Whether you’ve struggled with essay writing in the past or have just entered college and realized that there are greater expectations for essays on a collegiate level, you could likely benefit from learning how to write essays more efficiently. Keep reading for some advice to get you started writing essays like a pro.
Time Management
Time management is the very first skill you’ll need to develop or continue improving to write great essays. For longer and shorter essay assignments alike, there are a few tips you can use to write your essay by the deadline without worrying about submitting it on time.
Schedule or Block Out Time
If you haven’t made time management a priority of yours for completing essays in the past, it can be difficult to start. But an easy way to do so is by blocking out dedicated time to write. This may mean writing out a tentative schedule for your week where your classes, extracurriculars, and other activities are planned as well as the time you’ll take to work on homework for each class.
Plan for the Time It Takes To Revise
A mistake students often make is not planning for the time it takes to proofread, edit, and revise their work. Especially for longer essays, you’ll need to be done with your writing at least a day or more before the deadline so you have time to revise as needed.
If you don’t time your writing process this way you may not have the time to edit your work as you want to, which can lead to careless mistakes or incorrect statements left in your submitted version.
But if you don’t have the time to write an essay, or just need some help with editing or proofreading, don’t get discouraged. An order essay service can help you if you’re in a time crunch or having more trouble than anticipated.
Don’t Get Stuck
If you’re writing something from scratch, with or without an outline, it can be hard not to get stuck and you may not know what part to work on next. Or you may have developed a writing habit that takes up too much of your time and leaves less for the other things in your life.
Refine Your Writing Process
It may be hard to break out of bad writing habits but doing so can save you a significant amount of time. One of the easiest ways to do so is by refining your writing process.
The first step is to have a process at all, rather than attempting to start out trying to write all your thoughts or ideas down before thinking about the specific assignment. The next is to brainstorm and research, then write an outline based on your ideas. This way you’ll have a baseline and general idea of where your essay is headed.
After that, you can go through and write your first draft, which is meant to be a rough basis for the final product. Your second and possibly third drafts follow, ending off with editing and proofreading to make sure you’ve got everything right.
Research
It should come as no surprise that one of the most important aspects of writing a great essay is research. Even if you’re writing on a simple topic, research is the key to writing not only compelling but accurate essays designed to inform and inspire.
Brainstorm Ideas
Brainstorming can be a way to get started on finding a topic you want to write about and find ways to link it to other ideas. Your first step is to look at the prompt and any requirements.
This way you’ll know what topics will fit the length of the essay and what topics will be ruled out based on the assignment. From there, you can start writing down ideas, but don’t start overthinking, as brainstorming is designed to get all your ideas out before you choose one to write on. After that, start scratching out some of the ideas that won’t fit the assignment or ones that will be too difficult to research.
Find Your Thesis
Writing an essay doesn’t have to be a slog. A way to make sure your essay is coherent and compelling is to find a question to answer or elaborate on, which will be your thesis.
Everything in your essay should lead back to that thesis, so that’s what your research should be focused on. This includes any statistics, quotes, events, and ideas that you want to mention, which should all be from the text your essay is based on and/or reliable sources of information.
Take Charge of Your Writing
Like everything else, writing takes practice and care to get right. But crafting an essay doesn’t need to be a difficult task. If you use time management skills, work on your writing process, and put effort into researching efficiently, you’ll be on the path to writing good essays in no time.