5 Writing Tips to Make a Good Essay

If you want to learn to write well, you must write consistently. You can get better regardless of how poor your writing is at the start once you are committed to objectively noting your mistakes and learning from them. These five tips can start you off in the right direction:

Know your skills

Everyone has something that they’re especially good at. You may be an excellent descriptive writer but tend to fall short in argumentative, process or persuasive essays. In the long run, it helps to practice the types of essays that you have the most trouble with. In the short term and especially under exam conditions, pick the type of essay you know you’re best at.

Know your audience

Not every essay is intended to be read and marked by a teacher or any other academic. Sometimes an essay is intended for a competition or just for pleasure and will only be read by friends. Tailor your writing style to suit your readers’ tastes. This is like sending a unique cover letter to each employer you apply to. It shows that you care about your work and people respond well to that.

Pick the best topic possible

There will be times when you have absolutely no choice in the matter and the topic is basically thrust upon you without your consent. In this case, you just have to make do with it but where choices are given, choose wisely. Some topics may be traps that can easily lead you to dead-ends. If you have the absolute freedom to create your topic from scratch, spend as much time as you can on this because your decision will shape everything you do next.

Explore your topic fully

Write an outline and fill it in with well thought out and supported points. This is your essay in almost complete form. Make sure that you have included the best points possible and dealt with them in full.

Proofread like you mean it

No matter who reads your essay, once they have a good grasp of the language, errors will stand out to them. Prevent yourself from looking foolish by double checking your work for errors both with software and manually.

Those are your five tips. They may seem simple but never underestimate them. Many a promising writer has written a less than competent essay because one or more of those tips was ignored.