Essay essay
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. Successfully structuring an essay means attending to a reader's logic. The focus of such an essay predicts its structure. It dictates the information readers need to know and the order in which they need to receive it.
How to Write a Good Essay
People are used to producing prose—and sometimes pictures—to express themselves. Professionals of the future will routinely deliver results and reports as computational essays. Educators will routinely explain concepts using computational essays. Students will routinely produce computational essays as homework for their classes. There are basically three kinds of things here. First, ordinary text here in English. Second, computer input. And third, computer output.
The ordinary text gives context and motivation. And then the computer output delivers facts and results, often in graphical form. But what really makes this work is the Wolfram Language —and the succinct representation of high-level ideas that it provides, defining a unique bridge between human computational thinking and actual computation and knowledge delivered by a computer.
In a typical computational essay, each piece of Wolfram Language input will usually be quite short often not more than a line or two. But the point is that such input can communicate a high-level computational thought, in a form that can readily be understood both by the computer and by a human reading the essay. English is basically made up of words. How long is a typical word? Well, we can take the list of common words, and make a histogram that shows their distribution of lengths.
Notice that the word lengths tend to be longer in French. We could investigate whether this is why documents tend to be longer in French than in English, or how this relates to quantities like entropy for text. Of course, because this is a computational essay, the reader can rerun the computations in it themselves, say by trying Russian instead of French.
From this plot, we can start to investigate all sorts of structural and historical relationships between languages. The text is saying what the basic point is. Then the input is giving a precise definition of what we want.
But take a look at the input. What is it? But a function in the Wolfram Language is always precisely defined. And to know what it does we can start by just looking at its documentation. But much more than that, we can just run it ourselves to explicitly see what it does. How does one actually create a computational essay? A notebook is a structured document that mixes cells of text together with cells of Wolfram Language input and output, including graphics, images, sounds, and interactive content:.
In modern times one great and very hard to achieve! You can author a notebook in the native Wolfram Desktop application Mac, Windows, Linux —or on the web through any web browser, or on mobile through the Wolfram Cloud app. Then you can share or publish it through the Wolfram Cloud , and get access to it on the web or on mobile, or download it to desktop or, now, iOS devices.
Sometimes you want the reader of a notebook just to look at it, perhaps opening and closing groups of cells. Sometimes you also want them to be able to operate the interactive elements. And sometimes you want them to be able to edit and run the code, or maybe modify the whole notebook. Most of the current modalities for student work are remarkably old.
Write an essay. Give a math derivation. These have been around for millennia. A computational essay is in effect an intellectual story told through a collaboration between a human author and a computer.
The computer acts like a kind of intellectual exoskeleton, letting you immediately marshall vast computational power and knowledge. Students will be exploring and discovering as well as understanding and explaining. What should the actual procedure be for students producing computational essays? We ended up with 72 interesting essays —exploring a very wide range of topics. Create or discover something, with each student following along by doing their own computations. At the end of the class, each student will have a notebook they made.
And in my experience, this ends up being a very good exercise—that really tests and cements the understanding students have. And this is one of the great general features of computational essays. Yes, they might run across some situation where the notes would be helpful. What can computational essays be about? Almost anything! In effect, the structured nature of the computational presentation helps suggest structure for the narrative—making it easier for students and others to write essays that are easy to read and understand.
But what about actual subject matter? Well, conveniently, the Wolfram Language has a lot of knowledge about history as about so many other things built in. So you can present the English Civil War through a kind of dialog with it. For example, you can ask it for the geography of battles:.
You could start looking at how armies moved, or who won and who lost at different points. At first, you can write a computational essay in which the computations are basically just generating custom infographics to illustrate your narrative. You can start to compute various statistical measures of the progress of the war. You can find ways to quantitatively compare it to other wars, and so on. Maybe about art history.
Pick 10 random paintings by van Gogh:. Or maybe one could write a computational essay about actually creating art, or music. What about science? Maybe you could go on and check it for exoplanets. Or you could start solving the equations of motion for planets.
You could look at biology. One convenient source of this is the Wolfram Data Drop. Here it is for today:. What about math? A key issue in math is to understand why things are true. The traditional approach to this is to give proofs. But computational essays provide an alternative.
But why do only 1 and 5 occur well, after the trivial cases of the primes 2 and 3? We can see this by computation. What about computer science? Or in modern times, one could explore machine learning, starting, say, by making a feature space plot of part of the MNIST handwritten digits dataset:.
If you wanted to get deeper into software engineering, you could write a computational essay about the HTTP protocol. This gets an HTTP response from a site:. The format helps quite a lot, of course. Because a computational essay is full of outputs often graphical that are easy to skim, and that immediately give some impression of what the essay is trying to say.
It also helps that computational essays are structured documents, that deliver information in well-encapsulated pieces. Because in the end the code is the code, and actually has to run and do things.
So what can go wrong? Well, like English prose, Wolfram Language code can be unnecessarily complicated, and hard to understand. In a good computational essay, both the ordinary text, and the code, should be as simple and clean as possible.
I try to enforce this for myself by saying that each piece of input should be at most one or perhaps two lines long—and that the caption for the input should always be just one line long. Use the structured nature of notebooks. Break up computational essays with section headings, again helping to make them easy to skim. The technology of Wolfram Notebooks makes it straightforward to put in interactive elements, like Manipulate , into computational essays.
And sometimes this is very helpful, and perhaps even essential. The cloud is very useful for handling this. Just deploy the data or code to the Wolfram Cloud, and set appropriate permissions so it can automatically be read whenever the code in your essay is executed. OK, so if a computational essay is done, say, as homework, how can it be assessed? A first, straightforward question is: does the code run?
And this can be determined pretty much automatically. Then after that, the assessment process is very much like it would be for an ordinary essay.
And those cells can contain runnable code—that for example can take results in the essay and process or check them. At the core of computational essays is the idea of expressing computational thoughts using the Wolfram Language.
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. Oh no! It's finals week and I have to finish my essay immediately. Loading What is this? parrotsprint.co.nz Cycle theme. It looks like you're enjoying EssayTyper.
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.
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A short essay can often prove to be more difficult to write than a longer essay. While in longer essays, you have ample space to explain and clarify all your points, in a shorter essay you might feel like you do not have enough space to make a strong argument. The key to writing a short essay is including only the most pertinent information necessary to make your point.
How to write an essay
Each teacher gives out homework, and at the end of the day, the students are overburdened. To lessen this burden order a paper from custom essay writing service and spend your time revising for your exams. Using professional essay writer can also save you from the unhealthy sleepless nights and embarrassing grades plus late submissions. For students who have enough time, they claim to lack necessary skills to come up with a top-notch essay. With this simple tips and tricks, you can successfully and confidently write your essay. Follow each step-by-step.
What Is a Computational Essay?
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.
These days, students can hire online companies to do all their coursework, from papers to final exams.
People are used to producing prose—and sometimes pictures—to express themselves. Professionals of the future will routinely deliver results and reports as computational essays. Educators will routinely explain concepts using computational essays. Students will routinely produce computational essays as homework for their classes.
Essay Structure
Academic essay writing is a style that anyone can learn to produce, once they know the basics of writing an essay. An academic essay should provide a solid, debatable thesis that is then supported by relevant evidence—whether that be from other sources or from one's own research. Most research follows a standard set of guidelines. Remembering some basic principles for academic essay writing will allow you to create valuable, persuasive papers, even if you're under a time crunch. Before you even start writing an essay, it is important to know what you want to say. The easiest way to narrow down a thesis and create a proper argument is to make a basic outline before you begin writing your essay. The basic structure of an academic essay includes the following elements: an introduction that includes the thesis; the body of the essay, which should include separate paragraphs discussing evidence that supports the thesis; and a conclusion that ties everything together and connects it to the thesis. When it comes to how much evidence should be included in an academic essay, a good guideline is to include at least three solid points that directly support your thesis. Grammar, style, and punctuation are incredibly important if you want your research to be understood and taken seriously. Before writing an essay, make sure you have a solid understanding of basic grammar. Grammar basics include verb and subject agreement, proper article and pronoun usage, and well-formed sentence structures. Make sure you know the proper uses for the most common forms of punctuation. Be mindful of your comma usage and know when a period is needed. Finally, in academic essay writing, voice is important.
5 Ways to Quickly Improve Your Academic Essay Writing Skills
An argumentative or persuasive essay takes a strong position on a topic through the use of supporting evidence. Describe the role of the introduction and conclusion in a formal essay. Essay, The. Galli, K. Massey University Search this Guide Search. How to Write a Good Essay. What is an Essay?