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Skip to content. Skip to navigation. The essay is used as a form of assessment in many academic disciplines, and is used in both coursework and exams. It is the most common focus for study consultations among students using Learning Development. Other useful guides: What is critical reading? What is critical writing?

How to Write an Essay

Skip to content. Skip to navigation. The essay is used as a form of assessment in many academic disciplines, and is used in both coursework and exams. It is the most common focus for study consultations among students using Learning Development. Other useful guides: What is critical reading?

What is critical writing? Thought mapping ; Referencing and bibliographies ; Avoiding plagiarism ; The art of editing. These lists suggest questions to ask of your writing when you are reviewing it. The need to use such a wide range of academic skills is probably the main reason why the essay format is so popular with tutors as an assignment.

The word limit adds to the challenge by requiring that all of these skills be demonstrated within a relatively small number of words. Producing incisive and clear written work within a word limit is an important skill in itself, which will be useful in many aspects of life beyond university. Good, constructively critical feedback can give you excellent guidance on how to improve your essay writing.

It is worth attending to all of the suggestions and comments you receive, and trying to act on them. You need to read every single word of it, and to squeeze out as much guidance you can from the title.

Then you need to plan how you will respond to every single element of the title. The guidance given to you by the title is freely available, and is your best clue to what is required in your essay. One, answer the question. Two, answer the question. Three, answer the question.

This is important at the start, but also throughout your writing, as it can be easy to drift away and waste valuable words from your word limit by writing material that may be interesting, but which is not relevant to the title set. The Mini Guide: Essay terms explained , and Questions to ask about interpreting essay titles may be useful. It can be a way of making a lot of progress quite quickly. It can be stressful and very difficult trying to work out solely in your mind how to tackle an essay title; asking yourself questions such as: What structure should I use?

What are my main points? What reading do I need to do? Have I got enough evidence? It can be much less stressful to throw all your thoughts down on paper, before you start trying to find answers to these questions.

In these early stages of your thinking you may not be sure which of your ideas you want to follow up and which you will be discarding. Instead, you can catch all of your ideas, in no particular order, on a sheet or two of A4. Once they are down there it will be easier for you to start to review them critically and to see where you need to focus your reading and note taking.

Essentially, this is what you are doing within the essay process: breaking ideas down, then building them up again. You need to:. Throughout this process, the essay title is the single immovable feature.

You begin there; you end there; and everything in between needs to be placed in relation to that title. All three of the processes described above will inform your decisions about what you need to read for a particular essay.

If left unplanned, the reading stage can swallow up huge amounts of time. Fortunately, there is scope for developing efficiency in several ways:. While a certain level of efficiency is desirable, it is also important to remain flexible enough to identify relevant and interesting ideas that you had not anticipated.

You can use the writing process to help you think through, clarify and develop your early ideas about how you might respond to the title that has been set:. As with teaching, it is often not until you try to communicate an argument and its evidence that you find where the gaps are in your knowledge or argument.

Writing is an active and constructive process; it is not merely a neutral recording of your thoughts. It is therefore useful to go into the writing process expecting to make revisions. The first words you write do not have to be part of the final version. Editing your writing as you develop your ideas is a positive not a negative process: the more you cross out, re-write, and re-order, the better your essay should become.

All essays need structure. The structure may be strong and clear, or it may be unobtrusive and minimal but, in a good essay, it will be there. Again this may be strong and obvious, or it may be almost invisible, but it needs to be there. However, even in those essays that appear to be highly creative, unscientific, or personal, an argument of some kind is being made. It is the argument, and how you decide to present and back up your argument, that will influence your decision on how to structure your essay.

The essay structure is not an end in itself, but a means to an end: the end is the quality of the argument. By creating a relevant structure, you make it much easier for yourself to present an effective argument.

There are several generic structures that can help you start to think about your essay structure e. These can be useful starting points, but you will probably decide to work with a more complicated structure e.

In addition to these macro-structures you will probably need to establish a micro-structure relating to the particular elements you need to focus on e.

You may feel that, for your particular essay, structures like these feel too rigid. You may wish to create a more flexible or fluid structure. An analogy could be that of symphony writing.

This set out a pattern for the numbers of movements within the symphony, and for the general structure of writing within each movement. The continued popularity of their work today shows that they clearly managed to achieve plenty of interest and variety within that basic structure. Later composers moved away from strict symphonic form. Some retained a loose link to it while others abandoned it completely, in favour of more fluid patterns.

It would be rare, however, to find a symphony that was without structure or pattern of any kind; it would probably not be satisfactory either to play or to listen to. Similarly, a structure of some kind is probably essential for every essay, however revolutionary. The process of essay planning and writing does not need to be a linear process, where each stage is done only once. It is often an iterative process i. A possible iterative process is:. This section heading is in quotes as it is also the heading of chapter 8, pages , in Barass Barass p80 makes the simple but valid statement, that:.

The tutors reading and marking your essays deserve your consideration. They will be reading and marking many, many student essays. If you make your argument hard to follow, so that they need to re-read a paragraph or more to try to make sense of what you have written, you will cause irritation, and make their job slower.

Realistically, it is possible that they may even decide not to make that effort. Your tutors will not necessarily be looking for the perfect, revolutionary, unique, special essay; they would be very happy to read a reasonably well-planned, well-argued and well-written essay.

They will not want to pull your essay to pieces. They would much rather enjoy reading it, and be satisfied by the thread of your argument. In the words of a tutor:. A powerful introduction is invaluable. It can engage your readers, and can give them confidence that you have thought carefully about the title, and about how you are going to address it. A useful generic structure is to:. It may be possible to use only one paragraph for your introduction, but it may fall more easily into two or more.

You will need to adapt and extend this basic structure to fit with your own discipline and the precise task set. Here is an example of an introduction for an essay entitled:.

Although the introduction appears at the beginning of your essay, you may prefer to write it towards the end of the drafting process:. Questions to ask of your introduction and conclusion may be useful. The middle part of the essay must fulfil the promises made in your introduction , and must support your final conclusions. Failure to meet either or both of these requirements will irritate your reader, and will demonstrate a lack of self-critique and of editing.

The central part of your essay is where the structure needs to do its work, however explicit or implicit your chosen structure may be. The structure you choose needs to be one that will be most helpful to you in addressing the essay title. The content of this central part will probably contain: ideas; explanations; evidence; relevant referencing; and relevant examples.

It will be characterised by:. Questions to ask of your essay content may be useful. A powerful conclusion is a valuable tool. The aim is to leave your reader feeling that you have done a good job.

A generic structure that you may find useful is:. The study guide What is critical writing? With critical writing, you are doing work with the evidence you are using, by adding a level of examination and evaluation. Questions to ask about your level of critical writing may be useful. Another useful tool to support critical writing is the paragraph! Aim to present one idea per paragraph.

Research the topic. Develop a thesis. Outline your essay. Write your essay. Edit your writing to check spelling and grammar. First, define your purpose. Is your essay to inform or persuade? Once you have determined the purpose, you will need to do some research on topics that you find.

Despite the fact that, as Shakespeare said, "the pen is mightier than the sword," the pen itself is not enough to make an effective writer. In fact, though we may all like to think of ourselves as the next Shakespeare, inspiration alone is not the key to effective essay writing. You see, the conventions of English essays are more formulaic than you might think — and, in many ways, it can be as simple as counting to five.

An argumentative or persuasive essay takes a strong position on a topic through the use of supporting evidence.

Writing an academic essay means fashioning a coherent set of ideas into an argument. Because essays are essentially linear—they offer one idea at a time—they must present their ideas in the order that makes most sense to a reader.

The Basics of Essay Writing

There are many types of essays and papers you can write as a student. The content and length of an essay varies depending on your level, subject of study, and specific course requirements. However, most academic essays share the same goal. They aim to persuade readers of a position or perspective through informed arguments, which are based on evidence, analysis and interpretation. Furthermore, every essay has an introduction , body and conclusion that always do more or less the same things. Table of contents Essay writing process Introduction of an essay Body of an essay Conclusion of an essay Checklist: How to write an essay.

How to write better essays: 'nobody does introductions properly'

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. Learn more Got it! Essays are common in middle school, high school and college. You may even need to write essays in the business world although they are usually called "reports" at that point. An essay is defined as "a short piece of writing that expresses information as well as the writer's opinion. For some, writing an essay is as simple as sitting down at their computer and beginning to type. But, a lot more planning goes into writing an essay successfully. If you have never written an essay before, or if you struggle with writing and want to improve your skills, it is a good idea to follow a number of important steps in the essay writing process. While this sounds like a lot of steps to write a simple essay, if you follow them you will be able to write more successful, clear and cohesive essays.

Academic essay writing is a style that anyone can learn to produce, once they know the basics of writing an essay.

We spoke to experts to get some simple techniques that will raise your writing game. Tim Squirrell is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, and is teaching for the first time this year. When he was asked to deliver sessions on the art of essay-writing, he decided to publish a comprehensive and brilliant blog on the topic, offering wisdom gleaned from turning out two or three essays a week for his own undergraduate degree.

Essay Structure

An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument — but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a paper , an article , a pamphlet , and a short story. Essays have traditionally been sub-classified as formal and informal. Formal essays are characterized by "serious purpose, dignity, logical organization, length," whereas the informal essay is characterized by "the personal element self-revelation, individual tastes and experiences, confidential manner , humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme," etc. Essays are commonly used as literary criticism , political manifestos , learned arguments , observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. Almost all modern essays are written in prose , but works in verse have been dubbed essays e. In some countries e. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills; admission essays are often used by universities in selecting applicants, and in the humanities and social sciences essays are often used as a way of assessing the performance of students during final exams. The concept of an "essay" has been extended to other media beyond writing. A film essay is a movie that often incorporates documentary filmmaking styles and focuses more on the evolution of a theme or idea. A photographic essay covers a topic with a linked series of photographs that may have accompanying text or captions. The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer , "to try" or "to attempt". In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The Frenchman Michel de Montaigne — was the first author to describe his work as essays; he used the term to characterize these as "attempts" to put his thoughts into writing.

General Essay Writing Tips

An academic essay aims to persuade readers of an idea based on evidence. Although there are some basic steps to writing an assignment, essay writing is not a linear process. You might work through the different stages a number of times in the course of writing an essay. For example, you may go back to the reading and notetaking stage if you find another useful text, or perhaps to reread to locate specific information. Skip to main content. Current Students. Sign on Search Menu. Exams Results. The Nucleus: Student Hub. Counselling Health Service.