Essay Writing: Make Your Next Essay Better with These Tips
Essay writing is difficult, especially if you don’t have enough background about it. But it’s just a write-up where arguments are made. It’s more of a personal work rather than a formal one.
Also, it’s composed of ideas that join together to form your stand about a topic. Take your school works, for example. Your teacher asked you to write about a particular topic, and you need to point out your opinions about it. You already have ideas in mind but are having some difficulties in constructing them.
And so, after writing, your teacher returned your paper with some bad remarks. When situations like this happen, here are the things that you can do to essay writing and save your next paper from mistakes.
Red marks are red flags (Know your previous mistakes, as they tell much about how you write)
Once your teacher returned your paper, the first thing that you should notice is your rating or score. Now don’t get very disappointed if you always get low scores. It only means that you still have something to improve, and it does not mean that you cannot write.
Some mistakes may be repetitive with the rest of your submitted essays, but some can come rarely. Usual mistakes might include grammar and punctuation. High-level errors can include delivery, lack or absence of arguments, or engagement.
These mistakes can be dealt with, with the help of online tools like Grammarly. Most write-ups are also graded low because of too many words or characters. It affects the reader’s commitment if your work comes long and pointless. An effective tool that can aid this issue is a multi-purpose word counter. You can visit https://www.wordcounttool.com to ensure the length and readability of your work.
Divide and conquer (Focus on each part of the essay)
Knowing the parts of your essay is the key to improving it. The fundamental parts, like the introduction, body, and conclusion, should be emphasized. In this way, your reader can track your main argument with much ease.
“Divide and conquer” means that you should focus on each part one at a time. Once you have finished a quick draft of the whole essay, you can start fixing it part by part. If it is a bit hard for you, you can do it paragraph by paragraph. This allows the essay to achieve a good readability level and can be understood right away by readers.
Lose the belt for a while (Don’t make the usual stand)
If you think everyone else in your class made the same argument about a topic, you might want to be different. You can choose to have the opposite of the usual stand that a writer can put. You can portray a positive or negative image from the reader, and it’s not wrong.
This will help you because it attracts the audience. This also interests them along the reading process, depending on your flow. You have to make them think that you have a strong argument even when they think you are wrong.
For example, the teacher tasked you to react to a corruption incident in your country. The usual stand that writers can put is that it’s bad, or they lay down its effects in the long run. But, you can give points saying that corruption has positive effects on the economy. Your readers may want to shift their perspective and might agree with you at the end.
Drop an unusual title
Unlike thesis papers, your essay title does not necessarily need to be concrete. It means that you cannot only tell what’s inside your work, but you can also coin in far-fetched ideas. This may sound experimental, but tweaking essay titles can also give opportunities.
For instance, taking historical or famous literary quotes like the ones found here can allow you to draw parallels with other works. If your essay is about Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, you may decide to take a quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Both plays have allusions to supernatural witches and deal with the relationships between men and women. Using a quote as an essay title, you ask the reader to compare or contrast the two pieces of work immediately.
A quote could also place your work in a historical context. The Crucible example, while it was set in the 1600s, was written in the 1950s. Suppose you took a quote from Senator McCarthy, who persecuted suspected communists within the United States’ political and media systems when the play was written. In that case, you are immediately demonstrating your grasp of historical context.
Try not to be too obscure with any quotes that you use and always attribute them to the source; otherwise, your title’s cleverness may be lost on the reader.
If you also notice, some books have titles that are different from their content. The only catch is, you have to make it still relatable to your content when the readers finish reading. So, make sure that your write-up is seasoned with arguments that fit well with the title.
Takeaway
Writing out of your comfort zone can benefit you and your writing skills and essay writing. It is an investment that every writer should have. This is because having accustomed to writing tasks can become boring.
It would help if you made your teacher and your readers excited and interested all the time.
