Out of all forms of writing, essay writing is the one that every student has to do on all levels. Writing an essay can be as simple as describing your favorite toy to something more advanced like the impacts of the new technology or globalization.
It becomes bit easy when the topic for your essay is of your choice. But think about a student who has got an essay topic from his teacher, and, has no clue about it. To him, it is like a mystery that he has to solve on his own. These students need some help and guidance to make their assignments easy and interesting.
So, here I am laying down my strategy of making students understand how to write a good essay: -
Understand your topic
Before jumping into listing your ideas, choosing words, linking them together, constructing sentences, building paragraphs etc…. etc…etc…STOP and THINK…. why am I writing this essay? What is the purpose? Is this going to be a generic essay covering nothing to everything or this is going to be a specific one focusing on one aspect? Once you decide the purpose, it becomes a little bit easy to move to the next step.
Knowledge & Research
Let us be honest. We don’t know everything, yes, we don’t. And it is OK to be not aware of everything across the globe. But what is not OK is not aware of how to learn about something. What I mean here is, as a student, I may not know what globalization is, and this is perfectly fine. Concerning part is if I don’t know how to learn about globalization. In today’s world, we all depend on the internet for information. But, searching something on Google is nothing less than a mission, because you must know what keywords to use while doing your research. Here, you would need someone to guide. As a tutor, I encourage students to question themselves and search the answers on google for these questions. (Click here to seek help)
Ideas and Thoughts
Once you start learning and start understanding the topic, you would realize that your brain automatically starts relating your learning to real life. At this point, I would say half of the job is done already. Because, you, now know what you are working on and what you need to find next. For example, writing an essay on film techniques becomes more interesting when you start expressing your feelings on a scene by relating it to the sound effects and camera techniques used.
Brainstorming
At school, brainstorming is taught as the first step towards writing, but in my list, this comes at number 4. Now, when I know what my topic is and what is the purpose of me writing this, along with the knowledge and ideas, I can start listing down the points I would like to include in my essay. By doing this small activity, I am visualizing my essay. I can now see what all I have got, how I can link it together, and if I need anything more to be added to this.
Construction
Students often struggle to find correct words to express their ideas. The reason for this struggle is limited word knowledge. Therefore, all teachers including myself stress on building vocabulary. Building vocabulary means increasing your word knowledge. Now, please note, this won’t happen overnight. This is an ongoing process that starts right from the time when we all learn how to speak, and, has no end. Choosing correct words, putting them together in a way that it makes sense, and express your idea is like an art. Grammar, punctuation, and sentence layout all play a vital role, but all these need practice. (Click here to learn more)
Check and re-check
It is always a good idea to check your work to see if there are any spelling errors, any missing connections, or incomplete sentences before your teacher point them out and gives you less score. Read your essay multiple times until you cannot find any more errors.