Now that you have worked through all the places where you have identified potential for improvement, you are ready to write the second draft, and possibly the final version of your essay.

Following is a reminder of features that improve your essay if you use them well.

These features have been highlighted in the sample final essay below:

• Thesis statement (Step 9)
• Outline of the argument in the introduction (Step 10)
• Signpost words/conjunctions
• Variety of citation verbs
• Topic sentences (Step 9)
• Concluding sentences

Sample Final Essay

The desire to understand what happiness is has engaged thinkers for thousands of years. An argument that continues to be debated is whether happiness is a feeling that a person experiences at a particular moment or something more complex relating to the way a person remembers or makes sense of their life as a meaningful, valued story. These two ways of understanding the concept of happiness appear to have little in common. One is about the immediate present as it is experienced; the other is an accumulation of past experiences reviewed by memory. Both of these ways of understanding happiness have been explored through a range of research approaches.Firstly evidence for the experiential conception of happiness will be outlined. Next arguments supporting the meaning and memory perspective will be presented. The arguments for each position will then be compared and contrasted to try to assess which approach is more truly the meaning of happiness. This essay will argue that the significant nature of the contrasts found between these two approaches indicates that they are referring to two quite different things that historically have both been named happiness.

Joy and delight are words that refer to experiences that occur at a particular moment; they are good feelings that are experienced as they happen. Happiness is commonly understood as this kind of feeling. Killingsworth (2011) describes happiness as ‘having a lot to do with our moment-to-moment experiences’. He developed an iPhone app called Trackyourhappiness as a method of tracking large numbers of people’s feelings at random moments to try to understand more about how the momentary experience of happiness feels, what causes it, and what stops it. The app only asks questions relating to how a person is feeling currently, so it only explores the momentary experience way of thinking about happiness. Killingsworth discovered that feeling happy in the moment is closely correlated with being attentive to the present activity and that mind-wandering is correlated with a reduction in happiness. So this research finds that not only is happiness something that occurs at the present moment, but that it occurs most when a person is most attuned to the present moment.

In contrast, there are studies which explore happiness as a particular quality of memory. According to this perspective, how happy a person is depends upon whether they can create a narrative of their experiences which is valuable and meaningful. Einarsdottir (2012) investigated the happiness of health professionals working in the highly stressful environment of an understaffed neonatal intensive care unit. She discovered that these professionals consistently enjoyed their work, despite knowing that it is difficult and stressful, because they believed it to be valuable and feel professionally proud to be doing it. This sense of value, Einarsdottir argues, comes from the professionals’ ability to create and maintain meaningful narratives about their work that help them cope and bring them happiness, ‘when confronted with adverse experiences the professionals negotiated their meanings as well as the goals and priorities of their work’ (p. 7). Another study, related by Kahneman (2010), recorded the actual pain experienced by colonoscopy patients during their operation, and compared it with the experience of pain that the patients remembered when asked about their operations later. The patients who thought they had the best experiences were not those who experienced the least pain, but the ones whose actual momentary pain peaked and then decreased, because these patients could provide the story of their operation with a happy ending. So there is some compelling evidence that happiness is created within the stories humans use to make experience meaningful.

There are significant aspects that these two conceptions of happiness appear to have in common. Both ideas are familiar as ways that happiness is commonly spoken of. Both ideas of happiness can explain some of the factors found to contribute to happiness. For example, both theories are able to encompass the contribution of relationships with other people to an individual’s happiness, which is noted as a significant contributing factor in studies such as O’Rourke Cooper & Gray (2012 p. 139) who investigate the happiness of children in Western Australian primary schools. Both can also account for the influence that giving and gratitude have in increasing happiness, as found by Norton (2011). There are however, some factors, such as focussing on the present, or helping others despite a loss of amenity in the present, that have been found to relate to happiness that can only be explained by one of these two models.

Contrasts between the two theories are striking. The implications of each theory in terms of human actions to maximise happiness are very different. Understanding happiness as an experience in the moment implies that happiness would be increased by activities such as meditation upon the present moment, and activities that provide momentary joy or pleasure. On the other hand, thinking of happiness as a meaningful narrative implies happiness would be increased by engagement in activities that contribute to life having more valuable meaning, such as the achievement of goals, or contributions to improving something. Furthermore, while both ways of understanding happiness are concerned with experience, the nature of experience is different in each case. One concept of happiness takes experience to be the conscious realisation of a present state of being; the other takes it to be a constructed narrative that makes a period of time meaningful after it has happened. These contrasts suggest that these two conceptualisations are really describing two different things, rather than being two competing ways of describing the same thing.

While the similarities between the two concepts are explainable by their common usage for a long time, the differences indicate that there is a significant gap between them. Kahneman has argued that people commonly confuse two different ideas of the self when they speak about happiness. He refers to these as ‘the experiencing self’ and ‘the remembering self’ (2010) and explains that these two different selves are made happy by different things in different ways. He argues that research into happiness needs to recognise this distinction, to avoid confusion and error. This position is supported by the fundamental nature of the differences between the two perspectives. As argued above, they each understand the nature of experience differently. Furthermore, the evidence discussed in this essay demonstrates that both of these ways of thinking about happiness are needed to understand what happiness is. The two ways of understanding happiness appear to have little in common because they are explaining different, but equally meaningful things.

In conclusion, happiness has frequently been described in two conflicting ways, as either the experience of pleasant feelings in the present moment, or as a sense of satisfaction with experience as it is remembered and made meaningful through narrative. These two ways of understanding have been compared and contrasted. Although there are similarities between the two conceptualisations, these are not as significant as the differences. The two perspectives of happiness differ in fundamental ways, viewing the nature of experience differently, or as Kahneman describes, having different ways of thinking of the self. Because of these fundamental differences, the two ways of understanding happiness can be described as essentially different, rather than competing concepts, both of which are needed to explain the evidence. Happiness is a concept with two meanings; it is both of the past and of the present, created in memory, and experienced in sensation.

References

Einarsdottir, J 2012, ‘Happiness in the neonatal intensive care unit: Merits of ethnographic fieldwork’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Health and Well-being, vol. 7, pp. 1-9.

Kahneman, D 2010, The riddle of experience vs. memory, online video, TED Talks, Longbeach, California, viewed 4 April 2014, <http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory>.

Killingsworth, M 2012, Want to be happier? Stay in the moment, online video, TEDx, Cambridge, Massachusetts, viewed 4 April 2014, <http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_killingsworth_want_to_be_happier_stay_in_the_moment>.

Norton, M 2011, How to buy happiness, online video, TEDx, Cambridge, Massachusetts, viewed 4 April 2014, <http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_norton_how_to_buy_happiness>.

Oishi, S, Graham, J, Kesebir, S, Costa Galinha, I 2013, ‘Concepts of happiness across time and cultures’ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin vol. 39 no. 5 pp. 559-77.

O’Rourke, J, Cooper, M & Gray, C 2012, ‘Is being “smart and well behaved” a recipe for happiness in Western Australian primary schools?’, International Journal of Psychological Studies, vol. 4, no. 3, viewed 4 April 2014, <http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ijps/article/view/18622/13153>.