Effective Essay Writing Strategies

Question

What are the three most effective strategies to writing a successful essay in any subject?

Answer 1

When it comes to essay writing, many strategies can be employed, but I have always felt the best way to approach an essay is this:

1. What is being asked? Completely dissect the prompt and make sure you understand what you are being asked to do.
2. Form an answer that is based in knowledge of the text. Your response should be your own. It should be a response that answers the prompt and you feel you can support with evidence from the text.
3. Craft a clear and precise claim or thesis statement. Don't be vague about what you are going to write about. The clearer you are here, the easier the essay will be to write.
4. Collect your supporting evidence. Find THE BEST evidence to support your main ideas. If you can't find good evidence, then you need to change your claim.
5. Write a draft and sleep on it. Come back to it and reread. Does it say what you want? Make revisions.
6. Polish. Look for opportunities to use more precise verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc. Look for sentences that are too long or too short. and rework them. This is the time to work on the structure of the essay. Do the paragraphs work in this order? Have a used a word too many times? Etc.

Every essay I have written or have worked on with a student has benefited from this plan.

Answer 2

Essay Introduction: An engaging, attention-capturing paragraph that presents the main idea for the essay. The introductory paragraph sets the stage for the essay, inviting the reader to continue. The introduction is aligned with the purpose of a hashtag, but with more extensive use of language.

Essay Body: A clearly presented body of content that explains the main idea of the essay, and provides descriptive detail and evidence as appropriate. The information in this paragraph or set of paragraphs should answer all potential informative questions by providing contextual information to support the thesis.

Essay Conclusion: The summary paragraph that wraps the main idea and content together to support the argument or position that you’ve taken in the essay narrative. The conclusion should seek to emphasize the main idea with a character and tone that is more definitive than previously stated in the beginning of the essay.