How To Make Your Essay Writing Better
Writing an essay can be a daunting task. Important essays can often be high-stakes, but following these guidelines will help you maximize your essay-writing potential to show off your very best.
Picking a Topic
While sometimes you may be assigned a topic to write about specifically, other times you have a more open prompt, leaving for more possibilities for you to write about. Narrowing down the wide variety of topics to zero in on a thesis can be intimidating, but there are a few strategies you can utilize to ensure you find a topic worth writing about.
First, ensure that, if possible, you can write about a topic that you find interesting. Think of your own personal life experiences, and reflect that upon your prompt, if you have received one. In addition, it’s often valuable to think back to previous classes or essays that you have completed and enjoyed and see if it is possible to connect your essay back to this. Finally, you should pick a topic that allows you to research and create a clearly defensible statement.
Outline, Outline, Outline
Strangely enough, one of the most crucial parts of writing an essay comes before you complete your first word. Creating an outline for your essay before you begin to write is a crucial tactic to use when completing a paper of any kind. This outline doesn’t have to be particularly intricate but should be centered around one major topic – your thesis.
Ensuring that your thesis is a succinct, defendable point is critical to the remainder of your essay. Remember, if you don’t think you could explain to somebody the central concept of your thesis in everyday language, you may not have as strong a grasp on it as you need. Writing and rewriting your thesis multiple times is completely normal, so don’t be afraid to take a couple different cracks at it until you’re comfortable with your essay’s “main event,” so to speak.
Once you have created your thesis, you should outline specific points that back up this hypothesis. Make sure that the evidence you are using can directly support your thesis, and can connect to the themes you have spoken about throughout your paper. A clear outline of your introductory paragraph, your thesis, your central defense of your thesis, and your conclusion will lay the groundwork for a successful essay.
Write, Rewrite, Rinse, and Repeat
It’s a difficult pill to swallow, but it’s important to remember that your first draft may not be your best one. One of the best ways to evaluate your writing is to read it back to yourself. Trust your ears, and if a sentence doesn’t sound correct to you, it probably isn’t.
Finding others to read your essay to is also a helpful way to assess areas in your essay that may need more work. It’s important to remember that editing essays isn’t solely about grammar – diction, word choice, and style are all crucial elements to the totality of your essay. A cheap writing service will only help you ensure that your essay is readable, but it’s always best to go above and beyond the bare requirements, and pay close attention to the diction of the essay.
Research
So it’s all well and good to have proper word choice, but having a solid body of the essay, supported by evidence, is extremely important, too. To do so, research is crucial. One important strategy is to consult various libraries.
While the world may be online, library databases are still some of the largest repositories of information available. Take advantage of university resources as well, such as free directories of information.
Be wary of websites that don’t look trustworthy, or claim to be experts on a subject without having the proper credentials to back up such a claim. Create another document, separate from your essay and your outline, where you can store links to important articles or other resources that will assist you in your research. If your essay requires a bibliography, this will be a crucial document to keep track of the information you have cited.
Introductions and Conclusions
While the meat of your essay, so to speak, is in the body of the essay, what may be the most memorable sections are the introduction and the conclusion. While these may be formulated differently, they are both extremely important.
Your introduction should begin with a “hook”, a line that instantly catches the reader’s eye. If you have an interesting personal anecdote, this may be a good place to use it. If there is a particularly surprising statistic that you came across in your research, don’t be afraid to start off your essay with it.
Over the course of your introduction, you should lay out the arguments you will make in the body of your essay. The final sentence of the introduction should be that all-important thesis, which leads you directly into your first body paragraph.
While this may seem like a lot, it’s important to keep the introduction fairly brief, and let the evidence in the body of your essay do the majority of the talking. The essay writing service may extend your essay’s introduction beyond what is necessary, taking attention away from the priority of the essay. Closing out your essay is also extremely important. Consider the format of the conclusion as an inverted introduction. Start out with a restating of the thesis, framing it with the evidence you laid out in the heart of your essay.
Your closing of the essay has a few options. Ending with another unusual or significant statistic is always a good strategy for finishing essays. For example, if you are writing about crime rates, mentioning an eye-popping statistic about a crime that the reader can personally relate to will help you drive your point across. You can also finish your essay by posing a question to your audience, leaving them with something to ponder beyond the points that were made in the essay.
While writing an essay can often be an intimidating task, using the right strategies can help ensure that you write an essay you can be proud of. Research beyond what you believe to be necessary, create a strong thesis and have a solid and concise introduction and conclusion. Do this, and you’ll feel excellent turning in your next paper.