How to write essays in a deceptive manner.

All USP students in NUS would have gone through a basic writing module on how to write proper essays. After which, you can visit the writing centre to say hi to the writing assistants, or ask them for more help when your essay does not seem to make any sense. While the folks in writing centre are well trained to spot your motives and thesis, they usually do not give any advice (unless you bribe them with milo) on how to turn on the sex appeal of essays. Thus, while a good essay will give you...say a B+, writing it with style will push you to an A-, or an A.

While my own works are not fantastic, I have learnt a few tips that can be deployed in times of desperation.

1) Be your professor's friend, not just a student. Legend has it that a professor in NUS gave a student an F for her 20% essay. Yet, she managed to get an A grade for her final results. The bottom line is to be nice and friendly, and make sure he is someone up there in the department, not some senior lecturer. SMS him once in a while. Your friendship will come in handy when you realised your 15 page essay is due the next day, and you are stuck with the first sentence.

2) After securing the friendship, it is time to impress him with bourgeois ideas. Most professors are discrete neo-marxists who believe in the proletarian cause but like to use bourgeois language in their lecture delivery. Cross breed whatever that you have learnt in class with bourgeois ideas, such as art, film, high end cultures, religions and apply such hybridisation in a bourgeois manner in your essays.

3) What are bourgeois essays without bourgeois language? At every single possible opportunity, use bourgeois words in your essays.

i.e. 'sine qua non' instead of 'prerequisite', 'coup de grace' instead of 'strategy', 'weltanschaunng' instead of 'worldview', 'caveat' instead of 'warning'... you get the idea...

4) While we are limited in knowledge, it does not stop us from eluding a sense of knowing everything, by embodying key philosophical characters in every single essay.

Example - From a Hobbesian perspective, the state's Confucius ethos was nothing but a Machiavellian attempt, and a Gramscian coup de grace (refer to point 3), to subvert our Foucaldian gaze into a neo-Marxist alignment.

Okie...it is a nonsense statement...but if every statement can embody 500 years of eastern and western philosophy, the prof might just be tempted to give a plus in your grade.

5) Your prof usually marks his paper at night. He is tired and deprived, and the last thing he wants is to have confusing thesis. Therefore, the strategy is to summarize what you have written, in your second last paragraph. Forget what writing tutors said about the dangers of summarizing, fact of the matter is, it works most of the time. But I say, the second last paragraph, because you want to save the last paragraph for some twist and turns which leaves him unable to sleep through the night.

6) Dichotomize your thesis, contradict the dichotomy using words like 'within' and 'without', antithetical etc. Make the thesis sound more complicated than it really is. But of course, make sure you are not entangled in the process.

7) If all else fails, refer to point 1. That could be the only way out.