the Instagram account of @cfds_ugm or through the email. In the end, the event was closed at 09.30 p.m.