Your guide to writing the perfect Essay

Writing an essay can become a tedious process for many, forcing many attempts to become academic or creative disasters! As simple as it sounds, essay writing is also an art in its own right. Writing a good essay can be a breeze if the writer keeps in mind a few important pointers.

The key to writing a good essay lies first and foremost in sound research on the given topic. The idea is to read a lot of the topic, taking a little from the varied sources (read: libraries, online magazines, journals, reports and so on) and basically, making the reader know everything possible about the topic. It is only after building a sound base of knowledge that the writer can then move on to analyzing the said topic. Without having done proper research, the arguments that the writer seeks to build the essay on will fall flat as they can have loopholes to be challenged.

Once having built a sound understanding of the topic by looking at the various arguments that other people might have sounded on the topic across various sources, the writer must move on to picking his idea on the essay as his argument and building the entire essay around it. A clear argument is only what builds a truly good essay. It is thus, important for the writer to build on his knowledge of the topic and clearly analyze the same.

Next, with the argument and the central theme of the essay in place, the author should move on to developing an outline for the final piece. The outline is nothing but the basic skeleton or the map of the essay. The outline will have the basic pointers describing paragraphs and the basic structure of the essay before the content is filled in.

Once the outline has clarified the structure of the essay, the writer can start writing the essay. The most important fact that must be noted here is that the introduction and the first paragraph of the essay are the most important parts of it. These are the two parts that will make or break the essay. That is because the point of the introduction is for the reader to be able to get a sense of what the essay is about. If the writer is not able to convey that briefly and lucidly, the reader might lose interest.

While writing the rest of the essay, it is important to keep in mind the need to make each paragraph clear and focused on a single idea. Lastly, it is good to end the essay with a quick conclusion ending in a sentence that sums up the gist of the entire essay leaving the reader with just that. Just in the end, after writing out all citations and references, it is good for the writer to go back to both the introduction and conclusion tweaking them (if necessary) giving a good final touch to the essay.