Nearly all you are probably knowledgeable about the dread that accompanies the act of getting an essay topic provided to you. Nothing’s been written, nothing’s been looked at; all you have is a subject, a blank page, while the instructions to “write.” As a former senior school English teacher, I’m convinced the anxiety of not knowing what to write is the reason why a lot of of my students hold back until the very last possible minute to publish an essay. Under some pressure, you have no choice but to get started. But by then, it’s too late to publish the best essay you could’ve written.
The answer is always to start as soon as possible. Apply this five step prep process to your essay you write.
Free-write
Any writing is progress. Write down anything in regards to the topic you’ve been assigned, even if it is just questions you’ve got about what the prompt means. Write down anything. Don’t censor yourself; just ensure you get your brain firing. If you’re visual, you are able to draw pictures, symbols, or a rudimentary mind map (more on that below).
Exploratory Research
If you should be writing a research paper or anything requiring support to back up your points, do exploratory research. It will acquaint you using the topic as well as perhaps reveal ideas you’ve gotn’t thought of yet.
On the computer, Google Scholar or Wikipedia are great places to get started. Simply seek out the topics and ideas mentioned in the prompt and spend time doing a bit of good internet surfing that is old-fashioned. If anything jumps out at you, jot it down, add it to a word document, take a screenshot, or bookmark the page—you might want to make use of it later for the essay. If you’re into old-fashioned research (or if your essay is all about a book that is specific, head to the library, look up related topics in the catalog, and browse shelves linked to your subject. When I wrote my dissertation, among the better resources i discovered came from searching for a certain book and then stumbling upon two or three much more awesome ones regarding the shelf nearby.
The reason why i would suggest doing exploratory research before virtually any serious pre-writing or outlining is the fact that nowadays it’s not hard to quickly access informative data on the internet. In some cases, you may like to avoid letting the opinions of others taint yours. On the other hand, many times the ideas of others to be valuable to your development process. It really is your decision.
Now you can plan your essay that you’ve searched.
There are 2 primary strategies that are tried-and-true pre-writing: listing and clustering (also referred to as mind-mapping). If you select the first, take note of topics in a list and group related topics. If you choose the 2nd, your prewriting shall become more visual. Take note of the essay topic in the center, circle it, then draw branches out to other ideas. Circle those ideas and keep branching out. The final result will appear 123helpme to be a web.
After pre-writing, you need to have a more focused idea of what you will come up with. Now you’re ready to go into some deeper research regarding the specific topics and ideas you mapped out in pre-writing. The total amount of research you have to do might vary according to the scope of this topic or even the assignment. For example, you’ll want to do more research for a master’s thesis than a blog post. Make notes and connect them into the concepts in your pre-writing. Transfer your projects to some type of computer, for those who haven’t already done so, so you can easily shift headers and content.
Finally, it is time to get organized. According to your brainstorming and research, show up with your thesis (the focus of one’s essay). Start your outline together with your central point, then list your supporting arguments underneath (they are likely to be the topics of your body paragraphs). Underneath all these supporting arguments, list examples and reasoning to support them.
For some students & most assignments, i will suggest which you always get an initial structured outline down, but don’t agonize over which makes it perfect. Odds are, as you start writing, your ideas may go in unexpected directions. So don’t devote too much time to an overview which could must be changed.
You will find many sample essay prompts online, but a beneficial resource to train with are the new ACT writing prompts (even although you aren’t get yourself ready for the ACT). These persuasive writing prompts are superb practice at any level them to either do a quick pre-write and outline without conducting additional research (meaning you can practice these skills in just a few minutes), or you can flesh them out with additional research to practice for longer essays because you can use.
Writing can be intimidating, but the longer an essay is put by you task off, the more daunting it becomes. Get going early, using this five-step process, and you may arrive at the conclusion line faster and with less agony.