We have all heard the phrase, “Practice makes a man perfect.” We can implement this in every field of life. Becoming a good essayist also takes practice. You can practise by writing essay drafts and full-length essays.
If your college is making you write the essay, but you don’t feel like it. Contact an expert essay writer to get the task done professionally and quickly. An essay plays a crucial role in shaping your academic future, so don’t risk it.
But before you start writing an effective essay, you might need to know “What are the fundamentals and basic rules of writing an essay?” The following key principles will help you master the skill of writing essays.
What Are the Fundamentals of Writing an Essay?
1. Organise Your Thoughts and Brainstorm
Organising your thoughts can be a hard task to do as the mind remains constantly working, making it difficult to focus on one thing. However, sorting your thoughts out can benefit mental health and can give clarity in decision-making.
Creating a mind map for the visual representation of your ideas can help the cause. It will help you understand how your thoughts make a connection. Keeping a journal or diary is also a good option, as this will allow you to write your thoughts down, keeping a diary will also allow you to note the brainstormed ideas down.
Using your brain at its full capacity makes you emotionally and intellectually strong. You can use freewriting techniques to make the best use of your brainstormed ideas. But remember that all ideas are equally important; you have to note them all down. Once you have noted a reasonable number of ideas, you should get back to these ideas after a break and review them, make connections between relevant ones, and cross the irrelevant ones.
2. Research the Topic and Gather the Right Vocabulary
Before diving deep into the topic, do primary research about the topic and know whether this topic has enough information available to continue the research and writing. Along with researching the topic gather suitable vocabulary for writing essays. You can use different sources for research purposes like internet search engines, different libraries and online databases.
To gather the right vocabulary, you can consult different sources like AWL (academic word list) vocabulary by Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Or vocabulary for writing essays by The University of Sydney.
3. Understand the Analyse the Evidence Critically
By reading ‘argument’ and ‘critical’, you might be getting a feeling of something negative, as you might be used to understanding arguments as a disagreement. That’s right, but in academics, an argument represents a statement backed by some evidence.
While writing an essay, you need to build an argument with a shred of supporting evidence. By critically analysing the arguments and evidence, students can decide which arguments and evidence to trust and which will remain sceptical.
To critically analyse the argument and evidence, you need to evaluate the following:
- Understand the rhetorical context of the argument
- Is evidence accurate, credible, and relevant?
- Evaluate the reasons you got for the claim. Are they relevant?
- Are your assumptions valid?
4. Choose the Structure of Your Essay Before Writing
Writing the outline or structure of the essay prior to actually writing it makes the writing process smooth and easy. The primary format of the essay, introduction, body text and conclusion remain the same, the difficult part for students is how to organise the detailed information in the body.
Two main things of essay structure are adding the right information in the right place. To structure the essay, it is important to construct the argument systematically and transform the simple argument into a complex one. The other rule to format the essay well is to provide background information on the topic in the beginning.
Another important concept when structuring an essay is that the information has to be relevant to your thesis. If you want to try a simple way of formatting the essay, try using a chronological approach/structure. It involves discussing the occurrences and the order in which they happened, including the cause-and-effect approach.
5. Write an Interesting Opening Paragraph to Hook Readers
An essay hook is a one or two-liner statement that intrigues the interest of the reader and compels them to continue reading. The hook has to be the opening sentence, or it can be the entire first passage. Whatever it is, it must interest your audience and persuade them to read the paper.
The hook in the opening paragraph may consist of a:
- Relevant quotation
- Curious question
- Misconception
- Narrative
- Interesting rhetorical questions
- Surprising truth/fact
- Description
For the sake of an example, read the first line of this article again. We have used a narrative as a hook in the first line. However, using only the hook is not enough; you have to build your essay on that narrative to induce the reader to continue reading.
6. Build Strong Arguments When Writing Essay’s Main Body
When you move to the body text of the essay, this is where you have to deliver your argument. So, make sure to deliver relevant and strong arguments. Every paragraph itself has to be a separate argument, and every sentence should support the argument.
Building strong arguments is a difficult task, but it can be done with improved writing skills. If you are not ready to take on this challenging task, seek essay writing help online from an expert essayist who can get your paper done professionally.
7. Write a Conclusion That Supports Your Arguments
The conclusion of your essay is the last possibility to make an impression on the reader. So, try to be persuasive and bring together the main points of your argument, repeat your point of view or narrative on this, and give it a feeling of conclusion.
Remember, while closing the essay off, you need to engage the readers, bring curiosity, and encourage them to explore the topic further. To do so, maintain the tone of the essay, and try to include more hooks in the conclusion, this will personalise your conclusion conveying your perspective.
8. Always Remember to Edit and Proofread Your Essay
After making all the efforts to make your essay worth reading, don’t forget to edit and proofread it. This will ensure your essay is error-free and ready to submit. We are emphasising this stage as it is often ignored the neglected during essay assignments.
Proofreading and editing the content for mistakes play a crucial role in getting good marks. But before rereading your essay, make sure to wait for 2,3 days and read with fresh eyes, this will help to detect errors. In the first stage, check the essay for argument accuracy or clarity in expressions. The second round will be for grammatical, spelling, or punctuation mistakes.
9. Get Critical Feedback on Your Essay
Once you have written and proofread your essay, it’s time to take the critical feedback on the paper. Getting constructive or any sort of criticism is a courageous act. If you want to craft a powerful narrative.
Obtaining critical feedback will help you advance your writing skills. Although it can be heartrending to see someone criticising the writing, you poured your heart out. This is why many students, even writers, avoid taking feedback. But remember, taking criticism and executing it in your work will make you a better writer.
10. Create Clear Transitions Between Your Ideas
The readers expect the content to be interrelated from passage to passage. Two aligned passages have to be related to each other. If there are no connections between the text, readers will get frustrated and may stop reading the text further.
To be a better writer, you need to draw patterns in your essay and show how your ideas relate to each other. You can use common relationship categories and coherent paragraphs to establish the connections. If you are moving from one idea to another, there must be a smooth transition, you cannot break the pattern of the text.
Conclusion
Writing essays is one of the most important parts of academic endeavors. It develops your writing and argument-building skills. In this article, we have covered ten fundamentals that every writer must master in order to write a skillful and comprehensive academic essay.
Despite being a doable task, writing essays can be a demanding and tiring task. If you feel you’re not advanced enough in your writing style or vocabulary, availing of essay writing services from a professional agency can solve the issue. Experts can write your essay using the best style and academic vocabulary.
If you are persistent with your decision to write your own essay, don’t forget to implement these ten writing essay fundamentals to get better results.
