Guideline To Standard Essay Form

Guideline To Standard Essay Form As you're researching your topic, keep detailed notes about relevant information, ideas that interest you, and questions that you need to explore further. If you plan to use any of the information that you find in your paper, write down detailed citation information. As you do your research, you will likely find yourself narrowing your focus even further. This question or issue will form the basis for your thesis, or main argument. If you're writing an argumentative essay, get familiar with the major arguments against your point of view. You'll need to incorporate those counterarguments into your essay and present convincing evidence against them. A strong introduction should also contain a brief transitional sentence that creates a link to the first point or argument you would like to make. When you write the outline, think about how you would like to organize your essay. A college essay is a formal writing assignment that can take many forms. Persuasive, descriptive, analytical, expository, and personal are examples of types of college essays. For example, if you're writing a 1,000-word essay, your conclusion should be about 4-5 sentences long. Such a style is fine for personal letters or notes, but not in an essay. You can be personal, but a certain degree of formality and objectivity is expected in an academic essay. Each sentence and paragraph should follow logically from the one before and it is important that you do not force your reader to make the connections. The remedy is to analyse the question again and write another, simple, plan based on how to organise the material you are not happy with in the draft of your essay. Rewrite the essay according to that revised plan and resist the tendency to panic in the middle, tear it up and start all over again. It is important to get to the end and then revise again. Otherwise you will have a perfect opening couple of paragraphs and potentially the rest of the essay in disarray. From there, you'll need to present a few different arguments that support your thesis. Support each of them with specific evidence and examples. Make sure to address any major counterarguments or evidence against your thesis. For example, you might start with your strongest arguments and then move to the weakest ones. Or, you could begin with a general overview of the source you're analyzing and then move on to addressing the major themes, tone, and style of the work. Choose a question to answer or an issue to address. Always make these connections clear signposting where the argument or discussion is going next. At the opposite extreme, other students express only personal opinions with little or no researched evidence or examples taken from other writers to support their views. Some students' essays amount to catalogues of factual material or summaries of other people's thoughts, attitudes, philosophies or viewpoints. Start with a great fact, story, or compelling idea, then grow from there. If you're stuck, many writers save their intro until the end, once they know the actual direction and evidence in the rest of the essay. Start by defining the main argument you'd like to make in a few sentences.