Well, this may sound obvious to many but I think #1 should be "Become a regular reader of few psychological and social academic journals". I guess this alone can give you few ideas to write essays. Now my question is that, anyone know if journals of repute(related to psychological and social) can be accessed online?
The Society for Judgement and Decision Making has been publishing an online journal for about 4-5 years now. Very respected Editor and Assoc. Editors and certainly some interesting papers in there. http://journal.sjdm.org/
Also, I've found it useful to build a list of researchers whose work I find interesting, then trawl Google Scholar for them; this usually turns up some free sources that would be otherwise hard to find in the noise.
