How to Write an Essay

Any student gazing in half-panicked dismay at their essay title may be forgiven for wondering whether these were just thrown together at random.

Their teacher or lecturer had to provide some sort of prompt, just so they had something to mark later on. This is how we get grades after all. 

No. In fact your tutor could well have spent as long agonizing over how to phrase the question, as the student will in answering it. Essay questions are very precisely worded, in order to solicit a very precise response. This is the reality of how you get your grade.

One of the most common errors is to skim-read the question to glean the general subject, then write about everything you know about it. The law of averages states that something in that jumble might actually address what's being sought, but not the rest of it. Marks are being lost right there.

For example, say that the class has read five books in English Literature. The assignment is to pick an essay title from five on offer, each pertaining to one of those novels. Our student actually paid attention while reading Wuthering Heights, so selects the option: 'Explain how Emily Bronte uses the character of Edgar Linton to contrast with that of Heathcliff.'

The temptation would be to regurgitate all that has been learned in class about the novel, perhaps with a long diversion into Emily Bronte, her life and times, and the genre of Gothic fiction unto the present day. This is too much. Not only does it not answer the question, but it would take forever to write and go far over the word count. In that direction lies panic and despair.

First Tip: Read precisely what the question is asking. Ignore anything not in the remit of the question.

The best advice I ever received about writing essays came from a professor. It was during my first lecture, in my first week at University, when she was explaining what we could anticipate from her course.

Thirty students sat, in varying stages of academic anticipation and post-Freshers' Week hangovers, expecting to be educated in the historical delights of the early Anglo-Saxon invaders. Instead it was dawning upon us that, in return, we really would have to produce degree level essays. That part of it had always been a vague acknowledgement before, barely registering under the excitement of leaving home for the first time.

The professor must have seen our suddenly panicked expressions because she paused to deliver her advice. In fact, she wrote it on the board and I dutifully copied it into my brand new notebook. It was to serve me well across the next six years and two degrees worth of essay writing.

She told us, "Say what you're going to say. Say it. Say what you've just said."

The building blocks of any essay are the introduction, the main body and the conclusion. In short, they break down into this:

• The Introduction - Summarize what you're going to write about in the main body. If you have ten points, then write a sentence each to describe those ten points. (If you were paying attention above, then you're taking the elements from the title and writing a sentence about each of them. This highlights straight away that you read and understood the question.)
• The Main Body - Elaborate on what you have to say. Take each sentence from the introduction and add more detail, quotations and everything else you need to insert to support your point.
• The Conclusion - Summarize what you just said. If you've done this correctly, then you're basically rewriting the introduction, but in the past tense.

It might sound too easy, but it has worked for every academic assignment I've ever had to complete. Even the dissertations followed this structure, just on a slightly grander scale.