Essay Writing: Some practical considerations

Tutoring English, advice can be more important than “how-to”.  Here, then, are some practical pointers to help your next essay.

Talking to my sister yesterday, she told me she’s had a flood of essays to mark this semester.  When your essay is amongst many others, you might have extra opportunity for reward.

Like anyone else, English professors possibly get tired of marking so many essays – especially if one after another shows the same tired errors and repetitive sentence structure.

If you can make your essay enjoyable to read (while still functioning as a valid essay, of course), your professor might likely be a little kinder about any errors you make, and a little happier about what you’ve done right.

Here are some tips you might find helpful:

  1. Make sure you prove your thesis.  This will help you stay on topic and make your essay straightforward reading.
  2. Proofread your essay for errors.  This tip sounds obvious, but many people I’ve talked to say they never proofread their work.  Remember:  spell checkers don’t catch everything!
  3. Vary your sentence length and structure.  Use some inversions and the odd compound sentence – although complex ones are better.  Keep sentence length to two and a half lines or less – most should be less.  Short sentences – as little as five words – can be very effective now and then.
  4. Connecting with the last point, use a variety of punctuation.  Consider a semicolon, colon, or dash where appropriate.
  5. Vocabulary:  use some less common, but more descriptive words where appropriate.
  6. (Potentially) Controversial:  if your essay is finished, but underweight, don’t “pad” it.  I think ten percent under the assigned word count is probably acceptable in most cases – as long as the essay follows all the other instructions given.  If your word count is less than 90 percent of the assigned length, you’ll probably need another supporting paragraph in the body to make up the shortfall.

With reference to points 4 and 5:  you needn’t do those strategies more than once a paragraph or even every other paragraph.

Of course, asking your professor about any of these points might yield some great feedback.  Believe it or not, I’ll be commenting on how to ask your professor questions in an upcoming post.

Happy Holidays.

Jack of Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane, Campbell River, BC.

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