Help:Writing essays

Essays are pages created for a purpose beyond simply being informative. They can be written for various reasons, but usually either aim to advance a particular argument (similar to an essay you might write in school, or a persuasive opinion piece written for a newspaper) or to present research findings (similar to a research paper). It is not expected that bearchivists will write essays, but this guide exists to walk you through the process in case an essay idea does strike you.

Titling your essay

---

Your essay can be titled whatever you'd like, but we recommend keeping it short and descriptive to keep the page title and URL manageable! A good question to get you started might be: if someone were to ask you "What is your essay about," what would be the most efficient answer? If you really want to give your essay a long title like a newspaper opinion piece, you can use an abbreviated version for the page title and then place the full title somewhere at the top of your essay page.

Essays should be hosted as subpages on your user page. What this means is that when you use your preferred method to create your essay page, the title of the page should begin with your Wiki username, including the User: namespace, and then a forward slash. It also means your essay will automatically have a breadcrumb at the top left of the page that will link back to your main userpage.

• Example: If User:Bearchivist wants to make an essay about their experience being a bear builder, they can make a page titled User:Bearchivist/Being a bear builder, which will automatically link back to User:Bearchivist.

Template:Essay

---

At the top of your essay, please place Template:Essay by pasting {{Essay}}. This automatically adds your page to the Essays category and is a visual reminder for readers to read your essay critically.

Preview

Content

---

The content of your essay can be structured however you'd like. If you just want to write an opinion piece or about your personal experience with something, you can stream-of-consciousness the whole thing. However, if you want to try and convince other bearchivists of a particular viewpoint, it will likely be in your best interest to organize your essay more persuasively; for example, breaking it into clear introduction, body, and conclusion sections. The Build-A-Bear Wiki highly recommends researching reliable sources to use to support your argument when writing a persuasive essay and including them with the proper citations (see below).

Citing your sources

---

As in all other areas of the Wiki, any time a particular piece of information in your essay didn't come directly from you, please cite it! It is plagiarism to use someone else's work, thoughts, or opinions without attribution. In an essay, you have two basic options for citing your sources.

Direct links

To use direct links to cite a source, pick the most relevant part of the text (this can be as little as one word or as much as a whole sentence) and use Wiki markup to turn it into a link to the source you want to cite. Using direct links can be faster and easier than using Template:Reflist (see below), but it has the drawback of not generating an automatic reference list for your reader to browse, and of not having a way to un-redundantly link two pieces of information to the same source.

Template:Reflist

To cite a source using Template:Reflist, write <ref></ref> or <ref name="(refname)"></ref> after the material you need to reference, and enclose your citation within the brackets. Note that references must be named to be used more than once, and naming makes references easier to navigate, so The Build-A-Bear Wiki recommends naming all references. The reference name should be short, sweet, and specific; for example "NYTimes" or "reddit1." If you want to use a reference a second (or third, etc) time, use <ref name="(refname)"/> with the same reference name as the original citation: this will add a new superscript citation without duplicating the source in your references list.

To generate the list of references, place {{Reflist}} on your page. It is recommended to place your Reflist under a heading like ==References== for organizational purposes. Your citations will automatically be arranged by the template into a tidy numbered list.

For more information about styling citations and formatting for links and lists, see The Build-A-Bear Wiki:Style guide and Help:Basic formatting and_functions.

Tip: If you want to add a citation to a page that doesn't directly link to any piece of text, you can include it in a bullet-pointed list underneath {{Reflist}}.

IMPORTANT NOTE: To combat link rot, please try to save captures of all pages you cite from Build-A-Bear's various country-based websites OR active listings on sales websites such as eBay, Mercari, Depop, or Vinted, on Wayback Machine, and cite the Wayback Machine version of the webpage. Build-A-Bear has a habit of removing product pages before they can be crawled by bots and automatically preserved on Wayback Machine, and sales listings are rarely crawled at all, leading to permanent loss of the data these pages once contained. Manually saving snapshots for each page you cite helps to prevent the source of your information from being lost to time.