Three Ideas to Write Better Essays

If I ask a room of 100 pupils the question: 'Who hates writing essays?' 95 of the students raise their hands. And if I ask ‘why’ you find out that many students, from high school to university, just don’t know what is expected of them. It does not need to be like that. If there were three things that I would say to anyone about writing an essay, they would be: 

1) Realise that you are not writing a novel. You do not need a stunner introduction, (you need a clear one) and you do not leave your reader in suspense until the very last paragraph about what it is you are really saying. Don’t do it. You are not writing your next great American novel, where the climax of the whole book unfolds in the very last page. You are writing an essay, and an essay is an argument. And it is your job in your essay to convince me, the reader, why it is that what you are saying is valid and correct and that your view on this topic is robust.

2) Like any argument, you make it clear from the outset what it is you are arguing. Put it up front and in the first paragraph. I show you how to do this with lots of examples in my book, WRITE THAT ESSAY, but in brief: start your essay with a neutral sentence, then write a sentence putting the topic in its context, then follow that with a sentence that explicitly says what it is you are arguing. Write something like: “This essay will argue that while many approaches to essay writing are sound, the best approaches are those that make it clear in the first paragraph what the essay is all about. Overall, this essay will show that …..” Get the idea?

3) Plan it. Don’t short cut the planning process. I know it is tempting, but it is one of the worst things you can do, and it invariably ends up wasting so much of your time. Realize this: great writers write to a plan. Some book writers spend months in the planning stage, before they even begin chapter 1. So, if the best writers do it, why would us amateurs be any different? If you write even a short plan, and list not only what it is that you want to say, but also think about the best order for your ideas, you will write an essay that has a clear structure and demonstrates good logic. You will score more highly than if you just picked up your pen and hoped for the best. And another thing: if you write to a plan you won’t encounter those awful times when you sit at your desk wondering what on earth to say next….