General Essay Writing Tips

General Essay Writing Tips In most cases, your assignment will include clear guidelines on the number of words or pages you are expected to write. Often this will be a range rather than an exact number (for example, 2500â€"3000 words, or 10â€"12 pages). If you’re not sure, always check with your instructor. This is totally off if you’re writing a screen play or narration of any type. Just written out my plan for my essay on the political implications of the Italian Renaissance- Really don't want to start but I have a plan now and feel more motivated. Finally, ensure that all the points you wanted to explore are on paper and explained fully. Make sure each paragraph focuses on one point and doesn’t meander. In some cases, you are allowed to exceed the upper word limit by 10% â€" so for an assignment of 2500â€"3000 words, you could write an absolute maximum of 3300 words. However, the rules depend on your course and institution, so always check with your instructor if you’re unsure. Add more evidence and examples to each paragraph to clarify or strengthen your points. This way, when you sit down after lunch to tackle the main body of the essay, you'll have already knocked a couple of hundred words off the word count. As your intro is unlikely to need many quotes, it makes sense to get the ball rolling and feel a sense of achievement as soon as you've planned your essay and know where it's going. Once you've decided on your approach to answering the question, you should be able to form a pretty solid plan for the body of the essay. It can be helpful to come up with a quick answer in your head, as this gives you a general idea of what to write about and means you won't need to keep rereading the question. Now the essay is written, but you're not quite done. Reread what you've written, looking out for mistakes and typos. Don't jumble too many ideas in each paragraph or the reader may become confused. Make things wordier in order to hit your word limit. However long you're taking, you should still check that your essay flows nicely. But, as we touched on earlier, not everyone can get their ideas written down and do it eloquently all in one go. If this is you, then take this time to refine what you've produced and make sure it gets full marks for written communication. The very fact that they're short and worded in a very straightforward way means you're probably expected to construct a much more original and complex essay to respond to it. If you've been given a choice of essay questions, you should choose the one you have the most knowledge about, or have some strong opinions on. There are many reasons students find themselves in this pressurised situation . We're not here to judge, rather help you make the best of a tricky situation. Brainstorming can be a great way to develop a topic more deeply and to recognize connections between various facets of your topic. Write down everything that comes to mind as you can always narrow those topics down later. Different fonts and different font sizes will affect the number of pages you write. This is one reason why a teacher may give an assignment length in words instead of pages - page length can be faked by changing the margins and fonts. Cut out filler words and make sure each sentence is clear, concise, and related to the paragraph’s point. Use the research you gathered earlier to support the key ideas you set out in your outline, but don't ramble for the sake of it. Try to be concise and have faith that the strength of your arguments will take you to around 2,500 words. We've allowed 3 hours and 45 minutes for editing your essay, which might sound a bit excessive â€" and, for some of you, it definitely will be. Pick out a single point in your argument that you feel hasn't been fully built upon, and head back to your research. There will almost certainly be an additional quote or two that you could throw in to make your point even clearer. While your essay plan should see you through, there's nothing to say that more ideas won't occur to you as you go along. Create a mini-outline in your introduction so you signpost exactly what it is you're planning to argue. Don't worry too much about making it sound amazing at this point â€" just get stuck into introducing your argument and telling the reader how you'll support it. You can go back and make yourself sound smarter later on when you're at the editing stage.