Once you have a draft, you can work on writing well. Structure your essay in the most effective way to communicate your ideas and answer the question. A paragraph is a related group of sentences that develops one main idea. Each paragraph in the body of the essay should contain:. See The Learning Centre guide Paraphrasing, summarising and quoting. Write Your Essay. Write a first draft Your first draft will help you work out: the structure and framework of your essay how you will answer the question which evidence and examples you will use how your argument will be logically structured.
Structure Structure your essay in the most effective way to communicate your ideas and answer the question. All essays should include the following structure. There are four main categories into which essays can be grouped: Narrative essay - Tell a story or impart information about your subject in a straightforward, orderly manner, like in a story.
Persuasive essay - Convince the reader about some point of view. Expository essay - Explain to the reader how to perform a given process. You could, for example, write an expository essay with step-by-step instructions on how to make a peanut butter sandwich. Descriptive essay - Focus on the details of what is going on. For example, if you want to write a descriptive essay about your trip to the park, you would give great detail about what you experienced: how the grass felt beneath your feet, what the park benches looked like, and anything else the reader would need to feel as if he were there.
Here are a few other types of essays: Argumentative essay - Take a position on a controversial issue and present evidence in favor of your position. Compare and contrast essay - Identify similarities and differences between two subjects that are, typically, under the same umbrella.
Problem solution essay - Describe a problem, convince the reader to care about the problem, propose a solution, and be prepared to dismantle objections. Informative essay - Educate the reader on a particular topic with facts.
Brainstorm Your Topic You cannot write an essay unless you have an idea of what to write about. Write down everything that comes to mind as you can always narrow those topics down later.
Use clustering or mind mapping to brainstorm and come up with an essay idea. This involves writing your topic or idea in the center of the paper and creating bubbles clouds or clusters of related ideas around it.
Brainstorming can be a great way to develop a topic more deeply and to recognize connections between various facets of your topic. Once you have a list of possible topics, it's time to choose the best one that will answer the question posed for your essay.
You want to choose a topic that is neither too broad nor too narrow. Research the Topic Once you have done your brainstorming and chosen your topic, you may need to do some research to write a good essay.
Choose a Writing Style The writing style that you choose for your essay is dictated by your teacher or the topic of your paper. It uses the author-page number citation style. This is the most common writing style used by high school and college students. APA American Psychological Association uses the author-date citation style and was created for social science and psychology research papers and essays.
It is the second most common writing style out there. Chicago Manual of Style , also known as Turabian, has two writing styles: author-date and notes-bibliography.
Mostly used by college students and professionals, the author-date style works for scientific papers, while notes-biblio makes arts and humanities papers a breeze. Each different writing style has its own unique format for in-text and reference list citations. Develop a Thesis Your thesis statement is the main point of your essay. Outline Your Essay The next step is to outline what you are going to write about.
Start by writing the thesis statement at the top, then write a topic sentence for each paragraph below that. This means you should know exactly what each of your paragraphs is going to be about before you write them.
Don't jumble too many ideas in each paragraph or the reader may become confused. Ensure you have transitions between paragraphs so the reader understands how the paper flows from one idea to the next.
Fill in supporting facts from your research under each paragraph. Make sure each paragraph ties back to your thesis and creates a cohesive, understandable essay. Here are some things to remember: Revise for clarity, consistency and structure. First, isolate the ideas that are essential to support your thesis and then organize them in a logical and progressive order. If you want empirical evidence or complementary citations, track them down now. This is the main stage of essay writing where you roll up your sleeves and actually write the first draft.
The revisions stage involves your second draft, your third draft, or even your twelfth draft if necessary. Address all the nuances and subtleties you glossed over in the first draft. Pay attention to both word choice and clarity, as well as sophisticated writing techniques like avoiding the passive voice. Grammarly helps catch common mistakes with sentence structure—like run-on sentences, sentence fragments, passive voice, and more.
Go through your essay and correct misspellings, formatting issues, or grammatical errors. Essay structure almost always follows a simple beginning-middle-end format, or in this case, an introduction-body-conclusion format.
Essays follow the same guidelines for introductions as any other piece of writing, with an extra emphasis on presenting the thesis prominently, ideally in the topic sentence. By the end of your introduction paragraph, your reader should know without a doubt what your essay is about. From there, follow the conventional best practices on how to write an introduction. The majority of your essay is body paragraphs, all of which support your thesis and present evidence.
Pay close attention to how you organize your body paragraphs. Some arguments benefit from a logical progression, where one point leads to a second, and that second point leads to a third.
Serious writers can get pretty technical about how to organize an argumentative essay. There are three approaches in particular used often: Aristotlian classical , Rogerian , and Toulmin. However, these can get exceedingly complicated, so for a simple essay, a basic structure will do just fine:. If you get the chance, you can add a new perspective or context for understanding your thesis, but in general the conclusion should not present any new evidence or supporting data.
For more specific tips, read about how to write a conclusion for an essay here. The five-paragraph essay structure works well in a pinch.
0コメント