Showing posts with label academic essays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label academic essays. Show all posts

Friday, May 15, 2009

How To Love Essay Writing

Raise your hand if you:

- Have always gotten poor grades

- Constantly put off essay writing until the last minute

- Are under extreme academic pressure

- Hate essay writing?

All these factors can result in students who do not enjoy essay writing. How can you love something that is always associated with stress and fear?

And the sad part is that most students feel the same way. . .

For most students essay writing is a chore they suffer through until they learn how to write essays that score well every time. Almost everyone feels the same in the earlier part of their school careers. If you plan to study further then you are going to make peace with essay writing. For many students university is the time when essay writing becomes easier. Thus there is no choice but to learn to love essay writing.

Essay writing is often referred to as an art and with good reason. It can take years of practice to perfect the craft. Most often students really become good at writing essays when they reach the end of their school careers!

The good news is that you can make essay writing fun through some simple shifts writing the essays assigned to you.

The key to academic success is to become efficient and to learn to love the process. After all by writing essays you are expanding your mind.

Efficient Essay Writing

With any essay the hardest part is to begin. The act of sitting down and putting pencil to the paper is the biggest hurdle.

Leaving an ample amount of time before an essay deadline is crucial. If you are always time pressed you will not have time to absorb the question, do the research and come to educated conclusions. By adding a little buffer you will be able to think, research and write up a beautiful essay with minimal fuss.

By removing some of the stress associated with your essay writing you can help create a good feeling about essays.

The essay writing process

Begin by breaking each part of the process up into steps. By breaking down what needs to be done you make the overall task easier. Tackle each part of the process one at a time and you can make the task less daunting.

This also leaves more possibility for fun!

1. Thinking/absorbing/processing the question:

This is the most important part of the essay writing process. Once you have properly understood what the essay question is asking you you can analyze what kinds of supporting research you will need. There is no need to formulate your entire argument yet save that for later in the essay writing process. For now you need to understand exactly what the question is asking you. Highlight key terms and brainstorm some possible angles.

2. Research:

Thanks to the Internet - research has become much easier and more fun that it was in past generations. Without this super research tool we would all have to spend a great deal of time in the library searching for information.

But this doesn't mean that libraries are obsolete. You can still find better information in a library (although soon there will be vast libraries in the Internet too!). If you are even slightly interested in the topic simply typing the keywords in your assignment and googling them can provide a wealth of information and viewpoints. Be careful to keep the two separate. Whatever resources you use you must be sure to take good notes for referencing. Include the year, page number and any other information you can. This will make the process of writing much easier for you later. When writing university level essays you will have to reference each point you make so you will do yourself a huge favor by getting into the habit early.

3. Mapping out your argument:

With all that great research under your belt you can be sure that the next step will be easier. Take good notes and fit all your points into sections. Mind mapping is a great tool for organizing information in an efficient and fun way.

4. Writing it all up:

Undoubtedly the hardest part of the process is crafting the essay. But now that you have prepared thoroughly you will be able to relax and have some fun putting together your essay.

5. Referencing:

Because you took such good notes you are going to sail through the reference pages.

6. Polishing/Editing:

The easiest part, and definitely the most enjoyable. Going through your essay with your own red pen and editing it ruthlessly will ensure that you have a perfect essay to turn in when the deadline comes.

For many students these kinds of tips can do little to ease the struggle of essay writing. You can also improve your academic performance by buying a custom essay. Custom essay writing experts of Exclusive-Essays.com provide custom research papers for students who are struggling academically. Let a professional write your essay for you and use it to learn about how to answer essay questions.

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Sunday, May 10, 2009

Are You Concluding Your Academic Essays Correctly?

You’ve just written the bulk of your paper and want to finish it off – let it be complete before you leave it, as coming back later will only mean more time (and possibly more torment). This isn’t the case though, as you should leave a short time between completing writing your essay and writing the conclusion for your academic essay. Go for a walk and clear your head, try to go over the steps in your essay and what you have achieved – you will need this when you sit down to write your conclusion in a shirt while.

Is it conclusion or conclusions?
One key thing to clear up here is the difference between a ‘conclusion’ and ‘conclusions'. Conclusions are made throughout your paper, when you are recognizing that a certain author made an advancement in rabbit fertility, or organinisational culture change management, etc. Conclusions are made by you to the reader re-enforcing what you have just been going over (i.e. what the reader was just reading) and clarifying what meaning it had and moving on. Many academics term these as ‘sign posts’, elements in your work where you close on point and head for another.

On the other hand, a conclusion appears at the end of your academic paper. It ‘wraps things up’ and concludes the arguments that you have put forward in your paper. This part is often the part that the reader remembers and so needs to be the best part of your paper. Do you go to a journal article, read the introduction and conclusion to see if it is any good, or worth reading? Well I know I definitely did in graduate school, so you need to allow your conclusion to make an impact on your reader.



Answer Questions
You want to answer a major question(s) in your conclusion – so what? (possibly the most fundamental question in academia) You need to show people that your paper was (or indeed is) meaningful when they read it, and is useful to them; whether this is due to it being a paper that they can quote from or whether it identify answers to certain questions for your academic marker.

Don’t just repeat
You don’t want to repeat and summarize your paper. You need to draw on the main points of your paper that are of interest and need to be highlighted. You will need to support your academic essay writing here by referring to examples and not leading them down the path to seem that the information contained is not just some random paper.

Direct your Readers
You will need to relate your conclusion to the reader so that they can understand your conclusion in a real world context. If you introduced the essay generally, then have gone specific during your writing, then consider writing specific and looking in general context how your conclusions can be concluded to a global stance.

Create meaning that is unique
Creating and having new meaning in academia means not that you need to have new information, or some ground breaking theory, but will entail you encapsulating your own ideas, with other author’s work and putting them into a new and understandable picture. In general, the summary of the paper and its meaning is worth more than any single part of the paper.



3 Strategies to success:

– Challenge the reader – Challenge the reader to understand what you have read and apply it to their own lives in some way

– Look to the future – By looking to the future in your conclusion you can direct your readers to look towards the future and allow them to think more globally about the impacts your conclusions could have on them

– Pose questions – Posing questions to your reader or the topic in general will allow their minds to wonder and allow your readers to gain a new perspective on the topic that your paper is about. It can also help when you are wanting to bring your main ideas about.

The key points in this article are helpful if you are just wanting a quick guide in your writing in academia, but you should remember to get your work checked by a professional proofreader.

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Friday, May 8, 2009

How To Score Well For Academic Essays

If you are given the task of writing an academic essay, you want to know the best approach to adopt so that you get the best possible grades. On the surface, this sounds easy enough but there is more than meets the eye, as you shall soon see.

Most students think that just by submitting a well researched paper that is written with perfect grammar means that they have a chance for scoring well. Unfortunately, this approach will most likely get them an average score. Let's take a look at why this is on.



An academic essay is often used as a tool by educational institutions to assess the students in various areas. Different educational systems may have different grading systems. But in general, most will want to grade students according to: amount of research (or the equivalent of effort), understanding of topic, originality of ideas, and expression of ideas. These are the four key areas.

As you can see, it is easy to assess a student's ability to write and to conduct research. It is also easy to see whether a student has a good grasp of the subject at hand just by reading the paper. For instance, if a student has good command of English, he has a good command of English. There is no two way about it.

The problem is, it's not so easy when it comes to assessing originality of ideas. What if all the students start coming up with original ideas? Does that mean all of them should get distinctions for their papers? In theory, they should. But in reality, we all know that this is not the case. That is because educational institutions sometimes set thresholds as to how many students can score As, how many can score Bs, and so on. That means even if you have a whole cohort of geniuses, not everyone will get As. Only a handful will be able to get the top grade.

So what does that mean for the student?It means that in order to have a higher chance of scoring top grades, you need to know what your fellow classmates are writing about. Often, you can get a good feel of what the other students are writing just by talking to them.

But note that this does not mean seeing your classmates as the competition. In fact, all of you have the same goal - to score good grades. The challenge, therefore, should be to elevate everyone's standards by having open discussions about the ideas that you are going to write about. That way, everyone shares and the writing process becomes more fun. As students, the common "enemy" is whoever will be grading the papers. So make the job of the graders as tough as possible by submitting top notch academic essays.

This is the secret that very few students know about. Usually, in any given cohort, only a few students know this. And guess what? They are the ones who score top grades. And they continue to do so on a consistent basis. Know that you know the secret as well, maybe you can score better than them!

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Thursday, May 7, 2009

Academic Essay Writing

Academic writing is an important part of your academic excellence. Essay writing has become a typical and common assignment that is used in most subjects. In order to achieve skillfulness in writing an essay, you need to be acquainted with its varieties. One of them is compare-contrast essay paper writing.

It’s simple. For your essay paper you choose two subjects that are familiar to everyone. Make sure they are well-known because not a lot of people are familiar with terminology in different spheres of activity. Let’s say, we pick journalism and designing, or even more specifically – journalists and designers. Now you need to either compare, or to contrast them. By doing first, you show similarities between them in your essay paper. By doing second, you show their differences.



A logical sequence is important in this style of essay paper writing. Journalists and designer are similar because they never listen. They use a free interpretation of customer’s words. Ask anyone, who was interviewed, about the results of his interview. He’ll tell you that he didn’t say half of what was printed, or meant something else. Now ask a customer. Did he receive what he ordered? Ask any customer what he thinks about designers and their associative row. The results are pessimistic.

Now follow the structure of writing an essay and state the differences. Journalist – 10 letters: 4 vowels, 6 consonants. Designer – 8 letters: 3 vowels, 5 consonants. That’s the difference. Isn’t it enough?
There is one more way of writing an essay paper. First describe one object of your essay paper (in my case it’s journalism), and then describe the second object of essay writing (designing). The overall impression in this way of essay writing will be somewhat different. The evidence of contrast/similarity begins to appear after getting to a second part of an essay paper.

Journalists don’t use fact-checking. They can get enough information from the fist ten sources in Google. Looking at next ten sources is just toooo much. Designers don’t care how a web-site should look like. They go to GettyImage and use pictures from the very first window, for they think it takes too long to draw something themselves, and on GettyImage everything’s ready.

Sometimes essay writers only compare, or only contrast. What can be easier in writing an essay? But it also requires some researches on the topic to be able to pick the most comparable/contrasting sides of an object of your essay writing. Essay writers who only compare two ideas in their essay papers sometimes briefly mention the contrast in the introduction, and then move on so that they don't lead readers to think they can't make relevant distinctions. Essay writers who only contrast ideas in their essay papers sometimes briefly summarize similarities in the conclusion so they don't leave the impression that they are thinking in opposites.

Of course, nobody cancels a text structure in essay writing. In all possible tips for essay writing you will find out about the necessity of using an Intro, Main Body, and a Conclusion. Just remember that there are differences between academic writing and high school essay writing. And a five-paragraph essay that satisfied your teacher may not (and will not, that’s for sure) satisfy your college professor. This is why any academic essay writing has to be more thoroughly researched. It also has to be more thoughtfully written. Before handing it in, make sure it’s checked for punctuation, spelling, and grammar. Even a well-written essay papers can be a fiasco if you skip double-checking it.

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