The Five Steps of Writing an Essay, how write a good essay.

The body of your essay is where you develop your story or argument. Once you have finished your research and produced several pages of notes, go through them with a highlighter and mark the most important ideas, the key points.

Choose a title for your essay that expresses your primary idea. The strongest titles will include a verb. Take a look at any newspaper and you'll see that every title has a verb.

• America Needs Better Health Care Now
• The Use of the Mentor Archetype in _____
• Who Is the She-Conomy?
• Why DJ Is the Queen of Pedicures
• Melanoma: Is It or Isn't It?
• How to Achieve Natural Balance in Your Garden
• Expect to Be Changed by Reading _____

Anything you write will benefit from learning these simple parts of an essay:

Introduction

In your introduction, you stated the reason for your paper. In your conclusion, you should summarize how your key points support your thesis. Here's an example:

• Women are the chief buyers in 80 percent of America's households. If you're not marketing to them, you should be.
• Take another look at that spot on your arm. Is the shape irregular? Is it multicolored? You could have melanoma. Know the signs.
• Those tiny wasps flying around the blossoms in your garden can't sting you. Their stingers have evolved into egg-laying devices. The wasps, busying finding a place to lay their eggs, are participating in the balance of nature.

Vincent Hazat / PhotoAlto Agency RF Collections / Getty Images

• By observing the balance of nature in her gardens, listening to lectures, and reading everything she can get her hands on about insects and native plants, Lucinda has grown passionate about natural balance. "It's easy to get passionate if you just take time to look," she says.

In general, Eva feels like her first paragraph isn't as engaging as it could be and doesn't introduce the main point of the essay that well: although it sets up the narrative, it doesn't show off her personality that well. She decides to break it down sentence by sentence:

One prompt is relatively specific and the other is very general (e.g. "tell us about how your family shaped your education" and "tell us something about your background"), and

She's excited about both of her last two ideas, but sees issues with both of them: the books idea is very broad and the reporting idea doesn't seem to apply to any of the prompts. Then she realizes that she can address the solving a problem prompt by talking about a time she was trying to research a story about the closing of a local movie theater, so she decides to go with that topic.

You'll probably recognize this term if you studied The Odyssey: it basically means that the story starts in the middle of the action, rather than at the beginning. A good intro of this type makes the reader wonder both how you got to the point you're starting at and where you'll go from there. These openers provide a solid, intriguing beginning for narrative essays (though they can certainly for thematic structures as well).

First Editing Pass

You've decided on a topic, but now you need to turn that topic into an essay. To do so, you need to determine what specifically you're focusing on and how you'll structure your essay.

Explain what you learned. The last step is to tie everything together and bring home the main point of your story: how this experience affected you.

Once you've gone through the questions above, you should have good sense of what you want to write about. Hopefully, it's also gotten you started thinking about how you can best approach that topic, but we'll cover how to plan your essay more fully in the next step.

But don't confuse important to you with important to the world: a college essay is not a persuasive argument. The point is to give the reader a sense of who you are, not to make a political or intellectual point. The essay needs to be personal.

Phew! That essay was tough. But with this essay plan, you can get through any essay and do a stellar job! Essay planning is a great way to ensure your essays make sense, have a clear and compelling argument, and don’t go off topic.

The best way to organize thoughts is to create a Mind-Map. Here’s how Mind-Maps often look:

When coming back to edit your draft, here’s a few things to look out for:

• Make sure all the paragraph and sentence structure makes sense. Feel free to change words around until things sound right. You might find that the first time you edit something it sounds great, but next time you realize it’s not as good as you thought. That’s why we do multiple rounds of edits over the course of a few weeks

  These assigned readings were assigned for a reason: because they have very important information to read! Scan through them and see if there’s any more points you can add to your list of statistics and key ideas to discuss.

  Search for a Topic…

  Here’s some things to keep in mind:

  • Start and end with your strongest points

    Flick through those lecture slides and take quick notes on a piece of paper – what are the most important topics and statistics that are relevant to your essay question?

    Is Climate Change the Greatest Moral Challenge of our Generation?

    To write the draft, have a go at adding to each of your topic sentences to turn them into full paragraphs. Follow the information you wrote down in your notes and Mind-Map to get some great details down on paper.

    

    This tip can help you make a perfect hook in an essay with a formal tone that does not tolerate jokes or other inappropriate informal statements. It can be the right move. Here is an example:

    This is the most commonly used essay hook example, so if you don’t know how to start your introduction – use a quote and you will not be mistaken! Here is a good example:

    “They say marriages are made in Heaven but so is thunder and lightning” ― Clint Eastwood.

    Although this task is not the biggest or most complicated assignment a student can get in college or school, it does not mean that you can just make a perfect text without some planning. Writing an outline is always important as it allows you to see how to structure your text better and also define what it is missing or what has to be removed.

    Need to write an essay?

    Try to add some intrigue by adding an interesting and shocking fact that your audience may not have known about. This is another simple way to keep your readers interested. Here is a good sample:

    The introduction of an essay should have an interesting first sentence. This is known as an essay hook. A hook grabs the reader’s attention and urges them to read more. Read on to find out how to write a good hook for an essay.

    “Celery has negative calories: it takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it, and It's the same with apples”.

    Like a rhetorical question, making a statement that is contradictory will help you encourage your readers to think about something important and thus, prepare them for an upcoming discussion. For example:

    

    By writing about how social media and man-on-the-ground reporting has assisted the state of foreign news reporting, Goodman heads off naysayers at the pass.

    In addition to employing facts to his argument’s advantage, Goodman also cunningly discusses the counterargument to his position. By writing about how social media and man-on-the-ground reporting has assisted had some positive impact on the state of foreign news reporting, Goodman heads off naysayers at the pass. It would have been very easy for Goodman to ignore elide over the whole issue of citizen reporting, but the resultant one-sided argument would have been much less convincing. Instead, Goodman acknowledges things like “the force of social media during the Arab Spring, as activists convened and reacted to changing circumstances.” As a result, when he partially refutes this counterargument, stating his the “unease” many for longtime profession correspondents feel over the trend of ‘citizen journalism’ feel, the reader agrees. is much more likely to believe him. After all, Goodman acknowledges that social media does have some power. Knowing that Goodman takes the power of social media seriously will make the reader more inclined, in turn, to take Goodman’s concern about the limits of social media seriously.

    Much like planning on the SAT essay, revision seems unnecessary to most students. But trust us, it will help your score. There are two reasons for this:

    In this article, we'll show you how to write a great SAT essay. We'll take you through all the steps you need to follow when writing the SAT essay to show you how you can put together a killer essay yourself.

    Body Paragraphs

    

    Facts/evidence
    -first paragraph stats and facts - to show issue is real, lend credibility
    -by not explaining has a couple of effects
    ->forces reader to draw own conclusions/think about which draws them into the argument
    ->alt makes reader look to author in rest o/article (b/c had facts at first + so can be trusted)

    I then organized these notes into some semblance of an outline I could use to plan the organization of my essay.

    Once you have your analysis and planning done, it’s time to write like the wind. If you’ve taken notes and planned effectively, you should be able to jump right in and not have to go back and forth too much between the text and your essay.

    1. Revising helps you change up your vocabulary and fix mistakes and/or illegible words
    2. If you know you’ll revise, you can write much faster because you don’t have to worry about making it perfect