how to write a good english essay

how to write a good english essay

How to Write a Stellar English Essay

1. Understanding the Essay Prompt

If you understand your essay’s purpose, audience and summary, you can begin better organize your essay, which is actually the most difficult part for most writers. A scant outline cannot possibly contain all the thoughts needed to cover our essay’s entire topic. In fact, even advanced writers believe that an outline is necessary in the beginning, as it may give one a front devolving their ideas into a paper. It is not exclusively reserved to novelists but a powerful tool to help with any type of writing and thinking. You should start with the basics of an essay. Follow through the following steps of the Writing Process Endure. Consider a Thesis, Construct an Introduction, Develop the Body, Look into first Draft, Revise Structure and Style, Make a finale.

Chances are you have been given an essay prompt and you are scratching your head. It’s always useful to understand the task at hand and what is exactly required of you before jumping in to write your essay. In the prompt, you will find all the necessary information: the Essay Task, the guidelines, the essay summary, the audience and the scoring or the expectations. So instead of diving headfirst into essay writing, take a moment and try to understand everything that is asked of you before you move on any further. Reading the prompt will avoid you rework later.

2. Conducting Research and Gathering Evidence

With the birth of the internet, access to information was suddenly much easier for everyone. Students in particular stood the most to gain from it. Instead of traipsing around a library searching for a particular volume, scholars could search for their topics on databases and investigate various online resources. Both print and electronic sources provided massive amounts of information nowadays and students could carry out their investigation from home. Research has always been and will remain an integral part of any English writing essay. English essays written at the college level are usually argumentative or persuasive papers. This implies an interest in the subject you are writing about and a willingness to persuade the reader to your views, and these conditions in turn have to be supported by a carefully devised structure. Nonetheless, you cannot end this argument without presenting convincing proof.

Making an argument in an essay requires thought, cunning and the ability to articulate your ideas persuasively. A successful essay that inspires the reader cannot be written overnight. You must allow time for your ideas to simmer before you can turn them into a compelling read; one that touches your reader’s conscience. So what are the components of an outstanding paper? Writing an outstanding paper is an order of events that involves several peculiar factors. Namely, your paper must have compelling and proven evidence. You must then place your ideas into concise thought, ensure there are no grammatical or spelling errors and structure your essay accordingly. In order to produce a complete, well-researched and well-argued essay, you should revise several times. Here we explore research and gathering evidence.

3. Crafting a Strong Thesis Statement

I hope you found it a delightfully simple process! If this is a hard process for you, do not panic. A good paragraph organization naturally, and it is good to look back and ensure that those organization ideas are still intact. In essence, make sure that the order in which you talked about assorted things brings a logical conclusion of “yes, so this thesis statement makes a convincing argument for this essay. To craft a good statement no matter the method you choose, a statement should be an opinion on a subject and the reasons why. A thesis statement isn’t simply a statement of either a fact or opinion. An op-ed is always a good model to look at for tactics on convincing your peer to do something about your opinion. That essay above on perspective can help steer you in the correct direction of brain-storming, trying different ideas out, and therefore give you the motivation you need to continue. A statement should be one idea, not a collage of a paragraph’s worth of sentences.

Section 3: Crafting a strong thesis statement. The first step to writing an essay is to decide upon a purpose and plan out your purpose. It’s common for young students to attempt a broad thesis and research that their one idea was “the meaning of life”. Being broad with your research is good – try to find a component of the topic that really interests you. In the following breakdown I will explain how to start from the broadest subject and move down to one manageable idea. How can you talk about the meaning of life for three pages, let alone ten? The components of life are myriad, there’s so much to talk about! This is when a writer should start breaking their paragraph down, finding things to talk about. For instance, write your thesis in the center of a sheet of paper, and then circle it. When you write a “sub-idea”, circle that, write how you can elaborate, and draw an arrow to the next circle idea. Write your part of three/four ideas this way, would generate about two pages of writing.

4. Structuring Your Essay Effectively

Your first paragraph is called the introduction because its purpose is to introduce the reader to the essay topic and to convince the reader that the essay is interesting. This section also sets the stage for final elements of your essay that include your thesis statement and your 5-10 sentence outline. Once you have these elements in place, your introductory paragraph is complete. The next structure is the body which usually consists of 3-5 paragraphs. Each one of these paragraphs serves to prove a point that further supports your thesis statement and are built in the following way. Every paragraph should have a mini-thesis statement that is a clear, specific and arguable statement about a topic that hooks the reader so that s/he continues reading the essay. This is usually the first sentence in the paragraph. Then give 2-5 pieces of evidence from the text to support your mini-thesis (or topic sentence). Finally, every piece of textual evidence should have a sentence or two explaining how it supports the point you’re making.

There are many different ways to structure an essay, but each essay generally follows the same basic elements or format: an introduction that clearly signals the topic of the essay, body paragraphs, each with a main idea and supporting evidence, and a conclusion that restates the essay’s main ideas and sums them up in an inspiring way. This structure can be broken down into several steps that help you to first establish your argument and then flesh it out into a strong essay. Your thesis statement is the most important sentence in your essay, so spend a lot of time engineering this sentence. This sentence will guide the structure of your entire essay and should be the clearest and most provocative sentence in the essay. Instead of saying something like ‘Lord of the Flies is a book about the loss of innocence,’ say something that lets the reader know that your essay goes deeper. Something like ‘Lord of the Flies shows the destructive nature of man in the absence of order and civilization.’

5. Editing and Revising for Clarity and Coherence

Getting into the flow of thinking can deepen your argument to a point where you do not require drawn out transitions to tell the reader what you are about to tell them: simply continue. The same principle guides the removal of qualifiers such as wonderful, beautiful, and fantastic to explain how an author feels about something. If you strike down the red pen and concise thought in your writing, strip away excess talking.

Consider your options before deciding upon a style: if you are majoring in math, you may have the opportunity to use a nonstandard paragraph break to split mathematical symbols from text. This style might not work in the humanities, where there is a kind of freedom of word and thought that many math students do not understand. However, math students on the block system may already be good at transitions, so watch out for verbosity and check whether the overall structure of your paragraphs truly furthers your argument while providing visual cues. Error by unforced writers does take practice, which is out of our reach. However, typical errors such as disregarding paragraph unity, and using long and winding sentences without sentence variety are avoidable. First impressions set the tone, and your reader will understand immediacy if you skip over trite phrases. Keep in mind that although it is counter-intuitive to omit introductions and conclusions, they may not belong. A telltale sign that an intro or conclusion may not belong is if the paragraph acts as a conscious pause, a strategic rest from the task of connecting related thoughts and paragraphs.

Keep an argument simple by expressing only one thought in a sentence, no matter how complicated it may seem. Break down a complex thought into parts. Argument can still become complex by drawing connections between paragraphs by using connecting words (moreover, in fact, also, however, rather, similarly, etc.) to avoid having your reader backtrack to find the sense of what you have written. Consider the conventions of style, which are important especially for transfer students. These conventions vary from instructor to instructor as well as from area of study to area of study.

Clarity and coherence are musts in longer papers when an author develops an idea over several pages. Minimize distractions so that your reader can focus on the content of your argument. Begin with clarity of thought, expressed as simply as possible with sentences that are to the point. For your reader’s benefit, especially if they must read your work online or print it, be sure to utilize breaks and the arrangement of words to allow viewers a pleasant reading experience.