Essay Writing

Essay Writing Each sentence and paragraph should follow logically from the one before and it is important that you do not force your reader to make the connections. Always make these connections clear signposting where the argument or discussion is going next. Academic writing requires a careful balance between novel argument, and drawing on arguments presented by others. Writing a completely 'novel' essay, without drawing on a single source, indicates that you haven’t made yourself familiar with what has already been published. Some students' essays amount to catalogues of factual material or summaries of other people's thoughts, attitudes, philosophies or viewpoints. Some students find it best to write a provisional introduction, when starting to write an essay, and then to rewrite this when they have finished the first draft of their essay. It shows the marker that you are not simply repeating the arguments that have been fed to you throughout your studies, but actually engaging with theories in an academic manner. It is also important that you leave time, ideally a couple of days, between finishing your first draft and proofreading. Conversely, citing someone for every point made suggests that you haven’t produced a novel argument. You should also make sure that all the different parts of your essay fit together as a cohesive and logical whole, and that the transition from one argument to the next is fluid. Students often treat essays as lists of arguments, presenting one after the other with little consideration for how they fit together, which inevitably leads to a lower grade. Critical thinking is what will make your essay stand out. Rewrite the essay according to that revised plan and resist the tendency to panic in the middle, tear it up and start all over again. It is important to get to the end and then revise again. Otherwise you will have a perfect opening couple of paragraphs and potentially the rest of the essay in disarray. Such a style is fine for personal letters or notes, but not in an essay. You can be personal, but a certain degree of formality and objectivity is expected in an academic essay. Try to start with something intriguing and promising. Questions can be really effective for an introduction. The balance between other researchers’ and writers’ analysis of the subject and your own comment will vary with the subject and the nature of the question. Generally, it is important to back up the points you wish to make from your experience with the findings of other published researchers and writers. To write a provisional introduction, ask yourself what the reader needs to know in order to follow your subsequent discussion. Instead, you should exchange essays with each other once you are both done with the first draft. It is immensely difficult to proofread your own work â€" one goes blind to minor grammatical issues in a text after reading it repeatedly for days on end. It is similarly easy to overlook gaps in flow and logic of argument. Having a friend read through the work will address both of these issues, assuming that they, too, are high achieving. The reader should end up being satisfied, knowing that he learned something new from your essay and he just spent quality time with it. Leave some space for further research and intrigue the reader to dig deeper into the topic and find out more about the things you tackled. The body of the essay should provide arguments and evidence that prove the thesis statement. When you have a mind map in front of you, you'll know exactly what you're trying to achieve. The essay writing process will be much faster thanks to the minutes you spent in outlining. Take a plain piece of paper and write down all ideas that come to your mind. If you realize at least one thing that you like in writing essays, you may really want to do this and enjoy the working process.