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What is an “Essay”?
The purpose of an “essay” is to persuade. Therefore, to present a unique perspective – or defend an old perspective – with your own research and critical thinking as well as your own writing skills.
Writing an essay can be a daunting task whether it be for personal, professional or academic purposes. It is worth noting that essay formats can vary according to the subject matter and the task assigned.
Generally speaking, essays or research papers are created for argumentative purposes or for providing information on a particular subject matters. No matter the type of essay, there is a clear purpose, an intention, or main argument to an essay that can generally be found in a thesis statement.
In educational institutions, essays are normally administered in order to test your ability to explain or argue a chosen or assigned topic.
Here are the following steps I effectuate and key tips I follow in order to write an outstanding academic essay.
Step 1: Determine the Essay’s Objectives
The first and possibly one of the most important step is to determine the essay’s objective. This might sound like an easy and straightforward step, yet, a lot of students get marks deducted for not following the objectives of the ascribed essay.
This happened to me. By the time I entered my master’s program, I had successfully written anywhere between 75 to 100 essays. Many of those essays were of different lengths and objectives. I followed topics from philosophy to sociology, but mainly focusing on french and english literature.
Although I had “mastered” (no such thing) the essay form, I once ignored this very important step and it would have cost me much more than my pride. It would have cost me my degree if it weren’t for the fact that professors make us present our essay outline and research in class before we write them finish and submit the final copy.
I had done a lot of extensive research for this essay. I thought I was following the objective of the course until my professor pointed out at the end of my presentation that I completely missed the mark.
After my inquiry, I realized that I did miss the objective although the course’s objectives were right in front of my eyes every time I opened the syllabus.
Therefore, consult the objectives of the course and of the specific essay tasked. Do not be off topic and do not employ the wrong type of essay.
As a side note, here are the main – but not all – types of essay you might find in an academic work.
Types of Essays
- Comparative: As straight forward as its title, a comparative essay usually compares and contrast two (or more) ideas, concepts, characters, and works.
- Argumentative: Often, in argumentative essays, you present arguments and even address the counter-arguments that relate to your topic.
- Descriptive: a descriptive essay can also be a creative essay. Its purpose is to describe something in details.
- Narrative: Narrative essays read more like stories and often times use the first person pronoun “I.” Narrative essays are therefore more subjective, personal, and creative.
Note that the incorporation of the first person in the present – reflective such as for reflection pieces of your opinion. Mostly, many essays are in the third person. Third person can also be a marker of a more unbiased subjective essay, formal and impersonal as well as professional.
Consult your Syllabus
In order to determine your assignment requirements, you need to consult your syllabus or the sheet of explicit instructions your professor has given you. Write those objectives down, highlight them, heck, frame them. This will make or break your essay from the very start.
In this way, you can incorporate all of the elements such as the type of essay, the essay length, the works you need to use, the question you need to answer, the research you need to do, etc.
Take the essay length as an example. Essays can be as short as 500 words and as long as 5000 words although they are generally in the range of 1000-3000 words. I’ve written all of these lengths of essays for the undergraduate and graduate university level. As a rule of thumb, a shorter essay normally requires little to no research, while a much longer essay involves extensive critical scholarly research.
Step #2: Brainstorm
Now, you are finally ready for the second step. It is time to brainstorm. Write down every single one of your thoughts and ideas related to your essay. It is called “brainstorming” for a reason.
Brainstorming aids you into connecting all of the dots together. Some dots will be left unconnected. You will realize that you don’t want your essay to touch on certain arguments or leads. Maybe they simply don’t fit in your general argument or maybe there’s just too much to write about. It all depends on the essay topic and the length requirement.
At the end of your brainstorming session, if you are unsure between few of your arguments, try to see which ones flow together. If the topic is just too vast, then with the aid of research you will realize which one has the most sufficient and worthy sources you can present.
Furthermore, during the next step, the researching step, you will be able to focus on your arguments and develop a more focused thesis as a result.
Step #3: Research
Most of the time for an academic essay, research is a crucial step. No one wants to make claims with unfounded proof or credible sources.
Additionally, you should consult the objectives one more time to see if you have to use sources offered in class.
You research could include background (contextual) information. It can involve books, newspapers, and online scholarly articles.
WARNING: Avoid Wikipedia.
Avoid Wikipedia and generic searches although they can aid you prior to research. You should only use them to help you target the specificity of your research, to simply give you ideas that you should fact check with credible sources. At the bottom of the Wikipedia page, some of the sources used are cited. It doesn’t hurt sometimes to look though those.
You should also save everything you look at even if you won’t use it. Tab it, mark it, write it down in a separate document. You never know if you will change leads later on.
You also never want to refer to something or to a key element or a quote with no reference or without full citation, or the exact edition you got the information from, as well as the specific format (newspaper, online, book, etc).
All of your used references, citations, quotes, images, and graphs must be in your end bibliography without fault. You absolutely do not want to be caught in a plagiarism battle.
Once again, use Wikipedia at your own risk. You should only use it for your own comprehension for minor details you might have forgotten or overlooked.
Step #4: Have a Strong Thesis Statement
You must have a strong thesis statement that is concise but also offers enough details. Your thesis statement has to be arguable. It should be located in your introductory paragraph.
It is important to reformulate your thesis in order to answer questions such as “so what?” If you struggle to answer the specific question offered from your topic, then your thesis statement might not be specific enough.
However, be careful not to be too specific that you’re touching too heavily on one of your arguments’ subtopics.
The general consensus on thesis statement is to not be too general nor too specific, as well to not be too broad nor too narrow.
There are two ways of going about developing your thesis statement. Either you form it after your brainstorming and researching, before your outline. Or you can form it after filling out your outline.
Most times, you can email your thesis statement to your professor (or teaching assistant) for approval or guidance.
Step #5: Outline
Outlining your main ideas and arguments helps your essay’s flow and comprehension.
Additionally, the drafting process becomes much easier because you already know what you are going to write. You already have your sources and your quotes placed in the right sections.
Plus, writing an outline allows you to view which part of your essay suffers the most, the part that lacks development.
Your outlines allows you to answer questions such as: Do you have less proof for your third argument? Is your first argument leading your essay or should it be moved behind your second?
Here is a brief summary of the different parts of an essay:
- Introduction: The introduction presents your thesis statement as well as topics and in many cases subtopics. It may also present some contextual background information if required or needed.
- Body: The body paragraph presents all arguments with proof (citations, quotes, graphs, images, etc). Note: the body paragraphs can contain more than the standard three paragraphs three arguments rule that is often shown to high school students. Furthermore, some essays follow a chronological style analysis/argumentation in their body paragraphs.
- Conclusion: The conclusion answers the question of the necessity of your essay, responds clearly to your thesis statement, and summarizes the big ideas of your essay.
Step #6: Draft
After your outline is detailed and ready to go, your drafting process will be much easier. You will no longer be stuck with the words, “What’s next?” You will avoid repetition, convoluted ideas, and an overall disorganized essay.
Drafting simply consists of filling in your outline and wrapping everything up nicely.
Additionally, after you finish drafting, it is important to review your initial thesis statement. You can tweak and perfect your thesis because you now know all the details that contribute to your main statement.
When drafting, remember to have a topic sentence for every leading body paragraph and always make sure you are on topic by referring back to your thesis.
Don’t forget that everything you present must be relevant and important, even supplementary evidence such as contextual or historical background presented. They have to have to facilitate the comprehension for the reader of your essay without being too superfluous or gratuitous to the word count. Trust me, your professor will know and penalize you for it.
Also, add transitions words in order to help guide your reader through your essay. The organization to your essay should not be a guessing game for your reader or evaluator. They don’t know where you intend to break or lead your arguments and paragraphs, that is your job, not theirs.
Step #7: Edit and Revise
Editing and revising are crucial steps, as crucial as the first step. I say this because those are the two steps I personally take for granted and have almost paid the price for it.
You spent all of that time highlighting the objectives, brainstorming, researching, outlining, and drafting; it would be an absolute shame to lose points (all that wasted time and effort!) because you did not think your essay needed revision.
Firstly, make sure to thoroughly edit your essay. This includes removing or changing repeated words, making sure there are no awkward expressions or fragmented sentences.
You absolutely need to make sure that all of your sources are cited correctly in your essay and in your final bibliography. Plus, you need to follow the course’s objectives in which your citation formatting is mentioned (such as formatted in APA, MLA, Chicago, etc).
When you revise, you should also check for grammar, punctuation, spelling, and convoluted words and phrasing. Use your word document’s spellcheck or transfer your text to online grammar and spell checkers. There are highly effective and free programs that you can sign up for and easily download. The Grammarly software goes far and beyond grammar and spelling mistakes.
More Key Tips
Another revision tip is to get feedback either from peers or from writing services offered at your school. Some services may even be free and offered online through your school’s portal.
If you are writing an academic essay, you need to avoid contractions without fault. You can go through your essay and type in the search bar all of the apostrophes for contractions, such as “don’t, they’re, can’t.” Then, you can manually go through your essay to locate all the remaining contractions and fix them.
In case you need to hear this, don’t be afraid to break up your paragraphs. As a rule of thumb, there should one paragraph break per page especially for longer essays.
Here we are at my very last tip: read your essay out loud. It will help you spot once and for all any mistake that has escaped your reading eye. Your reading eye is too familiar with your essay. This step allows you to pick up on awkward sentences, ones that are too long or use the wrong words. It also allows you to pinpoint contractions and accidental misspelling such as those pesky misleading homophones.
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