Essay writing skills is a skill-set that assists in creating a valuable piece of a written work. This skill-set consists of such skills as brainstorming new ideas, finding and researching information, structuring the essay, writing effective introduction, and conclusion paragraphs. Let’s pay attention to the main elements of this skill-set and how to develop them.
1. Understanding the task
The very first step in writing a good academic essay is making sure that you understand the task in the correct way. Carefully read the instruction and till everything is clear. If there are some vague moments, take your time to check everything up with your professor. If writing essays is your hobby, pay some attention to whether the concept of your future essay is interesting and worth other people’s attention.
2. Brainstorming new ideas
The second step on your way to writing an awe-thrilling essay is to be able to brainstorm new ideas. It is not so difficult to do:
– focus on quantity and avoid criticism
In the matter of brainstorming, the main task is to generate more and more ideas even if they seem to be unreal or even crazy;
– combine and improve ideas
once you have generated a list of different ideas, make sure to consider changing them by improving, combining, and transforming.
3. Do some research for your essay
Once you have generated enough ideas, focus on finding more information on some particular aspects that require further research. To get only credible and trustworthy information, use such educational platforms and online library databases like Google Scholar, Airtable.com, JSTOR Home, PubMed, Science Directory, etc. Pay attention to the creation of in-text citation, reference list, or bibliography. If you do not do it or take information from the original source without changing it, you may be accused of plagiarism.
Check the requirements and guidelines of the following formats:
1. The American Psychological Association (APA) – use the surname of the author, the year– (Brown, 2009).
2. Modern Language Association (MLA) – use the surname of the author and the page number (Brown, p. 23).
3. Chicago Manual Style (CMS) – the in-text citation is presented in the form of notes: John Brown, New York Times (New York: Penguin Press, 2016).
The most common pitfall of citing is that information that is not cited or adequately cited can come across as plagiarism. Therefore, if you have taken some information from external sources, make sure to indicate where the evidence comes from. Another downfall is falling short of the mark to adequately reference the author’s text. If you do not want to spend your precious time on learning all these academic style particularities, you may hire professional paper writers for your further academic success.
4. Organizing your thoughts
When you have already planned the essay, took time to understand the essay question, gathered the required information, check the guidelines on the required academic styles, it is high time to organize your thoughts for further development of your ideas.
– Make everything fit into the existing framework of introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion.
– in your introduction, it is required to start an essay with a persuasive thesis statement that you can later support with adequate and fact-driven arguments. Start an essay with an interesting fact or quote. In Aristotle’s rhetorical approach, this is called logos or the argument from reason.
– in your body paragraph, pay attention to the way you are presenting information to the reader mention importing findings, add your analysis and creative ideas.
– in the conclusion, sum all the information you mentioned in the body paragraph and make sure that it correlates with the thesis statement mentioned in the introduction.
5. Important sources that may come in handy in your work
1. Grammarly is a source that helps you to check your writing according to the basic grammar and nonfunctional rules, stylistic, plagiarism, etc.
2. Owler is a website that gives instruction about writing accordingly to the existing formats.
3. Citethisforme – is a platform that is incredibly useful for generating the reference list and creating in-text citations.
4. Evernote – is a platform that gives you an opportunity to gather all the important ideas and collect them in the smartest way to later use in new essays.
5. Storybird – is a tool that gives you the ability to get readers’ feedback on your essays and enroll in some online writing courses.
As we can see, writing an essay is not so difficult when you have an understanding of what is expected and what should be done to make the process start. Remember that writing a good essay means the presence of such essential elements as the ability to generate ideas and concepts and present strong arguments, research skills, and critical thinking.
