Short Essay

Short Essay Notice the keywords including academic learning and literacy centres and the most effective approach. It’s very important to ensure that you fully analyse and understand the question before you start writing. Ultimately, your conclusion must demonstrate that you have fully answered the question. Planning your essay makes the writing process quicker and easier. You'll be able to focus on expressing your ideas while remaining within the word count, rather than having to organise your thoughts as you write, which often leads to waffling. The thesis is a succinct statement of your overall argument. If you introduction is multiple paragraphs long you have more flexibility where you place the thesis. Writing Essays takes you through the whole essay writing process â€" from preparing and planning to completion. Often you will be given a word limit, or suggested length for an essay. Use this information to gauge the level of detail, and degree of coverage that is expected. Obviously, an essay of 1500 words will have a narrower focus and will require greater summarizing skills than one of 3000 words. Note that markers will penalize essays that are too long. Michael recommends that you begin writing your essay by expanding your plan. 'You may find it helpful to write the conclusion first, especially if you know exactly what it is you want to argue,' he adds. 'This can help you to clarify your ideas and also give you something to work towards. First and foremost, you must fully understand what you're being asked and in how much depth you're required to answer the question. Michael says that one of the biggest problems students face when it comes to essays is squarely addressing the topic. But there are some points that you should bear in mind. One of these points is that you are writing an academic essay, and as such, are required to use a reasonably formal style of writing. This does not mean that you should be obscure, or use impossibly long sentences with multisyllabic words, but you should avoid being overly colloquial. Please keep in mind the keywords ‘in red’, which we will identify in our sample conclusion in a moment. Always recall the essay question as you write and continually link your body paragraphs to the essay question. To ensure your writing is cohesive and coherent - use linking words. Try to synthesise your evidence into each body paragraph in order to substantiate your points. Whenever you do use evidence you should follow the referencing guidelines that have been specified by your tutor or lecturer. Then, it must restate the key points that have been presented â€" and reiterate the thesis statement. In a previous online tutorial video we introduced you to a real-life assignment question and talked about how to structure the introduction to an essay. Now let's try and identify the essential elements to a paragraph by looking at an example taken from our assignment question. You’ll notice the first sentence is the topic sentence which clearly states the theme of the paragraph. This is followed by the explanation or argument and then substantiated through the integration of evidence and demonstration of examples. Keeping to the limit tells the marker that you understand what is important in your argument. You may already be quite comfortable writing essays and if so, you will have a definite feel for what works for you. You should pay special attention to Section 4.3 on stylistic conventions, as there is little scope for flexibility on these matters within a particular academic discipline. Writing essays is structured progressively and I recommend that you use it in this way. However, you will see from the sidebar that the guide is divided into a number of main sections. Click on any one of these and you will see that it’s divided into shorter sections or subsections. So you can either read it straight through from start to finish or you can go straight to the area that’s most relevant to you. Essentially, a conclusion consists of three main objectives. Firstly, it must summarise the arguments or information that has been presented in the body of the paper. The purpose of the conclusion is to consolidate or integrate the various issues or researched data that have been covered in the core of your paper.