How to write an academic essay: Top tips/hacks

When in school or college, as students, you’re often required to write an essay within a stipulated time. Thus, it is important to know how to write a killer essay.

The key to writing a good essay is keeping it crisp and interesting with short sentences. The aim is to not be repetitive and be on your subject.

Steps to Write an Impressive Essay

Here’s how to write a killer essay:

• Structure and writing style: How clear is the structure and writing style
• Explanation and coherence: How ell have you conveyed your thoughts
• Critical thinking: Did you link the theory (if applicable) to the topic
• Evidence: How well have you collected, processed and interpreted evidence
• Conclusions: How deep is your critical evaluation and answer
• Range of source materials used: How well have you shown knowledge of the literature
• Referencing: Have you correctly referenced your sources
• Adhere to the word limit

Know Your Topic

The most important, yet boring part, of writing an essay is researching on the topic. If you are already an expert in the field, it becomes relatively simpler to write an essay on the matter.

The topic of the essay should be familiar to you or your research on the matter has to be excellent.

Research work basically involves knowing, understanding and analyzing the available information on a certain subject. Without research, writing an essay becomes a fruitless task. In order to know the topic, you need to read on the matter.

Information is easy to procure nowadays and most research work for any good essay can be completed online. Books are another way of learning about any topic. Some interesting websites and research ideas are below.

• Wikipedia is a popular online encyclopedia. It has information on almost all topics/subjects.
• Visiting libraries is another good idea to gather information on your topic. Go to your local library or visit a large one that you know of. Sometimes you might even find libraries for particular subjects or topics, these can be a great source of information.
• Talking to an expert in the field is also advisable. You can get several ideas for your essay.

Read What Others Have Written

A lot of essays can be found online on various topics. Getting to read a few of them can give you an insight on how you wish to proceed.

But don’t just copy the essay, it is important to maintain ingenuity. Keeping this in mind, reading other essays is a quick way to get a structure for your essay.

Read The References Available

Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias have a common citation below every article. These links below have real research papers on the matter that you are looking for. Reading these papers give you a better idea of what is written on the internet and how to better portray it in your words. Understanding the concept of your topic makes it easy to explain it while writing your paper.

Please note – It is important to mention your references while taking any information from these papers.

Keep It The Right Size

It’s also important to know the right size of your essay. A very lengthy essay tends to lose the reader’s attention. Whereas a short essay most probably won’t be as informative as it can be.

Thus writing an essay which is brief, yet informative, is suggested. An essay should be simple enough to be understood by anyone without any prior knowledge of the matter. The correct word capacity of an essay also depends on the context in which it is written, and for whom it is intended.

Get it Reviewed

Have another set of eyes take a look at it. But before that, recheck your essay yourself. Look for all kinds of errors and fix them.

After rechecking the essay for mistakes, it is also a good idea to read it out aloud, doing this gives you more ideas on forming sentences and using better words. People often tend to leave their vocabulary unused while concentrating on writing. Using this technique will help you use better words/sentences.

Correct use of words and crisp sentences make an essay captivating to the readers, irrespective of whether they already know about the topic or not.

Wrap Up

The ideal essay has an optimum size and is informative. The information and data presented is correct and the references are clearly stated. Reading the essay should not be a boring task for the reader. Whether the essay is lengthy depends on few things, but mostly essays are better short.

Keeping these few simple hacks in mind, you can write a killer essay. Be clear about what you want to say and avoid repetition. This should make your essay better than it already is.