Essay Writing Tips

Do you like writing essays?

It’s okay; you can be honest with yourself.

If you’re like most other students, you’d rather avoid that task. Even if you loved writing, the limitations that academic assignments impose aren’t fun at all. You have to stick to a certain structure, which limits your creativity. The topics are rather boring when your teacher assigns them.

But you know what? You can make the assignment more appealing. It’s all in your mindset, combined with a few tricks that help you to complete assignments more effectively.

Stay with our essay writing service here. We’ll list the most effective essay writing tips, which any student can follow.

How to Write an Essay: 5 Easy Steps

1. Understand the Different Types of Essays

At high school, college and university, professors mainly assign these four types of essays:

• Persuasive (Argumentative)

This is a challenging type of assignment. You need a firm point of view, which you’ll discuss with facts. The point is to convince the reader that your arguments make sense.

Let’s say you’re writing an essay on Bitcoin. That’s a general theme, which you’ll have to narrow down to a topic. For example, your topic may be something like: The Effects of Bitcoin on the Future Economy of the USA. You may start discussing that Bitcoin will make positive changes to the economy, and you’ll have to present some facts. Even if your professor thinks that cryptocurrency is a gimmick, you should convince them otherwise.

• Narrative

The narrative essay tells a story about an experience. It may be a personal experience, but you may also tackle situations that you weren’t a part of. For example, you may tell the story of how your grandparents met.

When your teacher assigns a narrative essay assignment, they want you to be creative. They expect this paper to awaken emotions for the reader.

It’s not just about telling a story; though. It must have a purpose, so make a strong point about the moral of the story.

• Descriptive

This type of assignment is meant to describe a situation, place, character, object, emotion, experience, or anything else that the topic imposes. For example, your teacher may require you to describe your favorite meal. You’ll have to use sensory words, which will make the reader imagine how it looks, how it smells, how it feels, and how it tastes.

• Expository

The expository essay is a short form of a research paper. It requires you to research as much information as possible about an idea. You’ll present the available evidence, you’ll form a clear thesis statement, and you’ll use arguments to prove it.

You can use a few methods to write an expository essay: cause and effect analysis, examples, definitions, compare and contrast, and more.

2. Be Careful with the Topic Selection

Now that you understand what type of essay you need to write, let’s move onto the next step: choosing a topic.
Your professor will rarely assign a clean, narrow topic that’s ready to be tackled. That’s usually the case with exam questions. When you get an essay as a homework assignment, it has a broad topic. You can’t start writing right away.

These tips will help you choose a topic:

• Narrow it down by location. If, for example, the broad theme is Bitcoin, you can write about The Effects of Bitcoin on the UK Economy. With this, you give yourself a clean scope of interest, which lets you focus on specific arguments.

• Your interest should set the topic! Even the most boring themes can become interesting when you choose the right angle. Let’s say your literature professor tells you to write an essay about Russian writers. You can’t use Russian Writers as a topic; it’s too broad and an entire dissertation wouldn’t be enough to discuss it. When you start the research, you’ll find at least one intriguing detail. For example, you can use this topic: How Gandhi Inspired Tolstoy’s Work. Interesting, no?

• Make it unique. Students often get a bit too inspired by essay samples that they read online. As a result, the entire class submits a single essay in several variations. Don’t be that person! The Internet is full of information. Do your research and combine several ideas to get an entirely original topic. That will make you stand out, and your professor will remember your essay after reading through all submissions. That’s the perfect recipe for a better grade.

3. Start Early and Focus!

Do you know what your problem is?

It’s not that you don’t have the skills to write an essay. Everyone can do it if they just make an attempt. Even if it’s not perfect this time, it will be better than nothing.

Your problem is time, or the lack of it, to be precise.

Fortunately, it’s an issue that you can overcome. No; you can’t make more time in your schedule, since you only have 24 hours in a day. What you can do is plan the time you have available in a more efficient way.

Starting early is one of the best things you can do for effective academic writing. Students tend to procrastinate a lot. Their professor assigns an essay with a deadline of two weeks. They think that two weeks is a lot of time, so they focus on other activities (most of them are a pure waste of time). When they finally start working on the assignment, the deadline is too closed and they get stressed. There’s not enough time to go through the planning, research, writing, and editing stages.

Start working on the project as soon as your professor assigns it! You’ll complete small chunks of work every single day. Half an hour per day is not too much work, right? By the time the deadline is close, you’ll already have the complete paper through a stress-free experience.

4. Follow All Stages Diligently

The essay writing process consists of these stages:

• Understanding the type of assignment

If you’re not sure what you need to do, ask your professor! You can also search online to see what the specific type of assignment calls for.

• Brainstorming

This is the stage that helps you narrow down the topic. Take a piece of paper and write down all the ideas you have. If you don’t know enough about the general theme, conduct a preliminary research that will give you a few hints.

• Research

Find authoritative resources, and don’t forget to write notes about them. You can’t copy; you must reference all sources you use.

• Outline

Plan all parts of the essay.

• Writing and Editing

Finally, you’ll get to “real” work. Write the paper in accordance with the outline. Don’t forget to polish it out!

5. Approach the Process with Self-Confidence

Procrastination is a real problem, and most people don’t realize where it comes from.

Let’s dig into the psychology behind it.

It’s not because you’re lazy. You procrastinate because you’re overwhelmed by the project. It’s too big, and it’s unfamiliar to you. If the topic is something you’ve never researched and discussed before, you don’t know where to start. If you don’t have experience with essay writing, the structure of the paper is a problem, too. You don’t know how to write a thesis statement, how to support it with facts, and how to compose clean paragraphs.

Okay; you don’t know everything. So what? You can always learn! That’s why you’re a student, right? So that you can learn things you didn’t know before.

Convince yourself that you can learn everything about the topic, and you can write the paper. You really can! When you approach the task with self-confidence, nothing will stop you from completing it.

Good luck!