Essay writing: where to start?
Essay as a genre of writing is an integral part of School or University life. Many Universities include essay writing into the final or entrance examinations. Essays are obligatory not only for students whose subject area is Literature and the English language, but also History, Management, Law. To write a grammatically correct and interesting essay, it is necessary to follow certain rules and recommendations, which you will be introduced to this article.
The genre of the essay assumes freedom of thoughts and creativity. The advantage of the essay writing is that it can be written on any topic and in any style. You can write about anything, because the essay is your own thoughts about what you heard, read, and seen.
The author’s personality, his thoughts, feelings, and attitude to the world are in the first place. This is the main rule of essay writing. However, we must remember that despite the freedom of creativity, it is not easy to write an essay, since your text must be original and keep an unusual view on a particular problem.
What is an essay?
An essay is a small prosaic composition, which expresses individual impressions and opinions on a particular subject. The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, “to try” or “to attempt”. An essay usually has a philosophical, historically biographical, journalistic, literary-critical, scientifically-popular or fictional character.
The author of the essay attracts numerous examples, draws parallels, selects analogies and uses all possible associations to convey personal perception.
An essay is characterized by the use of different figures of speech and literary devices:
- Metaphor
- Allegory and Parable
- Symbols
- Comparison
An essay will look exciting and interesting if it contains:
- Unpredictable conclusions
- unexpected changes in the plot
- Interesting connections
The specifics of the essay genre
The title of the essay does not directly depend on the topic. It is well known that it reflects the content of the paper, but also it can be a starting point in the author’s reflections.
A deep analysis of the work of art with author’s discourse predominates in the literature essay. While the author’s opinion is clearly expressed in the simple essay. If you want to create a unique paper and write down your own thoughts and ideas – essay genre will be the right choice.
Outline and overall structure
Any text, whether it is a thesis, abstract, article, story or essay, should have a coherent structure. Even a blog has its own structure. What can we say about the essay? The essay differs in the freedom of thought from many other student works, such as case study, dissertation, research paper, etc. Alas, we all know the more freedom you get, the more responsibility you have. When you can express your thoughts on a paper, you must think over the structure of the future essay by yourself. An essay structure depends on your goals, paper format, essay type and word count. A narrative essay begins with a hook sentence to grab reader’s attention. The descriptive essay begins with the thesis statement. The analytical essay begins with a general statement about the particular topic that you will describe in your paper. You may think over an essay structure. But it is better to take a piece of paper and make a brief draft, your outline. The outline is a text base that will help you to build coherent and logical content. It is necessary to create an outline for each essay.
Creating an outline
Any written work, any text has:
- Introduction
Under “introduction” and “conclusion”, we usually understand the first and last paragraphs. Do not pay too much attention to these parts. The first paragraph or the first part of the text introduces the main problem to the reader. Do not make an introduction too wordy, one or two paragraphs will be enough.
- Main body
This part of the text requires particular attention. Especially when you are composing an outline for the whole essay. The main body can have the diverse structure:
- Thesis – argument, 2nd thesis – argument, etc. At this point, we fix the idea and then we prove it.
- Inverse structure (facts – conclusions). We describe the situation or cite facts, and then we make a conclusion, etc.
- Thesis and a few arguments (facts). In this case, we confirm 1 idea with several facts, examples. Thesis can follow these facts or precede it.
A thesis is a short complete thought, which the author wants to convey to the reader of the essay. Under the argument, we understand some proof of the thesis. It can be a situation from life, news, a scientist’s opinion, a scientific theory or fact.
Ideally, one thesis should be confirmed by two arguments, because one argument may seem unconvincing for the reader, while three arguments will be overwhelming. However, you are free to give to his thesis any number of arguments – much depends on the idea of narrative logic, the amount of text plan. It is important to maintain the consistency, laconism, and imagery of the text.
- Conclusion
As a rule, a conclusion sums up everything that has been said in the essay. An author draws conclusions along with the reader. Make sure that your findings are not far-fetched and do not arise “out of nowhere”. A conclusion should contain only main ideas that you were to convey to the reader.
- Main body structure
The main body should be logically structured. You may proceed from simple to complex. As a good alternative, you may try to carry out analysis or synthesis or use the method of deduction and induction. In order to build a logical text one should:
- Fix theses;
- Follow each thesis with a few arguments;
- Line up theses in a logical sequence: one thought should follow another;
Thus, you will have a detailed plan. The only thing you need to do is to expand it and your essay will be almost ready. But before you start adding more content, check whether all thesis statements are logically arranged and arguments are persuasive.
Where to start?
First of all, start your writing with the main body of the text. It is easy to add introduction and conclusion later when you make sure that the main body of the essay is coherent and readable. But if you have a detailed outline, you may start writing your paper step by step: from the introduction to conclusion.
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