Essay writing can often look like a tough task and is dreaded by several students. However, being able to do it is a useful skill you might need for your academic future.
Essays are an important factor considered by colleges and universities during their admission processes. They are also important device that helps you express and propagate your ideas and thoughts through a structured form.
Knowing how to write an essay also gives you an idea about presenting your arguments convincingly and making your readers believe in your opinion through written words.
However, to achieve these goals, it is important to learn how to write an essay skillfully.
This article is designed to help beginners understand the tricks and procedures of crafting an excellent essay and getting into the habit of writing one. This will help you prepare for future endeavors and admissions to higher educational institutes.
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Learn Essay Writing With These Tips
Given below are some of the most important tips that will help students learn how to write essays for the rest of their lives.
Understanding The Different Types Of Academic Essays
Academic essays have a variety of categorizations. These categories are based on the type of value you want to deliver to your readers through your essay.
In short, it is the goal of your essay that determines the type. Here are some of the major essay types that every beginner must know:
Narrative Essay
This is a story-telling essay type where you write about an event or a row of events that help readers derive some important information.
Descriptive Essay
These essays aim to describe a place, event, or thing where the efforts are directed to describing the subject more than proving an opinion.
Persuasive Essay
Persuasive essays aim to influence readers and persuade them to take action based on your opinions and ideas on the subject matter.
Expository Essay
Expository essays are more like guides that tell readers how to perform a specific function and get results. You can also frame them step-by-step to help readers follow and perform.
Argumentative Essay
With this type, you’re required to write an essay that proves a point using research, evidence, and arguments. Hence, your essay must find an answer to a controversial question of this type.
Preparing An Essay Structure
Putting up a set of varied ideas, arguments, and opinions in a coherent structure is the primary aim of writing any academic essay.
Therefore, the structure of the essay becomes extremely important. Typically, essays are divided into three main parts:
- The introduction: Where you introduce readers to the topic and present a gist of your argument flow.
- The body: This is the main part where you present your ideas, arguments, and descriptions.
- The conclusion: This is the last part of the essay where you finalize your argument or encourage readers to take some action after having proved the advantages or opinions in the main body.
However, if you move from basic to more complex essay writing, this structure might change according to the needs and rules of the organization and the demands of your essay topic.
The body can be divided into multiple parts. For example, if you’re writing an argumentative essay, you can describe the common opinion on the subject in one part of the body and present your opinion on another.
Likewise, a narrative essay must be divided into parts that describe each event separately yet function as one coherent structure at the end.
It is important to determine your representation form in order to create the perfect structure. You must divide events and arguments in descending order of importance when crafting the structure of your essay.
Writing With A Continuous Flow
When you’re writing an academic essay, students may get off-topic and divert the flow in a different direction.
Essays are long-form writing exercises and thus provide much space for imagination and creativity. However, this space often needs clarification, and the creative flow might lose the sense of direction and brevity.
Here are some tips that can help you stay in line and write an essay that perfectly communicates your ideas throughout:
- Structure your essay by dividing each part into paragraphs and limiting their individual word count. Delivering a message in fewer words ensures that you present only the “cream” words and eliminate what’s unnecessary.
- Use transitional words and pronouns to create links between each part, paragraph, and sentence in the essay.
- Divide each paragraph into an introduction, body, and conclusion structure to maintain the direction of your essay.
- Select and use a uniform tone throughout your essay.
- Write the entire essay in one single sitting. This will help you remember and pen down the points you’ve gathered and maintain a uniform style throughout.
- Make a rough note of the arguments before starting. You might need to remember or get diverted from your thoughts when writing. Therefore, having rough documentation of your thoughts can help you stay on track.
Revise And Proofread
Before you declare your work complete, the last and most important ending step is revision and proofreading.
Here are some tips that will help you get the best results after you’ve revised and proofread your article:
- Spell checks are helpful for detecting serious problems, but they often miss numerous straightforward grammatical mistakes.
- It’s crucial to read slowly and break the material into small bits because proofreading is precise and time-consuming.
- Focus on each word separately to easily detect spelling mistakes.
- Knowing your own strengths and shortcomings, as well as your own areas of weakness and error, is also beneficial.
- Style manuals and grammatical guidelines are extremely effective when proofreading.
- Read your essay aloud when proofreading to detect your mistakes.
- Maintain a note of all your major and repetitive errors so that you can put separate efforts into correcting them in the future.
- Divide your essays into manageable halves when proofreading and editing them.
Learn And Improve Your Skills
Practice can make you better and perfect if you’re still learning. Therefore, keep writing and reading essays.
This will help your mind open up to an ocean of ideas and make your essays more and more unique.
You can also take help from online essay-writing services. Platforms like freshessays.com help students with uniquely crafted plagiarism-free essays. Reading through these essays will help you learn the structures and create a guideline for your own writing skills.
You can also get help from your teachers, professors, and friends to get a reading guide and have them proofread your essays to recognize deficiencies.