Basic Guidelines For Essay Writing

Basic Guidelines For Essay Writing Sometimes, the hardest part of the process is to pick the topic and start writing . In your efforts to take an interesting position, don’t go overboard. The opinion you choose to defend in your paper should be arguable, but not laughable. Your task is to intrigue and enlighten you reader, not to shock or provoke him. Stay away from supporting points that are nothing but vague, abstract thoughts. For a truly student-centered process to work, we can’t ask leading questions or make decisions for our students. Giving students the reading, writing and thinking skills required for a process like this is, to put it mildly, challenging -- for students and instructors alike. We’re asking students to give up certainties and formulae, to dive into the unknown. You may find many trustworthy academic resources there. To know what to look for, familiarize yourself with the library sections relevant to your topic. Library staff can direct you to valuable material. Choosing a powerful topic will set a right tone for the whole paper. She may use a range of visually rich, active-learning methods to generate ideas, get her thoughts in order and fill gaps. As she figuring out the story she’s trying to tell, her early drafts will most likely be incomplete, overwritten or hard for the reader to follow. And that means she’ll have to revise and rethink and ask more questions. It is the reader’s first experience of your essay. It is where you first address the question and express your contention. It is also where you lay out or ‘signpost’ the direction your essay will take. At some point in your research, you should begin thinking about a contention for your essay. Don’t just tell the reader what he should think. Support your thesis with colorful, concrete illustrations. Don’t say that military families make great sacrifices. Tell the story of a friend who lost his brother to a roadside bomb in Iraq. Don’t talk about courage, show someone being courageous. Remember, you should be able to express it briefly as if addressing the essay question in a single sentence, or summing up in a debate. An essay using this contention would then go on to explain and justify these statements in greater detail. It will also support the contention with argument and evidence. As instructors, we also have to give up some control over our assignments. She’ll come to her overall claim, introduction and conclusion from her discoveries -- not the other way around. You always want to arrange essays in a way that clearly presents the main idea and provides vivid images. One option for adding imagery is through quotations from other literary works. Epithets, metaphors, hyperboles are at your service! Illustrate your ideas with real, concrete, tangible pictures. Make sure you look for any spelling or grammar errors that you might have missed while writing. Before you start writing, take a minute to organize your thoughts. Write down important points that you want to make in your essay. If your instructor has specific requirements for the format of writing assignments, check them before submitting your essay. We’re taking away the safety of falling back on generalizations, personal experience and conventional wisdom. The process work we’re advocating here is multistaged, iterative, messy work. The student may move from the text to questions to freewriting or brainstorming to drafting, then go back to the text and so on, deepening her analysis by asking questions. They will help you add interest to the essay, but, as mentioned above, you need to know when to stop. For some, it’s easier to concentrate in the morning, while others do their best work at night. Some prefer to hand write the first draft on the paper, while for others, typing is easier. Even if you have collected a lot of material, you may face difficulties. Keep in mind the goal of the essay and the benefit you want to come of it.