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Here's the essay guide:

Cambridge University Essay Writing Guide

Oxford University Philosophy Essay Writing Guide

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Chapters
00:00 Introduction
00:29 Coming up
00:48 Essays, not just homework
00:59 Michel de Montaigne
02:18 Great thinkers wrote essays
02:53 Essays - Better thinking
03:18 Bloom
03:49 Can you write an essay without doing this?
04:36 Essays improve your thinking
05:39 Taking notes for essays using retrieval
06:25 Elaborative Interrogation in note taking
06:55 Uncommon Sense Teaching
07:35 How to write an essay
08:18 Jordan Peterson
09:44 Thanks to the video sponsor Brilliant

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[KarlBunker]

Hot tip: If you're interested in a fairly obscure subject, become an active editor of the Wikipedia article on that subject. Check the accuracy of the article, read all the sources used for citations, then start correcting and improving it. Eventually you'll be a world-class expert on that subject.

[ruevictorhugo]

I’ve been doing this since I was 12. I had bought a book about horse training and it was translated from German and very complicated. So I started rewriting every paragraph I read in words that I understood. It worked. I do this all the time. It’s well known to math folks. Richard Feynman notably said that if you couldn’t explain something to an 8 year old you didn’t yet really understand it.

[billow]

All these Youtube explainers are just video essays. It's interesting to me that what so many students only created begrudingly turned into the type of content they consume most willingly.

[gauravtejpal]

Human beings are story-telling beings. Crafting narratives, writing essays are very much a part of who we are

[mechwarrior]

I work in IT and I cannot tell you how many complicated problems I have solved simply by explaining them comprehensively to someone, aka writing essays.

[laidman]

I spend a lot if time, too much time, scrolling through YouTube looking for something that can inspire me, expand my understanding of the universe, get me off the sofa. I think you just provided that inspiration. Thank you.

[duckdialectics]

There is no reason for hating it, just keep a journal. Rephraming "daily writing" as "thought journal keeping" mas it much more palatable. And yes, it does work, like magic.

[michellewentworth]

Totally agreed, I did a Masters Degree some years ago and learned more from the essays I wrote than anything else.

[gdvanc]

Somewhere along the line in school we stopped thinking of essays (and other things) as tools to master to help us make sense of the world and we started thinking of them as dreary assignments to survive. Along with that we have become more concerned more with receiving the degree or the diploma than the education.

On Montaigne and his essays: My daughter bought me Sara Bakewell's "How to Live - or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer". I enjoyed it enough to buy the Frame translation of Montaigne's Complete Works. As someone who enjoys history and philosophy, the breadth of references and quotes in his writings makes it a joy to read.

[kevingeaney]

I agree. In my own way I've been using writing to problem solve for 60 years. Explaining something in writing (in a way that a non expert could understand) requires you to order your thoughts, it highlights your misunderstandings, it confronts you with issues you never noticed before! Writing out your understanding of any problem (relationships, technical issues, finances, etc.) reveals solutions that were hidden in your subconscious.

[dondek]

I was taught the 5-paragraph essay in High School English, where we had to turn in a bunch of them. Then, in college, I found myself in front of my Freshman English class diagraming and explaining the 5PE for a class full of my peers. It’s a great tool.

[JohnSmith-gugl]

doing that for many years!

Recently, a few friends of mine started learning about machine learning, so I gave them an assignment:

"Write a 250-word essay explaining the following:
- Why normalization of inputs is necessary
- Why normalization after each layer is important
- Why shuffling the data is essential
- Why the softmax activation function is defined as it is
- Why ReLU is effective for hidden layers but not suitable for output layers"
and many many more questions like this.

After reviewing their essays, I realized they lacked a deep understanding of these concepts.
They could provide surface-level answers in a sentence, but they hadn't grasped the underlying principles and motivations behind these practices. All this was visible in their essays!


What did we learn?
You can fool the world and yourself with a sentence.
You can not hide your ignorance with an essay!

[josecarbia]

As soon as you corrected your pronunciation I INSTANTLY subscribed. So few have the humility to say “Oh, I was incorrect. Here’s the revision, let’s continue.” that is truly the mark of an educated mind. Thank you.

[knitterliness]

The most useful and interesting class I had in high school (many years ago now) required the writing of one essay per week, and oral presentation following. Crucial skills for my future professional life were the result. I would not have been able to write law school exams without that skill in my brain.

[scottguitar]

While I don't write essays, I would have to agree that even when I write a reply on different topics on YouTube, it helps me not only organize my thoughts better but certain topics have me ponder things before I write my thoughts down.

[jpl]

The 5 W ( what, why, when, where, who) questions are things to ask when wanting to gather information and gain a broad understanding of a particular topic or situation. The 5 can be written down in the relevant order appropriate for the subject of the essay.

[TeamCavalier]

I'm a writer, and you are correct that writing essays improve your cognitive thinking abilities. I tend to write essays in my college discussion posts, lol. Works for any subject, even mathematics!

[gadget]

Remembering may be as simple as writing down something multiple times. In the eighties I worked in a car dealers parts department, the part numbers were all ten digits long and we were constantly hand writing receipts. We were all quiet happily remembering the part numbers and the prices of all the common items. Then the company changed over to a computer, it soon had a noticeable effect, first the prices of everything wouldn't stick in memory after a price change, then as new part numbers were introduced they didn't seem to stick either. After the change I ended up relying on the computer where previously I would just remember. The upside of the first computerless years is a set of ten digit numbers I still haven't forgotten to use as internet passwords...

[MrGrokNRoll]

There are two, maybe three essays about essay writing by Paul Graham that are interesting. They are more about discovery (which is also a type of learning.
Paul Graham: The Age of the Essay
Paul Graham: Putting Ideas Into Words
Paul Graham: The Best Essay (that's the maybe one)

[Iron-Bridge]

You sir are correct. I came back to this practice a few years ago in my private time for self development.
Became even more necessary during the COVID lockdowns.
I managed to organise my thoughts and create teaching materials from this practice.