Academic Essays that Sway

fggddafdgThe moment you read “academic”, the first thing that comes to mind is restrictions. Sure, academic essays are solemn but they don’t have to be so lame. The good thing about academic essay writing is that it has been around for so long that there are countless resources to help you nail it. This article is just one of them. Let’s check out a few ways you can write essays that will knock your audience’s socks off when they read them.

Preparation

Nothing will enable you to write an effective essay like preparation (Reinking, Hart, & Osten, 1999). As long as you’ve properly done your homework, you can write an effective essay within minutes. But how do you prepare?

Firstly, determine the topic of your essay (Fastweb, 2017). If you were not given one, you’ll have to come up with one. If you were given one, what does it mean? Is it straightforward or you’ll have to read between the lines to understand what’s going on? Is it something broad or it deals with a narrow area? All these are questions that will enable you to understand the topic of your essay better. With that understanding, you’ll then be able to know where to focus your energy.

Brainstorming is a good technique to help you when you feel stuck and unsure about how to proceed with your preparation once the topic of the essay has been provided or determined (Reinking, Hart, & Osten, 1999).

Penning the most useful points related to the topic of your essay will help you do research and determine the contents or details of your essay.

It’s natural that you’ll need to do some research to gather more information about the topic of interest. During your research, take down notes about the most promising things you learn regarding the topic of the essay. You can write them down randomly or as you discover them and then arrange them later on.

Once you have all that you need to start writing your essay, bring all things together, arrange them in the best order according to how you feel your essay should flow, and I promise, it will be like a waterfall.

The Outline

I gave a hint at this in the previous point. Once you’ve gathered all the material you need to write your essay, make an outline of how your essay will flow. An outline is like a skeleton of how your essay will be like. In a way, it’s also like a table of contents, but without the page numbers. It can be something like this:

Title of The Essay

  • Introduction

Thesis

  • Body
    • Paragraph 1
      • Point 1
        • Mini Pont 1
      • Point 2
      • Point 3
    • Paragraph 2
      • Point 1
      • Point 2
        • Mini Point 2
      • Point 3
    • Paragraph 3
      • Point 1
      • Point 2
      • Point 3
        • Mini Point 3

Conclusion

If you are the kind of person who’s more visual, you could opt to make diagrams that illustrate how you intend your essay to flow. Just arrange your diagrams accordingly and you’ll have a visual representation of your essay (Livingstone, 2012).

This step will help you organize your thoughts and make it significantly easy for you to write your essay. Try it out and be amazed – that is if you haven’t tried it yet.

The Thesis Statement

The thesis statement usually comes at the end of the introduction, so I’ll kill two birds with one stone. Writing the introduction of your essay is not always easy. With so many points to express, sometimes you can’t predict how your essay will end up. If you find yourself struggling to write the introduction, put it aside for the moment and go straight to writing the body (Reinking, Hart, & Osten, 1999). Sometimes, once you’ve written the body, the process will have given you clarity and more information about what you really want your essay to be about. You’ll then be able to write a good introduction as well as the thesis statement for your essay (Niemtus, 2017). You will also be able to confidently come up with a conclusion about the essay.

The Body

There really isn’t much to write about the body of your essay – I mean in this article, and not necessarily in your actual essay. The reason I feel there isn’t much to write about the body is that most of what you really need to write a good body of your essay was covered in the preparation and outline sections of this article. As long as you have those parts well covered, then the contents of the body will just flow and fall in place according to your outline.

Okay, I change my mind. It seems there’s a little more that should be expressed.

You should pay attention to the paragraphs you write within the body of the essay. The significance of paragraphs is to express a single idea. So ensure that each of the paragraphs you have focuses on a single idea. That means that if you have five paragraphs, they should detail five distinguished main ideas. It is okay for an idea to be expressed in various points that help in making it comprehensible (Kain, 1999).

Provide illustrations or examples to give clarity to the points you’re making, and use arguments to convince your audience about the topic of the essay. Give examples, cases, facts, statistics, and such instances to make your work more credible. Appeal to people’s emotions, ethics, and logic to get them to agree with you and see things from your point of view (Reinking, Hart, & Osten, 1999). These points will really help you to write really effective essays.

The Conclusion

You can write the conclusion in various ways. A simple trick is to paraphrase the main points of the paragraphs in your essay, and then end with a paraphrase of the thesis statement. It will seem like a good conclusion. But this is the lazy man’s method. If you feel you still have the energy, write a proper conclusion indicating what you concluded from all those findings or arguments you presented in the essay (Fastweb, 2017). Be that as it may, it’s still a good idea to include your thesis statement either at the beginning or end of the conclusion.

Drafts and Proof Reading

Once all is written and done, you’ll want to ensure that everything is as it should be. It is an academic writing, after all, remember. There are rules and regulations that should be observed.

After you’ve done writing your essay, consider it the first draft. Put it aside, somewhere safe, and give it a day or two before reading it again. This is of course if you have that much time. If you don’t have time, a few minutes or hours will do. The main idea is to give your mind some time to reset so that you’ll be able to look at things from a fresh perspective when you are proofreading. After you’ve taken your break, go back to the draft and go through your essay and proofread and spell check. Please don’t rely on the spell checker of a word or text editor application (HelpHomeWork.net). Computer’s don’t reason, they only do what they’ve been programmed to do. If something isn’t within the scope of their algorithm and programming, they won’t correct it. Use spell checkers and alternative word processing aids together with your knowledge of the English language to proofread your work. By yourself, you’re likely to miss something, and the same is true if you rely on the spelling and grammar checkers of word processors. But if you combine your knowledge of the English language with spelling and grammar checkers, you’re likely to get an essay that’s 99.9% grammatically correct.

I rest my case.

References:

Fastweb. (2017, June 22). Essay Tips: 7 Tips on Writing an Effective Essay – Fastweb. Retrieved from Fastweb: https://www.fastweb.com/student-life/articles/essay-tips-7-tips-on-writing-an-effective-essay

Get Homework Help Online from a Nice Assignment Writing Company with Experts on Staff | HelpHomework.net. (2017, December 02). Retrieved from Help Homework: https://helphomework.net/

Kain, P. (1999). Beginning the Academic Essay. Retrieved from Harvard University: https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/beginning-academic-essay

Livingstone, K. (2012, June 25). Basic Guide to Essay Writing. Retrieved from Tripod: http://lklivingston.tripod.com/essay/

Niemtus, Z. (2017, March 7). How to write better essays: ‘nobody does introductions properly’ | Education | The Guardian. Retrieved from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/mar/07/how-to-write-an-essay

Reinking, J. A., Hart, A. W., & Osten, R. v. (1999). Strategies for Successful Writing. New Jersy: Simon and Schuster.

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