How to Write an Essay

Knowing how to write an essay is one of the basic skills you will need for high school English class and nearly every course offered by colleges. Your teachers expect you to be proficient at producing essays in college and will likely have little patience for those who lack the knowledge.

This article is written in a standard three point essay form to further help you understand how to create an essay.

Before writing an essay, you should plan it out in your head or on paper. Essays have at least three points, which are also known as supporting statements. These are separated into paragraphs. If your essay is only to be a single page, one paragraph per point is sufficient. For anything longer, you should break your points up into several paragraphs apiece.

A three point essay written on a single page has five paragraphs. One is the opening statement; the next three are for each of your points; and the final paragraph is a closing and summarizing paragraph. Before you start writing you should have a rough idea about what you will talk about in each paragraph.

When you write your essay know that each paragraph does not need to be of similar length. But if any of your supporting paragraphs are less than four or five sentences they will seem weak and poorly thought out. These paragraphs are the core of your essay. Each one should give a different reason for why your supposition or premise is correct.

The opening and closing paragraphs are far less important, but still serve specific functions. The opening paragraph introduces your idea or premise in a few sentences. It should suggest that you are about to support your supposition with several statements.

The closing paragraph can, but does not have to, summarize the essay’s main points. What it should do is basically say, “And that is why I believe such and such to be true.” Its purpose is to re-state your premise with finality, since your supporting paragraphs should have lent credence to it.

When you have written your essay, it is time to proofread. No matter how well you think you write or type, it can only help to catch your typos and errors. But you’re not just looking for misspelled words and grammatical errors.

You also need to make sure your central paragraphs support your argument or statement. The essay needs to be unified, and it can be easy to miss creating that unity when you are writing. Sometimes people just put down whatever ideas pop into their head as they write and end up going off on tangents.

So read through your essay after you have written it to make sure everything flows nicely and makes sense together.

Writing essays can become very natural after repeated attempts. It is a skill that everyone can and should develop. And you can do that by following these three steps: plan, write, and edit.


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