The Five Steps of Writing an Essay, step to write an essay.

Some people will tell you to wait until you have finished writing to choose a title. Other people find that writing a title helps them stay focused. You can always review your title when you've finished the essay to ensure that it's as effective as it can be.

Knowing how to write an essay is a skill that you can use throughout your life. The ability to organize ideas that you use in constructing an essay will help you write business letters, company memos, and marketing materials for your clubs and organizations.

1. Purpose and Thesis
2. Title
3. Introduction
4. Body of Information
5. Conclusion

Choose the top three ideas and write each one at the top of a clean page. Now go through your notes again and pull out supporting ideas for each key point. You don't need a lot, just two or three for each one.

Title

Your title should make someone want to read what you have to say. Make it provocative.

You've almost finished. The last paragraph of your essay is your conclusion. It, too, can be short, and it must tie back to your introduction.

• 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.

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• Elaborate on each of your main ideas with at least one paragraph each. If your main ideas will require more than one paragraph each, feel free to write more.
• For anything point that takes up two paragraphs or more, it helps to have a brief introductory paragraph.
• Stay as concise as possible.
• Include anecdotal examples if it will help you make your point more clear.
• If you are writing a formal academic essay, avoid using first-person pronouns.

Using your outline, you can now begin writing your essay. Some writers choose to write their paragraphs in order, beginning with the hook. The hook is the first few lines in your essay that will grab the readers’ attention.

Although this structure is made up of five paragraphs, we can easily use the same model and make it into a Five-Part Essay Structure. This means that we will stay within the pattern, but each main point may have more than one paragraph.

But really, an outline can help you organize your thoughts before you start writing and actually save you time, since you’ll avoid beating around the bush or jumping from one idea to another without a clear direction.

6. Pay attention to how you cite references.

If you can write the hook right away, well and good. If not, don’t worry, you can always come back to it after you write the body of your essay. Here are some more helpful tips for writing the body of your essay:

Next, use the proper citations. Plagiarism does not only constitute copying the idea verbatim, but you also have to reference the source of the idea itself, if possible. Depending on your teacher’s preferences, you can use the APA in-text citation style or the MLA style.

If you keep these tips in mind, writing an essay will soon become much easier for you and you’ll see your writing (of all kinds) start to improve.

Once you have your thesis statement, you can start to prepare your outline. Many people skip the outline process, thinking it’s a waste of time.

• Problem 1
• Problem 2
• Solution 1
• Solution 2

As it is an academic piece of writing, refrain from using contractions, informal phrasal verbs, slang, and even first-person pronouns. Make sure that the style of writing is formal, and the tone is neutral and objective.В

Thus, the chain structure allows you to discuss each aspect of the problem point by point, which is especially useful for longer papers. However, both of these structures are a suitable expository essay format. You should choose the method you feel more comfortable with.

This type of expository essay explains how to get something to work. It guides the reader through the stages of a certain process. Process essays usually include the descriptions of steps and directions for the reader to follow. These can be technical instructions or recipes, for example:В

Need an Expository Essay?

For instance, a descriptive essay can be assigned to a student to teach him to describe something such as a place, a person, an experience, an object, or a situation. A cause and effect essay prompt may compel a student to discuss the causes and effects of cheating at school, thus reinforcing the idea that he should avoid cheating.

Make sure that the body paragraphs are logically linked. Incorporate transitions either in the last sentence of the previous body paragraph or in a topic sentence of the following one. Use linking words to make the text cohesive.В

The body of the essay should explain your arguments. It must be the most detailed part of the text, so make it specific and do not add any fluff. Make sure that each body paragraph is focused on one particular idea or claim. It would help the reader to stay focused and follow your line of argumentation without effort. Typically, you would need to write three paragraphs. Each of them must have the following outline:

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• Introductory sentence explaining what you’ll cover in the paragraph (sort of like a mini-thesis)
• Analysis point
• Evidence (either passages from the text or data/facts) that supports the analysis
• (Repeat analysis and evidence until you run out of examples)

• A hook
• Brief background information explaining the issue/text
• Your thesis

The simple, uneducated dialogue Steinbeck employs also helps to create a more honest and meaningful representation of the migrants, and it makes the migrants more relatable to readers. Steinbeck chooses to accurately represent the language of the migrants in order to more clearly illustrate their lives and make them seem more like real paper than just characters in a book. The migrants lament, “They ain’t gonna be no kinda work for three months,” (555). There are multiple grammatical errors in that single sentence, but it vividly conveys the despair the migrants felt better than a technically perfect sentence would. The Grapes of Wrath is intended to show the severe difficulties facing the migrants so Steinbeck employs a clear, pragmatic style of writing. Steinbeck shows the harsh, truthful realities of the migrants’ lives and he would be hypocritical if he chose to give the migrants a more refined voice and not portray them with all their shortcomings. The depiction of the migrants as imperfect through their language also makes them easier to relate to. Steinbeck’s primary audience was the middle class, the less affluent of society. Repeatedly in The Grapes of Wrath, the wealthy make it obvious that they scorn the plight of the migrants. The wealthy, not bad luck or natural disasters, were the prominent cause of the suffering of migrant families such as the Joads. Thus, Steinbeck turns to the less prosperous for support in his novel. When referring to the superior living conditions barnyard animals have, the migrants remark, “Them’s horses-we’re men,” (556). The perfect simplicity of this quote expresses the absurdness of the migrants’ situation better than any flowery expression could.

Summary: How to Write an Analytical Essay

Your introduction will begin with some sort of attention-grabbing sentence to get your audience interested, then you’ll give a few sentences setting up the topic so that readers have some context, and you’ll end with your thesis statement. Your introduction will include:

What does this analytical essay example do well? For starters, it contains everything that a strong analytical essay should, and it makes that easy to find. The thesis clearly lays out what the essay will be about, the first sentence of each of the body paragraph introduces the topic it’ll cover, and the conclusion neatly recaps all the main points. Within each of the body paragraphs, there’s analysis along with multiple excerpts from the book in order to add legitimacy to my points.

Now that you have your main points, you need to back them up. If you’re writing a paper about a text or film, use passages/clips from it as your main source of evidence. If you’re writing about something else, your evidence can come from a variety of sources, such as surveys, experiments, quotes from knowledgeable sources etc. Any evidence that would work for a regular research paper works here.

• Lack of individual names in intercalary chapters to illustrate the scope of the problem
• Parallels to the Bible to induce sympathy for the migrants
• Non-showy, often grammatically-incorrect language so the migrants are more realistic and relatable to readers
• Nature-related metaphors to affect the mood of the writing and reflect the plight of the migrants

The key to writing your first draft is not to worry about whether it's any good—just get something on paper and go from there. You will have to rewrite, so trying to get everything perfect is both frustrating and futile.

If you have one essay that's due earlier than the others, start there. Otherwise, start with the essay for your top choice school.

Finally, have two other readers check it as well. Oftentimes a fresh set of eyes will catch an issue you've glossed over simply because you've been looking at the essay for so long. Give your readers instructions to only look for typos and errors, since you don't want to be making any major content changes at this point in the process.

She feels more positive about the other three, so she decides to think about them for a couple of days. She ends up ruling out the job interview because she just can't come up with that many details she could include.

Step 5: Write a First Draft

Let's dissect one of the University of Washington prompts as an example:

I mentioned this idea above, but I can't emphasize it enough: no one writes a perfect first draft. Extensive editing and rewriting is vital to crafting an effective personal statement. Don't get too attached to any part of your draft, because you may need to change anything (or everything) about your essay later.

Once you've fixed the problems you found on the first pass and have a second (or third) draft you're basically happy with, ask some other people to read it. Check with people whose judgment you trust: parents, teachers, and friends can all be great resources, but how helpful someone will be depends on the individual and how willing you are to take criticism from her.

Your dedicated PrepScholar Admissions counselor will craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up. We'll learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step. At the end, you'll have a unique essay that you'll proudly submit to your top choice colleges.