Writing essays is one thing. Writing good essays every now and then is another thing.
But then, there is mastering the art of essay writing.
What does that mean?
That means you can create awesome essays consistently without catching a break. If you want to learn how to do that, stick with us till the end. We’ll walk you through a guide on how you can do that easily.
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What to do when writing essays…
1. Build your knowledge and garner data
Your essay will be strong when your research is strong. Before you get started with writing anything, make sure that you have sufficient knowledge of it.
When it comes to research in essay writing, it’s salubrious to know that different types of essays require different types of research. If you’re writing a narrative essay, you don’t need as much theoretical research. Most of the content would be about your narrative, and that would involve just you voicing your thoughts and experiences.
On the other hand, if you are writing an explanatory essay on, say, a scientific topic, then you would need to do a lot of research since…well you’d need it.
Gathering data for your essay itself is pretty simple and straightforward. You just have to make sure that you pick the right sources and that you don’t copy anything from a source too closely so as to bring you close to committing plagiarism.
2. Understand the provided guidelines
The next thing you have to do – right before writing the essay itself – is to read and understand the guidelines that are provided by your institute or instructor.
Your essay could be well-written and organized, but if it doesn’t fulfill the provided guidelines, it won’t be worth a lot. In the presence of provided guidelines, the quality of the essay is majorly decided by adherence to said guidelines.
There are different aspects of the essay that may have been highlighted/prescribed in the guidelines. For example,
- The guidelines could chalk out the topic and subject matter to be covered in the essay
- They could also specify the formatting guidelines, e.g., the font size, line spacing, margins, and the like
- They could also include instructions about the word limit and the organization of the essay as well as the prescribed citation/reference style
3. Create an outline for your essay
You can only proceed with your essay properly if you have a solid outline created for it. Having an outline all prepped beforehand will help you stay on topic and not get diverted once you’re writing everything in a flow.
Your outline should not only contain the main headings of the essay. Rather, they should include the sub-headings for each of those.
While this can take time, it can help in laying down a precise plan for your essay’s content. It can make things easier for you when moving on to actually write the stuff.
4. Start the writing phase while keeping readability in mind
Then, once your plan is all made, the next thing you have to do is start writing according to it.
During the writing phase, there are a number of different things you have to keep in mind. Most of them are pretty basic things, i.e., keeping the content grammatically correct, ensuring spelling correction, etc.
One detail that some people can tend to overlook when writing their essays is readability.
Readability has two main dimensions.
- The readability of the words and phrases you use to make your sentences.
- The appearance of said sentences/passages.
If your words are simple and easy, your essay will be readable, sure. But along with that, the essay has to be arranged and organized in a readable way that allows people to quickly go through it.
For the arrangement and organization, a good rule is to make your sentences 20 words long at the max and to keep your paragraphs around 3 – 5 lines.
5. Check for grammar and spelling errors once you are done writing
Once you write your essay while following the instructions for it as well as your created outline, the next thing you have to do is check for spelling and grammar errors in it.
Spelling and grammar errors can slip by undetected in your essay, and they can show up conspicuously when someone else happens to read it.
You should take two different steps to make sure that there are no spelling or grammar errors in your final draft.
- The first thing that you should do is read the essay from start to essay a couple of times. You should put some time intervals between each of the reading sessions so that you can look at everything objectively every time. When you find any error in the content, fix it and move on.
- The second thing you should do – after the manual checking process – is use an online grammar-checking tool. Using a tool is a measure that you should take to ensure that there are no errors left after the manual checking.
6. Find and Eliminate Plagiarism from Your Essay
Finding and eliminating plagiarism from your essay is an extremely important step that you have to take before wrapping it up. Even if not actively practiced, plagiarism can make its way into your essay due to your text coincidentally matching existing material on the Internet.
Plagiarism has different consequences ranging from the mild to the not-so-mild ones. You can, for example, have your essay submission rejected or get a bad grade on it. If things get serious, it can even lead to more severe problems, such as getting suspended or expelled, etc.
The bottom line is…you don’t want to have plagiarism in your essay.
Here is what you can do to find and eliminate it.
- First, use a plagiarism checker to find out if there is any plagiarism in your essay to begin with. If there is any, you will be able to find out where exactly it is.
- Once you find out the plagiarized parts in your essay, you can do a couple of different things to deal with it. The easiest way to get about it is to just remove the lines or the passages that come back as plagiarized. But this only applies to text that is expendable, i.e., that can be removed without making a difference to the overall progression of the essay.
- If the above doesn’t work, you can fix the plagiarism by just checking the sources where the content matches and then creating citations for said sources. You can add the citations and make over the ownership of the particular sentence/passage to the original source.
- Lastly, another method that you can use to eliminate plagiarism is simply paraphrasing the specific parts. In other words, if there are any parts in your content that are showing up as plagiarized, you can paraphrase them so that the wording becomes different. When the wording becomes different, the plagiarism will automatically disappear. We personally advise using a paraphrasing tool for this job since they can do it quickly in a matter of seconds.
Conclusion
Writing good-quality essays can be difficult but rewarding. If you have trouble getting the steps in place, don’t worry. We’ve chalked out everything in the post above.
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