Are you having trouble with essay writing? Here are 3 tips that can help you improve your essay writing skills.
Over my many years of being an English tutor, I’ve noticed that many high school students have trouble with essay writing.
Some don’t understand the format, some don’t know how to start it, some are frightened by it, and some are just confused by the entire thing.
I’ve given a lot of advice and recently thought that they could be helpful to others as well.
So, here are some tips and tricks for how to write essays:
Always Plan and Organize
Prior to writing your essay, you should plan it out and organize your thoughts.
This is commonsense, but there are so many students who don’t do it. They just jump right into writing because they think it’s a waste of time to brainstorm and plan.
But in reality, planning your essay out will save you time.
You’ll have all the info you want to use laid out so you won’t have to waste time thinking about your argument or figuring out the support for it.
In addition to that, if you thoroughly organize and format your essay beforehand, all you’ll have to do when writing is put your points into complete sentences and connect them.
So, plan out your essay.
Write FBR
I have this one student who keeps fixating on the intro paragraph.
He keeps saying that it’s not good enough and wastes a bunch of time trying to make it better rather than working to complete his essay.
So, I keep reminding him to finish writing the essay first, then try to make it better after.
This method that I’m telling him to use is called Write FBR.
Write FBR is a writing method that encourages people to write fast and bad, and then review it.
It’s meant to get people to get their ideas down first and to not worry about the quality.
The reason why is that they have to proofread and edit their writing after anyway, so there’s no point fixing it as they write.
If you want to learn more about this method, click here.
Write the Essay One Paragraph at a Time
I’ve noticed that some students get nervous with essay writing because they believe it’s this huge assignment.
But it really isn’t, especially if you break it up.
Instead of thinking of it as one big writing, see it as 5 paragraphs that you have to write.
Break the essay up into manageable tasks and write one paragraph at a time.
For instance, write the intro paragraph fast and bad (and with minimal review) and then go on to the first body paragraph once you’re done.
(P.S. if you’re curious about the essay format, read this blog post.)
Continue this process until you finish the essay. Then proofread and edit it as best as you can.
This will take a load of pressure off of you because you’ll start to view the big essay as a few small paragraphs.
Final Thoughts
Essay writing can be intimidating.
Many times, it’s a big assignment that’s worth a lot of marks.
But essays aren’t that scary… if you do the things that I suggested above.
Thus, plan out your essay; break it up into smaller pieces of work; then write it fast and bad, and review it.