The most important starting point is to listen carefully to what the essay title is telling you.You need to read every single word of it, and to squeeze out as much guidance you can from the title.It is the most common focus for study consultations among students using Learning Development. A collection of Question lists is available via the Learning Development website.
As a tutor has said (Creme and Lea, 1997 p41): ‘When my students ask me about essay writing, there are three main pieces of advice that I give them. The Mini Guide: Essay terms explained, and Questions to ask about interpreting essay titles may be useful.
To start you off, and to minimise the likelihood of writer’s block, a useful exercise is to do a ‘brainstorm’ of all your ideas in connection with the essay title. It can be much less stressful to throw all your thoughts down on paper, before you start trying to find answers to these questions.
To produce a high quality essay you need to demonstrate your ability: The need to use such a wide range of academic skills is probably the main reason why the essay format is so popular with tutors as an assignment.
The word limit adds to the challenge by requiring that all of these skills be demonstrated within a relatively small number of words.
Producing incisive and clear written work within a word limit is an important skill in itself, which will be useful in many aspects of life beyond university.
Good, constructively critical feedback can give you excellent guidance on how to improve your essay writing.It can be a way of making a lot of progress quite quickly. In these early stages of your thinking you may not be sure which of your ideas you want to follow up and which you will be discarding.It can be stressful and very difficult trying to work out solely in your mind how to tackle an essay title; asking yourself questions such as: What structure should I use? So, don’t feel you have to make that decision in your head before you write anything.If left unplanned, the reading stage can swallow up huge amounts of time.Fortunately, there is scope for developing efficiency in several ways: While a certain level of efficiency is desirable, it is also important to remain flexible enough to identify relevant and interesting ideas that you had not anticipated.Then you need to plan how you will respond to every single element of the title.The guidance given to you by the title is freely available, and is your best clue to what is required in your essay. Three, answer the question.’ This is important at the start, but also throughout your writing, as it can be easy to drift away and waste valuable words from your word limit by writing material that may be interesting, but which is not relevant to the title set.Essentially, this is what you are doing within the essay process: breaking ideas down, then building them up again.You need to: Throughout this process, the essay title is the single immovable feature.It is therefore useful to go into the writing process expecting to make revisions.The first words you write do not have to be part of the final version.
Comments Guidelines On How To Write An Essay
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