If you are a student, the thing about writing essays is that you put down ideas straight from your head, meaning it is a good opportunity for you to shine with your unique ideas without having to worry if someone else has the same content as you do. However, as time goes by, you will need to keep writing quality content and get better with every essay. So, how do you move from great to brilliant, then over to writing a masterpiece?
1. Your Introduction
How you introduce your work tells your readers a lot. Probably start with a story that shows where you are headed. You can also create a scenario in the head of your reader and that will make them alert to the rest of the essay. You can also start your essay with a question then add your thoughts in the body of your essay. The whole idea is to make sure they want to know more about what you have.
2. Reading
Since you are trying to write better essays, go for essays by people who are already better than you. It helps you learn some techniques you probably didn’t know of, and it can eventually help you develop and build up your own style of writing essays. Do not only read essays of those better than you. Read even essays of those you are helping get because you will be surprised to find they could have skills that you could borrow from.
3. Keep Writing
You will not get better if you do not write. Period. You need to keep writing over and over again. Develop a culture and discipline of writing and watch as your writing muscles grow. Try to write on a daily basis if you can and sharpen the skills you get from your sources. Keep writing!
4. Plan Before Writing
You need to have a mental picture of where you want to end up. This will help you as you build up the content of your essay. Make an outline of the content you have to help you pull your ideas together thus, eliminating confusion. This also allows you to know how and where to place your points, and you’ll be able to put them together to create a seamless transition from the start through to the end. Planning will help you to stay on course, just in case you start getting lost as you write.
5. Experiment
Try out new ideas. If you come across new ways and techniques of writing, play around with them and find out what works for you and what does not. Try combining writing skills and see which ones work well together, which ones are used alone and which ones can never be used together. Play around with everything that interests you.
6. Your Vocabulary
Having a good vocabulary is easily the perfect way to express yourself. Vocabulary here does not mean using hard words and phrases. It means having the right words to express the right idea. You should work on your vocabulary continually as an essay writer since there are always new words and phrases to learn. Having good vocabulary shows intelligence on your part and helps you appeal to your reader easily and makes you more persuasive.
7. Tone of Voice
Go through your previous essays and see if you recognise the tone of voice you have written with. Do you find it interesting or boring? The most important thing is to make your readers understand, yes, but you do not want to bore them out. You want them to be intrigued too. Engage them, make them want to keep reading, and make it feel as if you are having a conversation with them.
8. Examples vs Explanations
If you are pressed by time and you have a lot of content to write but don’t think you can finish up in time, it will do you good to understand that examples work better than explanations. In fact, you can make those examples be your explanations. It helps you shorten the sentences, and it will actively engage the reader since posting an example will create a small scenario for the reader. It also helps you pass your idea clearly since writing an example is simply describing situations.
9. Focus on the Backbone of Your Essay
There may be many widely accepted formats for writing essays and but nothing else cuts across all these formats like the backbone. The backbone consists of three parts: the introduction, body, and finally the conclusion. The introduction is important since it grabs the attention of your readers and the conclusion is equally important since you do not want to leave your readers hanging, you need to let them off easy. The body, on the other hand, has to be intriguing enough to keep the readers with you to the very end.
10. Get Reader Feedback
So, you’ve practised your skills, read the work of others, gone through your vocabulary, played around with new ideas and finally, written an essay. Give it out for other people to read. It may be a little unsettling at first but it has its benefits. It allows others to appreciate your work and every compliment that comes your way afterwards admittedly takes you a long way in holding up your confidence. Giving out your work gives people the chance to learn from you too, just as you learnt from others a while back. It also helps you identify your mistakes which simply makes you a better writer.
Sophia Clark is a creative writer from New York who loves to share her thoughts with readers. In her free time, she enjoys writing fiction as well as reading it. Her big dream is to publish a novel one day.