Write Your Essay

Write Your Essay Interesting material won’t gain you extra marks unless it is relevant. Good essay writing is a skill acquired rather than learnt. Approaches vary from person to person and will depend on one’s experience in essay writing, almost to the point where a style of writing will be as individual as a signature. Although this may sound obvious, a lot of essays lose marks for containing material that is simply irrelevant. Make sure that you read the assignment sheet thoroughly and are sure about what it asks for before you start reading for the essay. While you are reading, bear in mind what sort of material you are looking for in order to address the assigned topic. Even if you do come across a lot of interesting material when researching for your essay, be selective. If you feel that you need more help in writing an assignment - then you can get free help at the HELPS unit. We’re located in building 1 level 3 room 8, just across from the Concourse café and the Careers Office. Please feel free to come and visit us and chat to an Advisor about receiving academic language support to complete your assesements. In a previous online tutorial video we introduced you to a real-life assignment question and talked about how to structure the introduction to an essay. Obviously, the difficult part is working out what that order should be. In essence, an essay is an argument, so your structure should be based on the particulars of your argument. You may feel that you are repeating yourself, as the body of your essay should have made your argument clear already, but the reader will appreciate a good summary. Remember that good essays don’t just give evidence for their point of view, but also demonstrate why opposing views are flawed. Imagine a reader, then try to predict their objections to your argument, and then demonstrate why they are wrong. A well-structured essay should consist of a series of paragraphs that progress logically through the series of points that you intend to cover. Remember to link all the points in your paragraph to the idea in the topic sentence. One way to check if you have done this is to write keywords in the margin for each sentence. If your keywords are related to the topic sentence, your paragraph is good. If there are ideas that are not related, you should remove them. It might seem strange to think about writing your conclusion before you write the body of your essay, but unless you know where you are going you can easily lose direction. Normally, when writing an essay at university you will be expected to use only academic sources. The following learning guide on source credibility will help you to determine whether an external source is academic or not. When you are writing an essay you will need to include references to external academic sources. This doesn’t mean that you have to invent a new theory each time you write an essay. Your essay should have a definite ending, in the form of a conclusion. Here you should summarize what it is that you have said in your essay, stating what your answer to the question is and why. Often, there is no simple answer (which is why you are writing an essay, and not a two-mark answer on a class test), so you should state what the complexities of the issue are. But there are some points that you should bear in mind. One of these points is that you are writing an academic essay, and as such, are required to use a reasonably formal style of writing. This does not mean that you should be obscure, or use impossibly long sentences with multisyllabic words, but you should avoid being overly colloquial. Originality is one of the hardest things to achieve in an essay, but any effort you make at being original will be noticed by the marker. View a text description of the writing an essay time management 'cake'. Here the writer is not ‘in charge’ of the paragraph, and it reads a little like a list. That is something your lecturers do not want to see. You are the principal storyteller, the internal voice of the writer, leading the reader through to your conclusion. Try and achieve a balance between both types of in text-references in your essay writing. Also, the conclusion is the last thing the reader actually reads, so it needs to be memorable. What constitutes “good style” is one of the hardest things to state explicitly, and is perhaps the criterion most open to personal variation.