History essay writing is somewhat tricky for one very important reason – history is really not about dates and names and places. A good college history essay should take the issues of a history class and represent them in an interesting way. After all, history is all about telling stories and telling them in new and interesting ways.

I always tell my writing students that a good college essay should be argumentative or persuasive in nature. The job of a college writer is to present an issue in a new and interesting way – not to simply rehash information.

This is the biggest mistake student writers make in history essay writing!

You should never approach a historical essay as though the “facts” are most important to the reader. Facts alone are worthless. The question lurking for your audience (especially your professor – an expert in history writing) is, “what do the facts mean?”

For example: you would never want to write what I like to call the George Washington essay. This is an essay that simply recounts the first G.W.’s life and times. We call this a biographical essay. Trust me: this is the last thing your instructor wants to see.

Your job is to take the life of George Washington and make it interesting. In other words, you need to say something unique about the first president’s existence and make an argument or take a new interpretation of the facts.

Information on its own is very boring. The job of a good writer is to take everyday information and transform it into something unique. Most beginning writers struggle with this part of the essay writing process. It can be quite challenging to both present accurate information and look at it in a new way. Of course, every college writer needs to spend time in the writing process on every essay to get the best results.

By: Jason Clegg

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Do have a bit of spare time everyday and wondering how it can be used productively? Have you written small articles for the local magazines in your school/college days and would like to build on that? Here’s a simple way to supplement your current income by just spending just a couple of hours a day: Essay Writing.

Essay writing is a very good idea if you have reasonable English skills, that can be put to good use in your leisure time. Its not time consuming, and actually slowly grows on you, in fact. Why not display your language prowess by writing articles and essays?

Ever since the advent of the internet, the website business has mushroomed. Who provides the content for all these billions of websites? Each time a new website pops up, someone has to fill it up with content, and it might as well be you, and make some money in the process. Many people use essay writing as their supplementary careers, some of them to great success.

Essay writing has been popularized by many article database websites, such as eZine itself, whose growth has been exponential since its launch. Writing essays can also be stimulating to the brain, garnering knowledge from various sources. There are other benefits as well. Writing is a great way to actually “reach out and touch someone”. It is quite gratifying to have others read and compliment your skills, and have people from all over the world looking to you for their needs.

Did you also realize that writing is one of the few areas that still isn’t automated! I think we can take pride in that fact. Pick up a pen, er, i mean keyboard, gear up your Grey cells and put those creative juices to use. Who knows, with a bit of luck, you might be the next Francis Bacon!

By: Jake Schofield

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As a first step let us get all the ambiguity out of the way. As the name implies, the only purpose a persuasive essay is to persuade. It should convince the reader to see your view point and agree with your proposition. The topic should be structured concisely, well defined and debatable. Your topic sentence should state your position. This sentence should not be a fact. Facts are not debatable. In addition, your topic sentence should be clear and precise.

Whatever your argument or recommendation your essay must contain sufficient evidence to support your statements. Preferably the introductory paragraph should state briefly your reasons for supporting your position. The subsequent paragraphs should be an elaboration of these reasons. Your essay should also contain an analysis of opposing views and a strong conclusion as to why your views should be preferred.

The body of the essay will not only expand on the reasoning that you have introduced, but also contain precise evidence, examples, and statistics in support of your reasoning. The evidence you provide should never take the form of generalizations. Each of the paragraphs of the body of your essay should have a topic sentence. And the sentences that follow should support the argument you have introduced.

Coherence between the paragraphs is important. The transition between the paragraphs should be so smooth that the reader is able to follow the reasoning without losing sight of what was said earlier. All subsequent paragraphs should serve to reinforce your position and what was said earlier.

In the body of the essay, where necessary, consider opposing views and counter them. Look at the issue from the point of view of the reader. Try and anticipate the questions for which the reader is looking for answers. This will give the reader the impression that not only do you know the subject sufficiently; but that you also know the alternatives that the reader is weighing and that you are helping the reader make correct choices.

The language you use and the tone you take should be friendly but firm. Being sarcastic and trashing the opposition will only go against you. Let the reader see that your position is not based on any bias but on down-to-earth reasoning. Do not get personal. Avoid personal pronouns.

In the concluding paragraph restate your position and your strongest evidence. The way you do this is very important as this is your final opportunity to make the reader see your point of view. Do not introduce anything you have not stated earlier as this will only confuse your reader. Your closing statement should be so emphatic that the reader is fully convinced about your position. Often a conclusion also serves as a call for action.

Learning how to write a persuasive essay may take a while. Strictly speaking there is no cookie cutter approach to persuasive essays. It may become necessary for you to deal with different topics differently. The best way out is to take a pragmatic approach.

By: Sarah Brodie

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Writing a college essay can be quite stressful for some because this is your chance to show the professors what you are made of. The college professors read essays upon essays and if you can put out that one that makes them sit up and take notice then you can consider yourself quite successful. This is doable, all you have to do when writing a college essay is be organized and follow the some of the steps below.

When writing a college essay, the very first step you should take is to begin early. The more time you have in writing a college essay the better the paper will be. You’ll have time to proof read and edit once the paper has been completed and in writing a college essay, this is an extremely important step.

Choose a topic wisely. When writing a college essay, you want to grab the professor’s attention and make your essay stand out above the hundreds of others. By doing this, you need to have a topic that appeals to you as the writer not necessarily the reader. If you choose a topic just because you thought it was what the reader wanted, you just may have an extremely hard time getting excited enough to write a powerful, interesting piece.

Spend some time brainstorming before writing a college essay. Just sit and write down every single thought regarding the topic that you have chosen. Don’t spend time thinking of each idea to see if it’s something you want to write. Just write everything down. Then once the brainstorming session is done, you can go back and look at all the ideas you have written and eliminate those that you don’t like. Writing a college essay is basically writing a story. Taking every possible idea or angle and putting them down on paper is essential towards the final work. Once you have gone through and eliminated those ideas that you don’t like, you are ready to gather up the ideas and begin your next phase. Now you are ready to begin writing a college essay.

Writing a college essay requires beginning with a draft. Just take the ideas that you have decided to keep from your brainstorming session and begin putting them together. At this point in writing a college essay all you need to do is expand on those ideas. This is the one time in writing a college essay when you can just flow with the writing without worrying about grammar or spelling.

When re-writing a college essay from the draft, don’t be afraid to make major changes if you feel they’re needed. After all the draft was never meant to be the masterpiece. Some people find that they need to eliminate words and phrases when writing a college essay while others need to expand on their writing. Still other see that their ideas may not be flowing into each other smoothly and find that they need to move paragraphs around to make it more readable.

When writing a college essay, your goal should be to make the reader take interest and keep reading. Especially the professors, they read so many essays. Once they’ve read dozens of essays on the same topic, they’re not going to remember yours unless you grab their attention with fantastic writing. When writing a college essay, make it interesting and bring up points that they may have not thought of in connection to your topic. Writing a college essay requires one to pull out every innovative and original idea they’ve ever thought of in connection to the topic. This is why one needs to choose a topic that appeals to the writer.

Writing a college essay provides such an excellent practice for those who move on into the business world. They’ll be able to fall back on their essay writing skills to produce strong, attention getting documents in their chosen fields. Remember this when given an assignment of writing a college essay; this is something that will carry you throughout your whole life.

By: Jordan Matthews

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Essay writing is an indispensable part of academic life – something a student cannot overlook. Essay writing demands certain skills on the part of the writer. The term ‘essay writing’ is now more applied in the academic context, while essays are written by famous and upcoming essayists in the non-academic world as well. A well-written essay is proof of the writer’s knowledge of a certain topic. Essay writing is a valuable tool for monitoring the skills of proper organization of ideas, good vocabulary, systematic argument and coherence of ideas.

Essay writing at the academic level requires a thorough knowledge of the primary sources dealt with. It is ideal to develop a system of note taking and carefully sorting the secondary sources referred to. Another significant aspect to note while writing an essay is to pay attention to the keyword, that is, whether one is asked to analyze, discuss, compare and contrast, criticize, define, discuss, evaluate, or illustrate. The style should be clear and should lay out a clear picture of the thesis statement. Lengthy sentences very often hinder smooth reading, as is the case with passive usages.

In essay writing, ideas should be distributed in an orderly fashion using paragraphs, preferably with evidence supporting the argument. Supporting evidence should be well documented in the desired citation style. It is important to avoid plagiarism of any kind while writing an essay and acknowledge the source whenever it is referred to. To get a good end product, the essay should be revised thoroughly. Diction and style are important aspects of an essay and are to be given special care. Wordiness is a defect to be avoided and it is absolutely necessary to proof read the essay upon completion to guarantee that it is error free.

By: Ken Marlborough

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For me, writing essays is not an easy task. Coming from a computer science background, I didn’t have the skills necessary to write a quality essay. I eventually was able to pick up the writing skills necessary to work in the real world, so here are some essay tips I have learned along the day.

Pick an interesting topic

This is one of the most critical aspects of your scholarship essay. There are some scholarships where they have a predefined topic, however you will want to tailor these topics to address one of the following issues. I have found that focusing on these issues will greatly increase your chances in winning the scholarship.

1. Focus on a major accomplishment

You’re going to want to impress the reader of the essay, so when writing about a major acomplishment, you want them to say, “wow, this person really does deserve this”. Keep in mind that an accomplishment that YOU think may be major, may not be major to the eyes of the reader. For example, writing about how you were able to stuff 20 marshmallows in your mouth is probably something that you can forget (until college starts, then you can tell or demonstrate to all your college buddes).

2. Focus on an event where you took action

Readers of scholarship essays LOVE iniative. This means that you saw a need and you actively pursued to fill that need. Some examples of this are being the ASB President, starting up a club, helping out less fortunate kids, etc. People who do these types of activities are most likely going to succeed in life, and the readers know this, so use it to your advantage.

3. Focus on an obstacle you overcame

Here, I would like you to you focus on adversity that has occurred in your life and how your managed to overcome in. Some examples would be the loss of a parent, living in a world with divorced parents, having a disability. These are the types of situation where when you tell somebody, they give you this puppy dog face and say, “I’m sorry”. When you write about these events, it is imperitive that the focus is on how you overcame these obstacles and to stay positive. When a reader finishers your essays, you will want them to say, “Wow, this person has gone through a lot, this person deserves this scholarship”.

Fully research your topic

I know that when you start to apply for scholarships, you will realize that you will need to write a ton of essays! You will feel that you can skimp on all the essays and focus on quantity, and not quality, but SHOULD not be the case. This is an automatic path to rejection.

Give yourself 2 weeks time for research and the writing of the essay for each essay you do. This will allow you to fully think out the topic and have enough time for feedback and editing.

Remember to focus on QUALITY, not QUANTITY.

Write for your audience

When I talked about some of the topics you should write about, I said that when the reader is done with your essays, the reader should say, “wow, this person really does deserve this essay”. You will need to do this when you write your essay. Put yourself in a reader’s shoes and ask yourself if you really do deserve this essay. Keep in mind that the reader may have to read tens to hundreds of essays of varying quality, and it is his/her job to pick just ONE. Do you truly think yours will be the one chosen?

In addition, you can tailor the essays to the foundation that provides the scholarship. Say, you want to apply to your parent’s company scholarship. You could write a little bit on how your parent’s company has affected your life in a positive manner.

Make your essay different from the other essays they get

This comes back to the fact that the reader has to look at tons of essays and needs to choose one. One way to do this is to show, not tell, your reader about your topic. Focus on specifics so that you can avoid vagueness and you’ll be able to make an overall stronger impression.

Another way to do this is to take a totally different creative approach to writing an essay. I can’t find the link to it right now, but I remember someone won with an essays that went like this.

“I have never parachuted from a plane. I have never taken a canal ride in Venice. I have never seen the light as feathers snow in Russia. I have never won a scholarship.”

As you can see, this is a totally different way to write an essay. So be creative, and try something different. Your readers will notice it.

Get someone to proofread your essay and keep editing!

Too many students treat their scholarship essay writing like a regular essay for class. Students will write their essays a couple days (or on the day) it is due and proofread it themselves 1 or 2 times. They don’t show it to their parents, or other teachers. You must remember that this essay will generate between $100-$100,000, so treat it like that! Show it to your parent and at least 1 teacher before submitting it. This will greatly increase your chances in winning the scholarship

By: Andre Alonzo

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The SPM English 1119 Exam comprises two papers: Paper I and Paper 2.

Paper 1, which is strictly on essay writing, requires candidates to write two essays: Directed Writing and Continuous Writing. Paper 2 tests students in the following areas: reading and comprehension, information transfer skills, vocabulary, summary writing skills, and literature. Although essay writing is reserved for Paper 1, students are required to write a summary and answer questions on poetry, novels and plays which test their ability to write.

It is evident that writing is prominently featured in the SPM English exam. This can be deduced from the marks allocated for the following:

Paper 1 – Directed Writing (35), Continuous Writing (50)
Paper 2 – Summary (15), Literature (25)

The total marks for the above is 125 marks out of the total of 160 marks.

What is the bottom line?

Students who want to do well in the SPM English exam should pay more attention to the above areas that require them to write. However, writing is a skill that most students find onerous or difficult. Writing is a skill that must be inculcated from young. Like reading, once you’ve got yourself into the habit of writing, you are hooked onto it for life.

Writing is a process that has to start from the child’s primary school years. But is this happening? It is common for teachers to lament that students are unable to write despite having done quite well in the PMR English exam for 15-year-olds. I have personally facilitated a group of undergraduates in a public university and I was horrified by the deplorable standard of English displayed in their assignments.

So, where did we go wrong?

By: Yoke Kiaw Lim

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Students often have essay writing activities in almost all of their subjects. The initial step is usually to decide on what topic to discuss. But the next big decision that essay writers confront is what type of essay to employ. What technique works for the selected topic? What kind of writing style is suitable? What tone is efficient?

In choosing what essay type is appropriate to use, students need to fully understand the difference between each type. Here are the common types of essays that can help students on their paper writing activities:

1. Persuasive or argumentative essay

A persuasive or argumentative essay makes a claim or position regarding a subject for the main purpose of persuasion. It is usually presented with statistics, expert opinions, and well-supported arguments about a claim or controversy. In using an argumentative tone in essay writing, it is essential that the issue to be discussed is two-sided wherein the writer takes a stand. Also, the main argument must be clear, exact, and highly focused.

2. Comparison and Contrast essay

This type of essay writing takes two subjects and identifies their similarities and differences. A good comparison and contrast paper possesses a valid basis for comparison – a limited focus and catchy information. In writing essay using compare and contrast, it is vital that the purpose for comparing and contrasting the two subjects is made clear. This purpose is crucial because it provides focus to the paper.

3. Descriptive essay

Descriptive essays’ aim is to provide a vivid picture of a certain person, place, object, or event. It offers concise details that enable the readers to imagine the subject described. Generally, descriptive essays explain the “what, why, when, where, and how” of a topic.

4. Definition essay

Definition essay writing demands writers to present a meaning of a term that goes beyond the objective definition offered in the dictionary. Essay writers need to provide a more focused and exact description of the term than what is offered in reference sources.

5. Narrative essay

A narrative essay tells a story in a sequence of events. This type of essay is told from a defined point of view, often the author’s. It offers specific and often sensory details to get the reader involved in the elements and sequence of the story. Verbs must be vivid and precise.

6. Evaluation essay

The prime purpose of this essay writing style is to form judgment on certain ideas, places, services, etc. basing on clear-cut criteria. An informed opinion is critical to the development of this essay. It is important to use facts, statistics and other authoritative resources to establish and organize the criteria to present a substantial analysis and evaluation.

Essay writing is just one tough kind of various paper writing activities. Students usually ask for professional essay help to assist them on what type of approach or style to use in their composition.

By: Laura Medel Nelson

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Essay writing is never complete without the two most essential parts – introduction and conclusion. Why? Introductions serve as teasers that establish and convey the relevance of the whole essay. On the other hand, conclusions serve as deal sealers that leave strong and persuasive impressions on the readers.

With such great responsibility, introductions and conclusions have to be as powerful as possible. These paragraphs give the readers the opening and ending statements required that can make or break an essay. Brilliant essay writing has two vital factors – attractive introduction and strong conclusion.

Writing good introduction and conclusion is not done in a snap. It entails squeezing of creative juices and sufficient time to research. But there are some important considerations that can guide essay writers in coming up with hip beginning and ending statements.

In Writing Introductions

The introduction is basically designed to grab reader’s attention. It also aims to provide the readers a brief rundown of the essay’s main focus and idea. Remember two main points.

1. Begin with a bang. An attention grabber opening paragraph is a sure hit in essay writing. How to formulate such? A lot of means are efficient. Here are some:

o Use startling information
Employing surprising and revealing information has always been a good way to start an essay. Essay writing is an exciting and brain stimulating activity. Using startling facts make readers curious and excited. Therefore it compels them to read more. However, the information must be true and confirmable.

o Through anecdotes
Using anecdotes is another way to start an essay. An anecdote is a story that exemplifies a point. But the anecdote must be short and genuinely relevant to the topic. This method can be a competent essay writing opener, although, I must be done cautiously.

o Try dialogues
Using dialogues as an introduction entails crucial scrutiny. The dialogue has to be appropriate and relevant. The readers must be able to understand the point that the dialogue is trying to convey. It is ideal to use only two or three exchanges between speakers to establish the main point. It must still appear as essay writing activity and not script writing.

o Apply information summary
In writing formal essays, information summary works best. A few sentences citing the general points of the topic can actually lead the readers towards the heart of the essay. It is ideal that each sentence gradually become more and more specific, until it reaches thesis statement.

2. Finish the opening paragraph with the thesis statement. This is to immediately convey to the readers the essential points that the essay offers.

In Writing Conclusion

Essay writing can never be effective without a closing statement. The conclusion does not only bring closure to the readers, it is a tool so that the essay can leave a strong and compelling impression to the readers. It does not merely sums up the important points of the essay, but it wraps up and provides a personal perspective on the topic.

Conclusions are usually three to four sentences long. It is not advisable to have long and winding ending paragraphs. Three sentences will do. However, these sentences must be powerful enough to achieve the goal of the essay – whatever it might be. Essay writers also have to ensure that the written conclusion emphasizes the value of the main claim.

There is only one key point in essay writing to make it invincible – begin strong, end stronger.

By: Laura Medel Nelson

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The word Essay is defined as “a literary composition on any subject.” Properly speaking, it is a written composition giving expression to one’s own personal ideas or opinions on same topic. It should be good to remember that the word essay means, literally, an attempt. The essays you write at school are trial exercises or “attempts” to express your thoughts in good English.
Now, what are the points we should keep in mind for writing a good essay?

1) Unity-An essay must be a unity, developing one theme with a definite purpose. The subject must be clearly defined in the mind and kept in view throughout. Nothing that is not relevant to it should be admitted to the essay.

2) Order-The essay should follow a certain ordered line of thought and come to a definite conclusion. It should not consist of haphazard reflections put down anyhow. There should be not only unity of subject but also unity of treatment. Hence there is the necessity for thinking out a line of thought before beginning to write.

3) Style-the style of an essay should be dignified and literary. Slang, colloquial terms needed to be avoided in an essay. At the same time it is a mistake to make an essay an attempt of any fancy writing. The language and sentence construction should be simple, direct and natural.
The secret of clear writing is definitely clear thinking.

4) The Personal Touch-An essay should reveal the personal feelings and opinions of the writer. It should have its individuality in it. Strictly speaking, an essay is a written composition giving expression to one’s personal ideas or opinions on a subject. If this personal touch is lost, the essay would appear to be colorless and devoid of any individuality.

To sum up, an essay must be a unity, treating in an orderly manner of one subject; it should be concisely written and not too long, and the style should be simple, direct and clear; and it should have individuality, or reflect the personal touch of the writer.

Three features necessary in a good essay are-1) suitable subject matter,2) proper arrangement and 3) adequate power of expression. Point 3 is applicable to most forms of writing like writing short stories, reviews, and reports.

By: Ishani Dutta

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