Throughout your academic career, you will be called to write a number of essays, persuasive, informative, narrative, and expository, research paper and case studies, among so many others, on numerous occasions. Writing an essay is one of the first things a student needs to write, be it for college admission, class project, essay contest or any other. For that reason, it is significant one knows how to write one. This paper will focus on explaining the process steps for writing an essay.
Part 1: Writing Your Essay
Step 1: When assigned with an essay it is important to evaluate the sources one will be using. Not every source is reliable and not every author is eligible to write about anything under the sun. Peer-reviewed articles, journals, books and material coming from governmental bodies and academic websites provide valuable and sharable information. Whether you can use Wikipedia as a source is controversial, and it is at within your educator’s discretion to accept it as a reliable source or not. Of course, turning into an academic database or the online library of your college or university is the ideal place to start researching for sources. When listing your sources, it is important to also include opposing viewpoints, and nullify them with strong evidence in your paper.
Step 2: Brainstorm your ideas. It is a process that might take a while; but, there is no need to rush at this point. Once you have settled with ideas, it is time to pick your thesis. Choose your strongest supporting ideas that are backed up with solid evidence. Your thesis should be the summary of those ideas. The reader needs to know exactly where you stand, so a clear, succinct thesis with a narrow focus is essential. A thesis is never a question and first person should not be used when writing your thesis.
Step 3: Make an outline of your essay, based on your brainstorming ideas and materials you have collected. After writing a topic sentence for each of your core ideas, make bullet points to list your supporting evidence.
Step 4: this is the time when you write the body of your essay, and it should be wise to consider the assigned word count to manage your space. Again, personal pronouns, like “I”, and personal statements like “I believe” are not to be used, unless instructed otherwise by your professor. Bottom line is you need to sound authoritative. Moreover, you do not want your reader to dismiss your thesis because they simply do not agree with you. So, it is best to avoid sweeping generalizations and prefer a more precise position. For example, if you write “. Is the most important problem in modern society”, your reader might reject your ideas from the start. Instead, if you say “ is a problem that rising concern nowadays”, you have a more accurate position that does not turn off your reader. Everything you write must have strong evidence to build your case.
Step 5: Your title and introduction are the very first things that make people either want to read what you have written or reject your essay (if you are writing a college admission essay or for an essay contest). You need a hook in both your introduction and title to motivate your reader (s). A clever way to write your introduction is to start with a broad statement and gradually narrow it down until you reach your thesis, where you give an accurate position on your topic.
Step 6: once you reach conclusion, you have to summarize the main points that have been thoroughly explained and analyzed in your essay and make suggestions as to how your essay can make a difference in a larger sense. Are there any unanswered questions? Are there any implications coming from your thesis? Your readers will need to smoothly come to a logical conclusion and refresh their memory on everything presented and analyzed in your paper. Finally, close with a hook concluding sentence that will allow your audience remember your essay for long.
Part 2: Revising Your Essay
Step 1: After writing the essay, the next step is to leave it aside for a few minutes and then go through it again. That way, with a clearer mind, you might track down mistakes, either in punctuation, grammar or other, and correct them. You may even want to rephrase sentences if you feel they are not clear, supporting or explanatory enough. Remove any unnecessary words and make sure your sentences flow well and have good transitions between different ideas.
Step 2: Furthermore, it is the time you revise your format and referencing style. Have you quoted properly? Have you referenced according to the style your professor wants or instructions have indicated? Have you used one’s words without putting them in quotation marks? This is plagiarism and you will get penalized for it, so you need to be extra careful when citing your sources, both in the text and in a separate reference sheet at the end of the essay.
