Tips on How to Spend Less Time on Essay Writing 1

The Beginner’s Guide to Writing an Essay

Preparation for writing an essay requires the student to have knowledge and skill. Those who have never written these types of papers will find a useful guide here. How do you optimize your preparation for writing an essay? In our opinion, the following material will help with this process.

The main requirements for the essay are as follows:

  1. Correct understanding and interpretation of the topic.

In accordance with this requirement, the essay must include:

  • clear formulation of one of the main problems;
  • a detailed commentary on the selected problem;
  • formulation of your position on the issue;
  • clear argumentation of your own position with the involvement of several (at least 2) arguments that can be based on life or reading experience.
  1. Semantic integrity, compositional harmony, and verbal coherence of the essay. The essay should consist of an introduction, main body, and a conclusion.

The named requirement assumes:

  • consistency and completeness of the paper;
  • the presence in the essay of certain compositional parts corresponding to the communicative intent of the author and highlighted with the help of paragraph division.
  1. The accuracy, expressiveness, and correctness of the format of the essay, i.e. the accuracy of expressing personal thoughts, the correct use of the vocabulary, the appropriateness of using the expressive means of the language in accordance with the chosen style of writing, and the absence of spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors, and shortcomings.

In accordance with this requirement, the presence of even one spelling or punctuation error associated with the basic rules of the English language will not allow the work to be evaluated with the highest grade.

Of course, writing an essay that follows all the requirements and has no mistakes is not easy. In such case you can pay for writing essay to professional content writers from PayForWriting to see how you should write an article that adheres to all the rules. You can use this essay not only as a sample of a good paper to look up to, but also to pick up ideas for your own writing.

Recommendations for essay writing preparation

To successfully complete an essay, students must:

  1. Clearly understand the concepts and terms used in the task, such as the problem, commentary on the problem, position of the author, argument, and life experience.
  2. Be able to distinguish between topic and problem.
  3. Be able to differentiate the problems touched upon in the text according to the degree of their significance and generalization.
  4. Be able to concisely and correctly formulate the ideas concerning the problems you consider.
  5. Be able to select several necessary arguments and arrange them in logical connection.
  6. Be able to build the text of the essay in such a way that it reflects the answers to all the questions formulated in the task.
  7. Be able to write the text of the essay in accordance with the academic standards.

Theoretical concepts and definitions

The topic of an essay is not just an image of the object (what the author writes about in the text), but certain aspects of a concept, a phenomenon of life, which the author highlights, depicts in his or her own way, and often evaluates it.

The problem of the essay is a complex issue that requires resolution, serious thought, and research. The problem always presupposes the presence of some kind of contradiction, opposition, conflict between certain phenomena, concepts, points of view, etc.

The text may contain not one, but several problems. In such cases, they talk about the problematique of the topic. Several problems raised in the essay can usually be combined into one common (more significant) problem.

The topic of the essay and its main problem are sometimes very closely interrelated, and their delineation can cause significant difficulties. This is observed, for example, in those cases when the text is devoted to any complex phenomenon or concept, the very essence of which can be considered as a specific problem (compare, for example, such concepts as goodness, happiness, beauty, etc.).

A commentary to a problem is an explanatory note, reasoning showing what the problem is, between what phenomena there are contradictions or conflict, what and how they are expressed. Such a comment also presupposes a description of the significance and urgency of this problem.

The position of the author is the author’s attitude to a particular topic or a particular problem of the essay. The position of the author on the main topic and the main problem of the essay is the main idea of the text and its main conclusion.

An argument is evidence of a position or statement. Arguments can be concise (in which case they can be separate sentences) and expanded (in such cases they can consist of several or even many sentences).

Mistakes to avoid

  1. Inaccuracies in citations and misidentification of their authors.
  2. Errors in references to historical facts, geographic names, and names of actual historical persons.
  3. Distortions in the titles of literary works, ignorance of their authors, and mistakes or inaccuracies in the names, surnames, and nicknames of literary heroes.
  4. Violations in the sequence or proportionality of parts of the essay.
  5. Lack of required paragraphs, and the unjustified highlighting of a paragraph.
  6. Repetition of thoughts.
  7. Incorrect word formation.
  8. Errors in the construction of sentences.
  9. Mixing direct and indirect speech.
  10. Incorrect or unsuccessful use of a word or phraseological unit.

Every student has had failures in studies, but with this guide, you can succeed in writing essays. Surely, everyone who has read the article knows now what recommendations to follow and what mistakes to avoid. Good luck with your essay writing!

About the Author

Dylan Roberge

Dylan Roberge is a San Francisco-based writer and editor with over a decade of experience covering money saving and deal hunting. Before going freelance, he got his start as an editor at Yahoo Finance. These days he writes about mobile, tech gadgets, and lifestyle subjects for a variety of publications.