How to Start an Essay: Focus of Building Overall Writing Skills!

Essay writing is healing. It is an activity that helps you to activate neurons of your brain and structure your thoughts paragraph by paragraph. For most of us, the opportunity to write an essay and sharing our ideas looks interesting and easy, but in reality, it is a challenging task when you start to pen down your thoughts unprepared. So, it would not be wrong to say that writing great quality essay is gut-wrenching task for many.

Here, I am sharing a few core considerations you will need before developing and writing an essay that you hope will mean something to someone out there.

Read to write

Reading, reading and reading! Reading is crucial for building-up new vocabulary and learning narrating technique. Just like breakfast is the important meal of the day for the overall wellbeing of the body.The more you read, the more you will be able to write. Expose yourself to general topics such as current affairs, science, environment change, economics, animals, history, sociology, and other subjects.  Get to know the world around you.

Identify the essay type

Do you know what kind of essay you are suppose to write? Broadly essays can be grouped into four major categories:

1. The Persuasive/ Argumentative Essay: utilizes logic and reason to persuade reader to adopt certain point of view.

1. The Descriptive Essay- describes or summarize a topic

3. The Narrative Essay- shows a defined point of view of writer
4. The Expository Essay- requires write to research and investigate an idea

Just as there are multiple types of essay, there are different ways and techniques to write an essay. When writing an essay, it is imperative that writer follows the universal well-acknowledged structure format.

Let the words through your imagination

Read three essays or paper on a topic of your choice. Now imagine that you are having conversation the same with your friend. Now next step is to jot down your thoughts. Remember, it is challenging to find your own unique perspective while exploring the existing convincing opinions on the same topic. Your reader wants original thoughts, not canned sentiments with haphazard sequence. While paying particular attention to potential plagiarism, the writer should to keep in mind three factors: [1] the structure, [2] the substance and [3] the style.

It’s all about title

Most of the people spend their time in writing body of the essay, not paying enough attention towards title/headline of it. To prevent an essay from being discarded and ensure that it addresses the right audience, it should include a proper title that satisfies certain requirements. Catchy title acts as an attention-grabber. Don’t play safe, be bold, brave and exciting!

Introduction: generic, specific or quotation

There are countless ways to begin an essay effectively. You start with question and then answer it. Or you may start with some interesting fact about your subject. Or if you like drama, you can start with story

 Avoid making bald statement like, “this essay is about….”. These kinds of sentences might frustrate the readers.

Introduction of essay should not be written like a mystery novel, which keeps the reader in suspense; rather, it should reveal the contention and supporting argument in the beginning itself.

Body of essay

Write your thought with your own unique voice. Don’t try to be someone else. No one is expecting you to be William Shakespeare, JK Rowling, or Nicholas Sparks. You are you. Find your own style, and it is fantastic. If you haven’t found it yet, start writing your life experiences. More writing will give you intuitive voice that helps you be your most authentic self in all parts of life. Avoid using personal pronouns like ‘your’, ‘our’, ‘we’, ‘my’, ‘you’.

Avoid repetition

Repeating the same thought in different words or sentences may kill your essay. Your readers can take ‘repetition’ as it is a sign of laziness. Use a thesaurus to eliminate wordiness and eradicate repetitive words and phrases. However, you should not inject any unfamiliar word within your writing, without understanding it’s meaning.  It may hurt even more than the original repetition.

Modeling context with flavor of idioms

Proper use of idioms in context can enhance the conciseness and elegance of the writing. If you are writing a narrative essay, you can start with a quotation of a famous person or a literary quote you like. Readers are emotional beings and by quoting a famous person you can easily play with the reader’s feelings while spreading your point of view.

Writing conclusion

Just like an introduction, the conclusion of your essay must provide the answer to the central topic questions of the topic. It is like the last scene of the movie. It makes readers feel that the piece is complete and well put.A purposeful and reflective analysis can be used to write conclusions.

Other common mistakes to avoid

• What would you say when a student copy sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph from someone else writing?Don’t plagiarize

• Proper use of grammar, style, and punctuation are extremely important. Avoid writing in passive voice and select more dynamic verb.

• Analyze and read your essay aloud. Yes, you will certainly spot infelicitous turns of phrase, grammatical errors, and typos.

• While writing, don’t go off topic, else essay will become messy and disorganized. Stay on the plan.

• Use clear, concise, and coherent language. Avoid passive voice.

Essay writing is a special skill. It is easy for those who are passionate about it. The basic writing style of an essay is common for all types of essay. It includes the introduction, body content, and the conclusion. You just need to pick up your topic, do some research and get started. Before going to write an essay, you need to have a deep knowledge of your topic. In essence, writing becomes easy with critical thinking, understanding, and patience. The above-mentioned quick writing tips can help you to boost up your mind and gives you good ideas to write.