How to approach writing an essay

Throughout recent history, essays have become one of the most popular forms of written expression, especially in the educational system. And writing good essays is arguably among the most important skills a person will acquire in their teens.

The reason why this form of writing is so important is that it allows its author to sketch out a detailed analysis of their thoughts and present compelling arguments for or against a particular viewpoint. Some of them more abstract, others more practical. Where would we be if we wouldn’t know how to persuade our employees that we are the best candidate for that, oh so coveted job opening, or convince a Master’s commission that you’re worth their time and that entering their program will benefit you greatly?

In this article, we’ll look into the best way to approach writing a coherent essay. Let’s start, shall we?

What kind of essay are you writing, by the way?

Let’s say you’re about to write an essay at an exam. The quality of your essay will be defined by the type of argumentation you’ve provided in relation to the topic. Get Academic Help suggests a generic list of essay types that are very common at exams like TOEFL, IELTS, CAE, and CPE:

• Analytical essay
• Argumentative essays
• Interpretive essay
• Comparative essay
• Problem and solution essay
• Cause and effect essay

The differences between the various types of essays are now complicated to master and remember. So, if your grade depends on how you elaborate on your viewpoints — it good to know your essay types!

Understand the topic you’re touching

While this may seem a very straightforward point, having a clear understanding of and have a grasp on the subject you’re writing on. Unfortunately, this issue seems to be very widespread among essay authors.

This is why you need to take care of studying the topic thoroughly way ahead of time. An excellent essay takes time to execute, this is why you need to start researching and analyzing the topic way before the topic deadline.

Don’t underestimate outlines

We live our lives in the illusion of mental clarity. We think we have it all sorted out. We understand what we think about certain things in great detail. However, that seems to be false with the vast majority of people. We’ve biased and distracted all the time. A great solution to understanding what you actually think a particular issue before writing an essay is sketching an outline.

Prepare a bulleted outline of the text you’re about to write. In the outline, include all the keywords you’re going to use, all the essential ideas you need to tackle, and all the arguments for and against those ideas and viewpoints.

Connect the dots

Now that you have an outline put in place, it is your responsibility to build on it. The next thing you should do is to create a clear and coherent narrative that connects all the ideas and arguments between them.

To ensure that, you’ll need to work diligently on syntax and connectors. Make sure that the reader fully understands that viewpoint that he’s presented with, without having to decipher it. So your approach should be lasered in on correct sentence structure, and after that, you should work on paragraph structure.

Finesse it

Once you’re done writing, you enter the most complicated part of essay execution — editing. Often people underestimate the importance of editing, due to various reasons. However, usually, none of those reasons are actually valid. Take time to double-check everything you’ve written and spellcheck the piece.

After you’ve spellchecked it, you need to look into the text at various degrees of definition. First, you look at the word level — scan for words that don’t seem to fit very well and find better analogies.

Secondly, find sentences that seem incomplete or out of place and reword them, or, optionally, remove them altogether. Very often in writing less is considered to be more, and eliminating redundancy is an essential goal.

Then, observe the text at the paragraph level. Essays often have to present one idea/argument per paragraph. Thus you need to focus that a block of text represents your ideas as honestly as possible.

Lastly, read the piece as a whole and analyze whether you’re content with the viewpoint you’ve expressed and the words you’ve chosen to channel it.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it’s safe to say that learning how to write essays is a hefty journey, and it takes a while too. Essays are about structure and clarity. Once you lack a clear representation of ideas, you might fail the entire project altogether. We hope you’ve found this text useful and we wish you good luck with your writing assessments!