How To Write a University-Level Essay in 9 Steps
I use this every time I write an essay! It helps me a lot, and since I started using it I haven’t gotten lower than an A on any of my papers! (minus one lol)
First things first, every prof and every teacher expects a different thing. The essay I’m using as an example is from my first year class and was around 1600 words — so not very long. It’s also not a research essay. The prof called it an exegetical essay, but don’t get it mixed up with Bible Exegesis. We studied the Odyssey and the Iliad for the semester and had to write on them and explain them. Despite this! The form of an outline will help literally every kind of essay.
SO this isn’t exactly a how-to-write-an-essay post, but instead its more like how to make sure your essay is bomb as fuck. My first year prof forced us to do an outline for all of our essays (yes forced, we automatically failed if we didn’t hand it in along with our essays). At first it was annoying, I’m not going to lie, but once you get used to it, this sort of outline literally saves your life. What I like to do is make sure it’s detailed enough that all I need to do is erase all the spaces between the points, and explain my ideas a little bit more. To give an idea of how much I actually write after this, this outline is 900 words, and my final essay was 1600. It makes writing your essay go by a LOT faster, and makes sure you can easily see all your points laid out in front of you.
1. Find out what your topic is and what you want your thesis to generally be. I never write my thesis out right away, because when I write outlines I tend to change my mind on things a lot as I discover new topics. So I start out general and get more detailed later on.
2. Write out your main points. In this essay I was explaining how Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops was the first step in a many step process to make him a stronger and more intelligent man so that he would be able to fight off the suiters when he arrived in Ithaca. Each of my main points is the part in the book that has to do with this idea. My main points are: Odysseus tells Alcinous the story of him and a cyclops, after the Trojan war. // After escaping, they set sail again and reach the land of the Cyclops // Odysseus comes to the realization that the Cyclops is not human, and therefore he cannot reason with the Cyclops as a human. At first glance none of these points have Anything to do with my thesis, but I chose parts in the book that show Odysseus’ growth. I go on to explain my ideas within each of the points. Another thing to help you is to make sure each of these can read like a sentence. So you should be able to read Point 1 2 and 3 consecutively and have it flow well. It will help you when you write your good copy.
3. Once you have your main points, create what I call “sub-points” in each of the main points. The number varies, as you can see in my example, but use as many as you need to make your point clear.When I was writing essays about Homer I usually stuck to explaining Odysseus’ actions, or the actions of other characters in this section. This year when I was writing philosophy papers I used this part to fully explain each of the ideas in my own words. Also you may be noticing a (P) beside some of the points, this is what I’ve sectioned off to be a paragraph. As you may notice the “main point” doesn’t have a P beside it; it is its own paragraph, but I use those as transition paragraphs to help my paper flow and to show the reader what I’m going to be talking about. It’s a grounding point. I usually opted for shorter paragraphs when writing about Homer because I broke things up by event; when writing philosophy papers my paragraphs are usually much longer. These points should tie back into your main idea for you paper. Each point should tie back into the one above it to create a nice flow, this will help orientate your reader but also make it a lot easier for you to write.
4.Now is the time to explain each sub point. Explain why the point was important enough to be in your paper; I often chose to explain how it changed Odysseus’ actions or actions that he chose to do. I usually use this section as an opportunity to clarify my points and to look back at the section I’ve put the sub-point in to make sure it fits. It around this time that I switch things around
5. Give any further explanation you may need. Sometimes I find that I need to explain things just a little bit more. Or if I’m not 100% sure on my point yet, I use this section to write down my explanation rather than waiting to write it when I write my good copy.
6.After this I write my thesis out. I know this may seem like a late point in the essay to write a thesis, but like I said I find waiting helps me really settle down with what I want to get across. I tend to have a hard time finding my thesis before I’ve written out all my points
7.Then I write my Introduction and Conclusion. I don’t write these in the broken down way that I do for the rest of my essay. I write them in full to help ground myself
8. Finally, I delete all of the points and spaces to create a solid paragraph. I do it point by point to make sure each sentence is a complete sentence, and then make sure I add on any explanation or detail that may be missing. Once thats done I usually have a solid essay with just some missing “gaps”. I.e. I need to further explain my point. So I go in and fill in the gaps, add my explanations to tie it back into the thesis completely, and then I move onto the next paragraph.
The third picture shows my sentences in my actual essay that I directly pulled from my outline (highlighted to match the outline), while the sentences that aren’t highlighted were the sentences written to fill in the gaps.
9. Once that’s all done I send my essay to a friend and we face time while she edits mine. She reads it out loud to me and we stop when something sounds funny (and then we switch and I do the same for her). I high recommend peer-editing and making sure you read it out loud! Its how I catch 90% of my mistakes.
And that’s it! Keep in mind that you should be gathering quotes, sources, or whatever BEFORE you write your outline, and it helps A LOT if you write in the sources in your outline so that you know where to put it in your essay!
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