High school students are frequently tasked with writing essays, which also play a big role in the college admissions process. But they’re not alone: professionals taking exams like the IELTS or LSATs also need to know how to write clear, concise, and persuasive essays.
When editing, pay attention to the words you use: remove all unnecessary words and work on using strong verbs in place of weak ones.
Also, fact check all the information you have in your essay, especially when citing other sources.
Although this structure is made up of five paragraphs, we can easily use the same model and make it into a Five-Part Essay Structure. This means that we will stay within the pattern, but each main point may have more than one paragraph.
What Are the Different Types of Essays?
- Elaborate on each of your main ideas with at least one paragraph each. If your main ideas will require more than one paragraph each, feel free to write more.
- For anything point that takes up two paragraphs or more, it helps to have a brief introductory paragraph.
- Stay as concise as possible.
- Include anecdotal examples if it will help you make your point more clear.
- If you are writing a formal academic essay, avoid using first-person pronouns.
After you write your first draft, refine and proofread your work to make sure you fix all grammatical and spelling errors. You can use a tool like Grammarly when you do this to have fresh “eyes” looking at your work, but don’t rely solely on software—always review your work at least once yourself or have another (human) do it!
When you write your outline, make sure that each paragraph has only one main point. Jumbling too many points in one paragraph tends to confuse your reader. Also, make sure that your main points are all relevant to your thesis statement.
Creativity: After I understand how a game works, I like to try to improve it by tweaking the rules. Two examples: 1) I remember when I was young trying to find the right amount of money for the Free Parking space in Monopoly, and 2) recently, I learned the game Guesstimation is so much better if you add wagers. I see my 4-year-old daughter tweaks games too, which drives my wife crazy, as she likes to play by the rules of the game.
Sometimes students pick the hardest challenge they’ve been through and try to make it sound worse than it actually was. Beware of pushing yourself to write about a challenge merely because you think these types of essays are inherently “better.” Focusing myopically on one experience can sideline other brilliant and beautiful elements of your character.
Even if you’ve faced challenges, you do not have to write about them in your personal statement.
Q: How do I work in extracurricular activities in a tasteful way (so it doesn’t seem like I’m bragging)?
The “Home” essay: A quick case study
Step 1: Write down 5 similar things that are meaningful to you in different ways.
Challenge 1: She grows up surrounded by war, which is explicitly stated.
Your theme could be something mundane (like your desk) or something everyone can relate to (like the concept of home), but make sure that it is elastic (i.e. can connect to many different parts of you) and visual, as storytelling made richer with images.
- Narrative Essay: The narrative essay shares information in the form of a story and from a clearly defined point of view.
- Expository Essay: This type of essay explains, illustrates, or clarifies a topic. This also includes instructional pieces with step-by-step directions.
- Descriptive Essay: Descriptive essays do exactly what their name implies: they describe an event, phenomenon, or any other subject in detail.
- Persuasive Essay: This type of essay aims to convince the audience to adapt a certain perspective or idea.
- Compare and Contrast Essay: This type of writing pinpoints how similar or different two or more things are from one another.
- Problem-Solution Essay: This essay highlights an issue, influences the reader to care about it, suggests a solution, and tackles possible objections.
Generally, the thesis statement will present your main topic while also expressing what position you hold regarding the subject.
When editing, pay attention to the words you use: remove all unnecessary words and work on using strong verbs in place of weak ones.
Nothing is more daunting for a writer than staring at a blank page. This is why you need to have an action plan for starting your essay.
How Do You Begin an Essay?
You can use the Mind Map method to brainstorm connecting ideas, or you can also just jot down bullet points as you encounter them in your research.
Next, use the proper citations. Plagiarism does not only constitute copying the idea verbatim, but you also have to reference the source of the idea itself, if possible. Depending on your teacher’s preferences, you can use the APA in-text citation style or the MLA style.
One common structure for an essay is the Five-Paragraph Essay, with the following parts:
A second approach is the thematic structure, which is based on returning to a key idea or object again and again (like the boots example above):
However you structure your essay, you want to make sure that it clearly lays out both the events or ideas you're describing and establishes the stakes (i.e. what it all means for you). Many students become so focused on telling a story or recounting details that they forget to explain what it all meant to them.
Writing your personal statement for your college application is an undeniably overwhelming project. Your essay is your big shot to show colleges who you are—it's totally reasonable to get stressed out. But don't let that stress paralyze you.
5. Describe the most significant challenge you have faced and the steps you have taken to overcome this challenge. How has this challenge affected your academic achievement?
Develop a Structure
However, don't reuse essays for dissimilar or very school-specific prompts, especially "why us" essays. If a college asks you to write about why you're excited to go there, admissions officers want to see evidence that you're genuinely interested. Reusing an essay about another school and swapping out the names is the fastest way to prove you aren't.
You should start the editing process by looking for any structural or thematic issues with your essay. If you see sentences that don't make sense or glaring typos of course fix them, but at this point, you're really focused on the major issues since those require the most extensive rewrites. You don't want to get your sentences beautifully structured only to realize you need to remove the entire paragraph.
Want to write the perfect college application essay? Get professional help from PrepScholar.
Once you've gone through the questions above, you should have good sense of what you want to write about. Hopefully, it's also gotten you started thinking about how you can best approach that topic, but we'll cover how to plan your essay more fully in the next step.
It doesn’t matter how urgent your deadline is, the quality of writing and uniqueness of texts is always up to the hilt. Our writers do quality original essays and papers every time.
If you need writing help, we’re the best option for you. See for yourself. We have the best writers, easy and secure payment procedure, as well as the fastest turnaround – only 1 hour!
Receiving a new order, we first and foremost instruct a writer to carry out original topic research that is always based on requested sources.
Correct, finely-written, and original papers bring only positive results. To write such texts, we offer you the industry-leading academic authors in your subject field.
Always Timely Delivery
Pay For Essay is a premium service that offers you reasonable prices. Order the best custom essay the money can buy and turn the work in safely, knowing that it’s been written by a professional.
Our essay writing services include free revisions. If you want a writer to make any changes in the document, you’re free to activate the revision period from your Personal area.
Can’t fit into a tight college schedule? If you don’t want to get into writer’s block, then you should hire a pro essay writer to help you out.
Speaking about writers, it’s also necessary to talk about all the great editors and proofreaders on our team. They are brilliant! And so are our papers that are always written using proper grammar, syntax, and punctuation.