Essay writing is a common task faced by English learners. Often, essays are used as homework assignments, part of tests, and, of course, as one of the tests for admission to educational institutions. I found an interesting post about what types of essays are used most often and tips for writing such texts. You can use check my paper online to know if you article is good.
What is an essay in English?
In English, an essay is one of the genres of written works, which resembles the “composition-reasoning” familiar in the post-Soviet space. When writing such a text, the author’s task is often – to convey his opinion and reason for it, in other cases – to investigate any issue to provide the reader with space for their conclusions.
It leaves a particular imprint on the style of the storytelling. Often it is conducted in the first person singular. Connecting words are extensively used in the text, emotional vocabulary and metaphors are encountered.
There are quite a few essays of different types – in other sources, they distinguish from several main ones to ten or more. Today we will focus on the basic types of essays.
Narrative Essays
One of the most popular types of essays. When writing such a text, the author must tell a story based on a real-life experience. Such reports are usually written in the first-person format, leading the reader to independent conclusions.
Descriptive Essays
In this case, the main goal is how to paint a picture for the reader using words. Usually, the author describes situations, people or objects, laying deeper meaning in simple descriptions. Usually, such texts affect the emotions of readers. The task is also to bring them to some conclusions based on what they read.
Expository Essays
Texts of this type usually include an analysis of a specific topic, which is carried out using facts, statistics, links to various studies and reports. That is, points are more important here than emotions in descriptive essays. Therefore, even in the first person, the author should avoid expressing his own opinions or feelings.
Persuasive Essays
As the name implies, the main task of this type of essay is to convince the reader of something, using facts, logic and descriptions of related situations. In such texts, it is good to use expert opinions, practical examples, etc.
As mentioned above, there are many more English-language essays, but these are the main ones. Now let’s move on to tips for writing these types of texts.
Step # 1: formulate an idea
Writing a standard text is not as easy as it might seem, but the task becomes almost impossible without a formulated idea in advance. Therefore, before you start writing, you need to develop the topic. To do this, you need to define pairs of the “thesis-argument” type.
A thesis is a complete thought that you want to convey to the reader. Usually, the text of the essay should include at least three abstracts. For example, you want to write an essay on the topic “Why is jealousy dangerous?”
- an envious person becomes angry, it is difficult for him to rejoice in the success of others, he does not want to help anyone;
- in the modern world of gloss and Instagram, it will be difficult for such people to communicate with others, envy provokes isolation and promotes loneliness;
- an envious person rejoices at the failures of others. He will not seek to counteract injustice.
There may be one thesis common to the entire text. In support of each hypothesis, you need to select arguments, that is, facts and examples proving them. Depending on the type of essay, this can be some real-life situation, a quote, a link to a study, etc.
Step # 2: develop a basic structure
Simplicity is hard. Among other things, this means that to create a good essay. You do not need to stuff it with many facts, sections, beautiful literary techniques. One of the main secrets of success is a well-thought-out structure.
When creating it, it is convenient to rely on the theses and arguments prescribed in the previous paragraph:
- introduction – this part mentions the main hypotheses of the text;
- The central element is paragraphs with arguments and facts supporting the thesis, presented in a form suitable for a particular type of essay.
- Conclusion:In this section, you do not repeat the main idea but draw conclusions based on the arguments put forward.
Step # 3: If necessary, use auxiliary tools
When you need to write something right now, there can be a problem called “fear of a blank sheet.” Even if the author knows what he needs to write about, taking the first step can be the hardest.
There can be many reasons for fear of a blank sheet: from ephemeral ones like “no mood” to particular ones like paralyzing fear of getting a bad mark for homework or excessive perfectionism. Of course, lack of practice is also alarming for you.
Experiments show that this problem can be solved by using text templates. The idea is simple – it is difficult for a person to write at least a sentence so that the page ceases to be empty. If there is already some text on it that needs to be changed, it is much easier psychologically.
According to the statistics of the blog service Ghost, the use of content templates can increase the speed of writing posts by 600%. And here is a collection of templates for different types of English essays.
Step # 4: proofread the text
After you have overcome the fear of a blank sheet and wrote the text, it is important to re-read it a couple more times and correct mistakes. If you are writing it online, it is a good idea to use specialized proofreading and grammar checking tools.
These tools can help you correct typos, get rid of grammatical errors, and improve the style of your text. Comparisons of popular products in this area in terms of cost, user satisfaction and other parameters are presented on special sites.
