Developing Your Essay Writing

Developing Your Essay Writing 'Many successful essay writers plan consciously and deliberately, and commit to extensive notes, lists or mind maps,' he says. 'Some - those who work less consciously - may have a very sketchy plan. We've asked two academic experts for their recommendations on how to plan and write a first-class essay. Mastering how to write an essay early on will help you prepare for writing your dissertation in your final year. That is, it tells you what things mean and what they are; and it uses examples to show you how they work. Welcome to Writing Essays, the RLF’s online guide to everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask about writing undergraduate essays. 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. Notice too that even a preview into the conclusion is mentioned here. This outline of your essay will set up a sort of contract with your reader, explaining what you will deliver to them in the body of your essay. Let’s imagine then, that we have spent some time and worked on our first draft of our essay and have written the introduction to the essay question. If there is a word count for your essay try to devote 10% of this to your conclusion. You need to be concise, and clearly articulate your argument. We can analyse the text in our sample introduction and look at the elements it needs to contain. We will try to make it clearer for you by actually using a sample introduction that was written for a real-life academic essay. The introduction usually contains background information about the topic, your position and a preview of how your ideas will be organised. To improve the flow of your essay make sure the last sentence of one paragraph links to first sentence of the next paragraph. This will help the essay flow and make it easier to read. This functions as kind of map to navigate the reader. We can tell that this is a preview from the use of key words such as “this essay will focus on”. Notice that further into this paragraph, signposting language is used to designate the structure of the essay, for example phrases such as “the first, second and last section”. Writing Essays does not cover every type of writing you will do at university but it does cover the principal types. So you will find guides to essay writing, dissertation writing, and report writing. You will also find a section dealing with the differences between writing for the humanities and writing for the sciences and social sciences. The information and guidelines in these sections will provide blueprints you can apply elsewhere. The guide is a toolbox of essay writing skills and resources that you can choose from to suit your particular needs. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences. There should also be an appropriate balance between these two essay components. Taking the time to properly plan an essay can lead to higher grades, with lecturers welcoming a logical structure that clearly demonstrates your understanding of the subject. You might wait a day or so before between the previous step and this final step. This is your chance to tweak the writing and smooth over any awkward phrases. Add some transitions between the body paragraphs if needed. Look for basic errors like incomplete sentences, copy-paste issues, and the like. A concluding sentence that restates your point, analyses the evidence or acts as a transition to the next paragraph represents effective writing. In a previous online tutorial video we introduced you to a real-life assignment question and talked about how to structure the introduction and conclusion to an essay. Today we are going to have a look at the structure of a body paragraph â€" these paragraphs make up the most substantial part of an essay, report or case study. HELPS is dedicated to providing English language and academic literacy support to UTS undergraduate and postgraduate coursework students via free con-credit programs and services. This is the third paragraph of our introduction which contains a preview of the essay. This means that the paragraphs follow a logical order . Have a global structure with themes arranged in a way that allows for a logical sequence of ideas. You might want to rearrange paragraphs to a different position in your essay if they don't appear to fit in with the essay structure. If you are unsure of what to write read the essay question and answer it in one paragraph. So many students either forget to write a conclusion or fail to give it the attention it deserves.