The dreaded essay assignment: it’s bound to happen to you at some point during your college career. And for most of us, it’s a regular occurrence.
What is an essay?
Essays are usually short-form writing assignments that ask you to combine academic writing with knowledge on a very specific topic or your own personal experience. These two categories of essay can be divided into narrative essays and topical essays.
Narrative Essays
The narrative essay asks you to transmit something from your personal story (a memory, a belief, an experience) to the reader through academic writing. There are two main purposes behind these assignments:
- Demonstrate and develop your academic writing prowess.
- Demonstrate and develop your self-awareness and ability to share your internal world with others.
Topical Essays
Quite the opposite of the narrative category, topical essays ask you to look outward at a topic and write a concise, informative piece. Here are the main purposes of a topical essay:
- Demonstrate an awareness of basic information about the topic.
- Demonstrate familiarity with current research on the topic.
- Suggest how your opinions may interact with the topic and develop thoughts that could be expanded in longer-form work.
Step 1 – Thesis
You’ve probably heard about something called a thesis. You need a thesis for your essay. This is the fundamental truth you will be writing to explore, argue for, and defend.
For a narrative essay, a thesis might be, “My life changed drastically for the better the day I began to read.”
Consider for a topical essay example, “The rise of the smart phone has led to the fall of the average attention span.”
Make your thesis strong by stating your argument (main point) plainly and with strong grammar.
Weak: “It seems that leaving children to their own whims could result in less discipline later in life.”
Stronger: “Allowing excessive autonomy for children is detrimental to their future wellness.”
A common concern students have is that they feel they do not possess the authority to make such strong claims. If you feel that way, there is a simple solution: do your research!
Students create problems for themselves by neglecting the research phase or the writing process. The false narrative they tell themselves is that research takes time and energy, and doing more research will naturally lead to the assignment taking longer and being more difficult to complete.
Yes, research does take time and energy. But what takes more time and energy is attempting to write an essay that is nothing but wordy fluff. Trying to make something out of nothing is a lot harder than reading some articles and synthesizing the main ideas into your essay.
Step 2 – Pre-write
With your thesis formulated and your reading underway, it’s time to start thinking about what you want to say in your essay. Your thesis may change during this process.
Writing an essay is rarely as simple as typing up a first draft, then hitting “submit”. The process of thinking, writing, thinking, writing, etc. leads to more developed ideas and deeper understandings of the subjects you study.
For any kind of essay, it is helpful to do some pre-writing exercises to help you generate ideas you can add in as you write. An example of a pre-writing exercise is mind mapping. (For an extended review of mind mapping, please see this excellent post by Anne-Laure Le Cunff; nesslabs(mind mapping).)
Step 3 – Draft, draft, and draft some more
With sufficient thought and pre-writing complete, it is time to truly put pen to paper. Write your essay over the course of several days, if possible. Write intentionally, constructing each paragraph, sentence, and phrase to be as perfect as you can.
Go over sections you’ve already written and rewrite them to be better. Analysis every bit of punctuation yo make sure you’re as close to perfect as possible. Read your paper out loud to yourself to check for awkward wording or other typos.
Step 4 – Submit your essay
After all of this work, hopefully you feel confident about your essay. Send it in. When you get feedback about your writing, take it seriously.
Writing is like thinking, and even though feedback on our way of thinking could be challenging, it’s a great opportunity to learn and grow.
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