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How To Write An Essay
By Alan Leach
How to write an essay
Knowing how to write an essay is an essential skill for students in many different courses these days. From business to history, the ability to write an essay will have a huge impact on your university education, and therefore potentially a future career too. It then pays to learn how to write an essay. Learning how to write an essay is relatively straightforward, and the time you invest in doing this will pay off big in the long-term.
The first step in writing an essay is research. The Internet has provided stressed-out students an easy and invaluable source of research but be careful - anyone can write anything on the net! To impress your markers and get a good grade, stick to academic journals and peer-reviewed articles.
Once you have finished research, you can form a brief outline of your essay. Decide what the main ideas of each paragraph are going to be and what evidence or examples you will use to support each of your main points.
When it comes to actually writing the essay, it should go without saying nowadays that typed worked is greatly preferential to hand-written work. A typed essay looks clearer and more professional. Save your work regularly, and have at least one back up. No matter how brilliant your essay might be, it your computer crashes on the day of hand-in, losing all your work as you only had one copy, you are still going to receive a low mark, or no mark at all!
Style is extremely important when it comes to learning how to write an essay. You are probably writing a this essay for academic reasons, so your marker will expect you to employ a formal style. That does not mean you should scour the dictionary with incomprehensible phrases and jargon to impress you teacher. Rather, avoid slang and informal vocabulary, but ensure the language is easy to read.
The introduction of your essay should explain the topic question in more detail, and you should set out how you intend to approach the essay. In other words, you should state what you intend to write before you write it.
Each paragraph of your essay should have a topic sentence, and for preference this should be the first. This topic sentence should basically state your main argument of the paragraph, with everything that follows merely serving as supporting evidence or examples. Markers are looking for logical arguments, so use facts or the opinions of respected experts in the field to support your arguments.
A common mistake students make if they don't know how to write an essay is to use several long quotes from other authors. Markers want you to show you understand key concepts, and simply copying other writer's works does not do this. The general rule is to use the ideas of others, but to paraphrase them instead or a direct quote. This shows you understand the main ideas and are able to put into your own words.
Knowing how to write an essay does not end when you have written your last sentence. You must also take care to provide either a reference list. This ensures you won't be accused of plagiarism, and you should include all works that you have mentioned or taken ideas from in your essay.
The last step in learning how to write an essay is to check your work carefully. While markers nowadays often care more about your ideas than your language, careless errors or untidy presentation may lead to a drop of at least one grade.
http://www.english.bham.ac.uk/staff/tom/teaching/howto/essay.htm
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