Writing An Essay

Writing An Essay Slang and jargon should not be used and long, rambling sentences should be avoided. A good dictionary is the writer’s friend â€" spell checks cannot always be relied on. You will find a number of great books on essay writing in the Laidlaw Library, Level 1, under Skills E-5. The body of the essay consists of a number of paragraphs in which you present your main points and evidence to support them. If you have planned and prepared appropriately, writing the body of the essay should be fairly easy. It will almost be a case of expanding what you have in note form into complete sentences, adding specific details where necessary. Your grammar (sentence structure, use of vocabulary…) should be considered carefully, as should punctuation. Together with research and planning, these areas make an impression on the reader. A final paragraph for a 1,000-word essay would be words in length. Some assignments, and most examination answers, will be required to be presented in the form of an essay. 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. In a long essay, your introduction might take up two or three paragraphs. You can also have as many middle paragraphs as you like. Every essay obviously has an introduction and a conclusion. 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. That is, it tells you what things mean and what they are; and it uses examples to show you how they work. The introduction should identify the topic; give essential background information and/or definitions of key words where necessary; and indicate the direction and angle of your argument. However, even an experienced writer needs to be deliberate and thorough in order to write a well-constructed essay. An essay assesses the strength of your critical thinking and your ability to put that thinking into a persuasive written form. A guide to essay writing, including a number of helpful videos, is available in the CASE Toolkit for HE. Essays should be presented word processed as directed on A4 paper. Naturally, you will need to do some background reading to consolidate your ideas before your start planning your essay. We will try to make it clearer for you by actually using a sample introduction that was written for a real-life academic essay. Welcome to Writing Essays, the RLF’s online guide to everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask about writing undergraduate essays. A conclusion is the final paragraph of your essay. It should tie all the loose ends of your argument together. The trick with writing paragraphs is to remind your reader of the general argument. However, there’s no need to conclude every paragraph with a summary of what came before. Just make sure you paragraphs transition nicely from one to the next. Some teachers advice their students to come up with three points for their thesis. What invariably ends up happening is that you end up writing three mini-essays that are only loosely connected. What’s important is that there is no set rule as to how many paragraphs you can use for any section of your essay. An essay is a continuous piece of writing in which ideas, propositions, research and justifications are put forward and analysed in the form of a series of paragraphs. A university essay can be thought of as an extended answer to a question.