writing essay tips

writing essay tips

Effective Strategies for Writing an Exceptional Essay

1. Introduction to Essay Writing

Effectively writing an essay involves understanding the type of essay you have been asked to write. While essays are meant to demonstrate comprehension of specific subject matter, course content, or personal growth, we can generally determine their goal by the keywords they include. For example, words like analyze, evaluate, compare and contrast, identify cause and effect, discuss, interpret, or summarize indicate that your teacher expects you to engage in a particular type of essay. It is crucial to have this understanding as it will influence the organization of your essay and the depth of your analysis.

An essay is an organized compilation of thoughts and views related to a specific theme. It can be descriptive, argumentative, narrative, explanatory, persuasive, or contain cause and effect, among other types. It can provide a comprehensive answer to a problem, or simply express a basic opinion, describe an event or events, or provide examples and evidence to support a statement. Regardless of the type, one of the primary goals of essay writing is to convince the readers.

Enumerable of Words

If you are new to essay writing or academic writing in general, you may be relieved to know that it’s much easier to write a perfect essay than you think. Even though it requires more work and organization, it is not as terrifying as you may believe. Writing an essay can be simplified by breaking it down into specific steps. This composition discusses those steps in simple terms, acknowledging that they may vary for different types of essays, but can always be adapted.

Introduction

2. Planning and Pre-Writing Techniques

After you have answered the audience and purpose questions, you need to decide what you know and what you need to know about the subject matter before you begin any additional research. Everyone knows something. The television show “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?” may demonstrate the fact that you know a lot of interesting stuff that may not exactly relate to your subject, but if you take the time to think about your subject, you will discover that you know even more than you think. Identifying what you know is the start to gathering the following kinds of specific details: specific types (understanding types is important so you can see relationships between them); important characteristics; functions (uses); relevance; persuasiveness (assessing the probable reactions of your audience); context and personal connections.

You will be more successful in your writing if you use pre-writing techniques to get organized. Before planning an essay, you need to generate ideas related to your question or topic. We often discuss some of these tasks in a cluster or brainstorming activity. You can generate ideas using the technique that works best for you. Some of the most popular ones are clustering, asking and answering questions, brainstorming, doing a freewrite, keeping a journal, or talking about your ideas with a friend or in a group of students. Whatever technique you use, nothing is off limits, and it is helpful to get other people involved when possible. As you generate ideas, don’t worry about grammar or spelling or anything but getting as much information as you can onto the paper. Once you have generated enough ideas, think about your audience and your purpose. Who is going to read your essay, and what do you want this audience to learn or understand or believe about the subject matter?

3. Structuring Your Essay for Clarity and Coherence

There are many ways you can modify the organization of your essay to achieve coherence and hold the interest of your audience. While you need a clear introduction which includes a thesis that directly states your primary claim, you have the flexibility to present any part of the main body of the essay at the beginning, as either an argument or an illustration, to lay the foundation for the remainder of the essay. Your essay may open with a discussion of the students of economics, and with the concern for social and ethical values found in the writings of the early economists, before directing attention to the paradox of modern economics. Alternatively, you could begin with a review of Frank Knight’s research on ethics and the concept of economics, directly placing Knight into the context of economic thought.

4. Crafting Compelling Introductions and Conclusions

Address readers in a more conversational way. Lastly, try to address readers in a more conversational or, perhaps, informal tone. However, be careful not to overdo it. When writing about literature, don’t be restricted by the idea that the reader is looking for something profound. Just give them your opinion, backed up by your most compelling interpretations of the dramatic action in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Othello’s jealousy. Inform the audience of how the play’s events have been interpreted differently for some centuries.

Conclusion: Do not allow your essay just to peter out at the end. Instead, and in a little differently from the way it was introduced in your introduction, restate the importance of your subject. This strategy works well in both conventional academic essays and creative writing. A good conclusion is a smooth and natural one, not forced or hurried. A carefully worded sentence can act as a bridge that helps the essay flow smoothly and naturally from point to point.

Introduction: Choosing an introduction strategy that catches the reader’s attention is often a difficult and elusive task for many writers. Failure to grab the reader at the beginning is the primary reason for ineffectual essays. Be on the lookout for openings that lead directly to the sentence containing the thesis statement, providing an emphasis on the point to be supported. Introduce the subject, identify the piece of literature that relates to the subject, provide context (in the case of literature, this includes the author and title), and prepare the reader for the thesis statement.

4. Craft a compelling introduction and conclusion

5. Polishing Your Essay: Editing and Proofreading Strategies

Editing and proofreading strategies: 1. Strengthen the depth and quality of the ideas that you developed in the essay. 2. Review the focus and thesis of the essay. 3. Limit the number of ideas that you would like to develop in a short essay. A longer essay allows you the opportunity to develop several ideas over a few anecdotal paragraphs; a short essay may only allow you enough space to thoroughly develop one idea that supports your thesis. It is better to provide one anecdote and to develop different aspects of it than it is to state that all Anabaptists are risk-takers. 4. Each idea can be developed over a complete paragraph. Primarily, this paragraph should have an opening idea that relates to your thesis. Next, the body of the paragraph completes the idea through anecdotal evidence and examples, then concluded by looking inside the idea, perhaps by concluding why the idea is important. 5. Develop the sense of order for each idea in the essay. The paragraphs of your essay should flow from one idea to the next. An effective way to establish your overall order is to first decide how to order the paragraphs for each idea, then use topic sentences within each paragraph to establish a logical order of presentation.

The final stage of the writing process, called polishing, focuses on the aspects of your essay that you can fix but that are difficult to proofread or change once the essay is written. Polishing allows you to put some distance between the task of writing the essay and the task of evaluating the essay. By using a slightly more formal version of your in-process evaluation, you will be able to focus on more substantial and thoughtful revisions. A formal evaluation should have the effect of distorting some of your ideas to the extent that you can more easily identify your own insights and thoughts. Here are a few other factors to keep in mind.