Writing Your Essay
Essay writing is a task dreaded by most students. The many steps to be followed by students in order to come up with an effective essay makes the essay writing task seem daunting. However, as long as you are a student, this is an inevitable task. As such, it is necessary to learn and master all the basic steps of coming up with an effective and efficient essay. The steps are pretty simple. All that is needed is practice.
Steps to Writing an Essay
Choose a Topic
When you have no topic prior assigned to you, the topic you choose to write on has to be catchy. Choose a topic that you are comfortable with so that you may have an even easier time writing your essay. Before choosing your topic, decide the aim of your essay. The aim of your essay should dictate the shape your topic takes. Is your essay a persuasive essay? Is your essay a definitive one?
Research
Spend enough time researching on your topic’s content. This will make your essay convincing. Enough research will also help you familiarize more and get comfortable with the topic you will be writing about.
Outline Your Essay
Once you have a topic you are comfortable with organize the flow of your essay’s idea. Put down how your essay’s ideas shall flow. This will help you see the link between your essay’s paragraphs. Remember, there must be a connection and a smooth transition between all of your essay’s paragraphs.
Formulate Your Thesis Statement
A thesis statement is an important aspect of your essay. Thesis statement directs your reader towards your line of thought. A well written thesis statement has two main parts. The topic part and the essay’s point part. State what your topic is and show the point in your essay supporting the topic.
Once you have your thesis statement, depending on which point you are comfortable with; introduction or body, start writing your essay.
Writing Your Introduction
Your essay’s introduction is what your audience reads first whenever they get to your essay. This tells you that your introduction should focus on retaining every reader that gets to your essay. The only way to retain your readers is through making your introduction as catchy as possible, and communicate the focus of your essay to your reader. Start off your introduction with information, a story or a fact that grabs your reader’s attention, ensuring that it is in line with your thesis statement. Make your introduction brief but ensure the readers get to know what your essay is about. Once you get to relay this information, state your thesis statement, then move to the body paragraphs of your essay.
Writing Your Essay’s Body Paragraphs
The body paragraph(s) should explain, argue or describe the topic you are writing on. The structure of the body paragraphs should be: first sentence: main idea, the consequent sentences should be supporting your main idea, then the last sentence of each paragraph should be a transition sentence. Your transition sentence should create a link to the next paragraph. Every sentence in your body paragraph should be supporting your thesis statement.
Writing Your Conclusion
The conclusion should give closure to your essay. It should be more of a reinforcement of all that you said in your essay. The conclusion basically restates your introductory paragraph, but in different words.
References
You certainly do not want to fall victim of plagiarism. For this reason, you must ensure that you cite all the sources you use in your essay. References include in-text citations as well as the bibliography page. The bibliography should appear as the last page of your essay.
Cross Check Your Essay
Once you have completed writing your essay, ensure that you read and re-read your essay, correcting all grammatical and content errors.
Formatting Your Essay
The correct formatting of your essay can earn you up to 10% of your essay’s total score. Therefore, you ought to be keen on the way you format your essay. Various factors come to play when formatting your essay. These are, title page, page numbering, references, line spacing, margins, font size and font type. How you format your essay greatly depends on the instructions provided by your professor.
Essay Formatting Basics
Spacing - unless asked otherwise, you should leave a double space in between your essay lines.
This leaves your work neat and allows your professor leave comments where
necessary.
Page numbering - all your essay pages must be numbered. This should be at
Margins - you should leave at least one inch margin all through your essay.
Word spacing – leave a single space between your words.
Paragraph indentation – depending on your professor's preference, the first line of your
paragraph van be indented or flush with the left margin.
Writing titles – every word in your titles should be capitalized except for articles, prepositions,
and conjunctions.
Essay Writing and Formatting Help
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