Saturday, March 21, 2009

6 Easy Steps To Your Essay Structure

By Nick Sanders

If you are at university and wanting to ensure that the essays you submit will be structured well and easy to be followed by your reader. This will mean that they will have a better chance of understanding your work and thus providing you with a good mark.

Being new to academia, you will need to understand the structure of the perfect essay. Also, you will want to understand that these essays on your degree course will be more complex than other that you have written at a lower level.

After all, you want to bet getting the best grades possible from the work that you submit, so if your essay or report is structured in the wrong way, then you may end up missing out on marks because your thoughts aren't clear and your argument is a little fumbled. Below I will set out some steps that you can take when thinking about the actual structure of your paper and what you will need to submit an essay you can be proud of.

Step 1. Organizing your work area will mean that it will be easier to sort through and understand all of your academic work. Also, you will want to make sure that you have everything else on your computer cleared away. Don't open Itunes and close down any other chat software that you may have on there. This is the time that you want to concentrate on your studies and ensure that you give it your full attention and potential.

Step 2. Be informed - Many people seem to think that they can look at a computer screen, type a few thousands words and hey presto you have an essay! Well, probably it would be an essay in an ideal world, but let me tell you that the world is far from ideal and in order to sound credible to anyone who is going to read your work, you need to be able to understand all of the material that you need to source, read and digest. If you havent got around to this stage yet, then feel free to go and learn about the subject you want to write, even if this is only an introduction.

Step 3. Always ask why? - You should continually ask why throughout your research, as you will want to get to the bottom of why something has been agreed between two authors or a number of authors. Simply collecting the information and presenting it to your readers just simply isn't a good option, you haven't finished the whole essay and thus you will need to understand that you should be evaluating and asking why is something as it is and why it shouldn't be something else. Completing your essays in this manner will allow you to understand the different areas that you should be including and how your paper can be structured better.

Understanding and establishing the different parts of your essay will be essential for the reader to comprehend where your essay is going to lead them. Therefore, having adequate signposts throughout your paper will mean that you should be able to guide your reader through your paper.

Answering why certain things have happened or arguments have ensued - this is probably the biggest part of your ability to show an understanding of the essay topic.

Step 4. Set the direction - You will want to understand and plan where your essay is going well in advance of actually getting down to writing your paper. You will need to understand that you should take each part and link it to the next. Also, you will need to think about direction in the flow of your arguments that the reader will be reading, and thus making sure you don't guide them down a road that is pointless to the overall meaning of the essay. All well-written essays have a solid structure and foundation to them and they make sure they know where to take the reader.

Step 5. Write it and Write well - actually getting down to the writing is a good start indeed, but structuring your writing to have a beginning, middle and end is the way to go. Every part of your essay should have an introduction, a central body allowing the reader to see your argument, and then a conclusion of the particular section that links and leads onto the next.

Step 6. Preparation - this is one of the most important things to possess when you are writing an essay and more important in any piece of academic essay. You will need to understand that you have to prepare and plan your argument as well as your overall goal of writing this particular essay. Some students will find it a lot easier than others to map out their thoughts on the essay that they are about to write, while others will find it a real mental challenge to do this. You need to understand that certain parts of your argument will belong in certain parts of your paper, and thus completing a plan and preparing beforehand will make this task significantly easier for you.

Once you have completed your essay, if you feel that you want to get the best available mark that you can, then you should look at having your essay proofread, edited and reviewed by an essay editor.

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1 comment:

  1. Outstanding advice. To chime in, here are some specific introductory strategies that college professors wish every high school English teacher had shared: http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/writing/how-to-write-an-introduction/ and some good conclusion paragraph strategies, as well
    http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/writing/how-to-write-a-conclusion/

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