How can I get better at writing essays?

Question

I'm a grade 11 student in a U english class.
ENglish is one of my best subjects...but I SUCK at writing essays. I mean, I get an okay mark on them (my last was i think an 87) but they take me forever to write because I can't organize my thoughts properly to put them together. To write a 5 page double spaced essay, it took me 12 hours. ANy suggestions on how i can organize my thoughts and how i can improve my essay writing so it's actually easy for me?

Answer 1

Here are a few suggestions:



1. Consider the type of writing you're doing and your audience. Are you writing a persuasive essay, a narrative essay describing an experience, or an expository piece that gives directions or relays information to the reader? All those genres have different styles. A good persuasive essay shouldn't sound like a fictional novel, because it doesn't serve the same purpose. Read good fiction, but also take the time to read good essays.

2. To help you organize your thoughts, a graphic organizer is a good idea. It helps you organize your thoughts into a coherent structure. Don't be intimidated the format of a graphic organizer can be as simple as jotting down your points for you introduction and paragraphs in a bullet form.

3. Stay on topic. There is nothing worse than an essay that goes down a tangent and doesn't address the points it set out to. When I answer your question, I shouldn't digress and address other types of writing.

4. Finally, write your first draft fairly quickly. When you're done, set it aside and come back and revise it. If you need to, revise it again. The best writers spend the most time on the revision process. As you read your essay, you'll hear things that don't make sense that need to be changed.

5. Be open to constructive criticism. Give your essay to someone else to read and make changes together. People often think that because they are good with the mechanics of writing, that they're getting across the point they want to convey. That may or not be true. It is the meaning in the writing that makes for a truly well written essay.

Answer 2

But...you need to write the essay. I'm a college grad with a degree in communications. I can write a 200-300 word essay on what makes ME a great leader, but that's not you. It would be lying. I'm not you. I've had a different life. You made it into NHS for a reason. Now prove it. Don't cheat on this, of all things!

Answer 3

Um. Are you sure there is actually a problem? How long do you think you should take to write such an essay? Seriously, essays can take a long time to write themselves. Try jotting down thoughts in dot point form, then expanding each one as inspiration comes. As you go along, re-read to see if any of the points/paragraphs can be combined. Often that happens, one point you want to make sort of morphs into another point you have already made. If you do this on computer, you can cut and paste and juggle things around. The best thing to do is keep your notes on a separate document to your essay. So work on your ideas, then copy and paste onto a new document. Nothing worse than deleting stuff just to decide later you wanted it after all!



Otherwise, go ask your English teacher. He/she is the only one who knows why you lost the marks you did and will therefore know what you need to do to improve.

Answer 4

I would recommend using a graphic organizer - the things that have spaces for you to put down your thoughts in little circles or lines (like a spider or fishbone chart)_

enchantedlearning.com has samples of these.

I think getting a lot of information down - perhaps from multiple perspectives, combined with focusing on how you are going to attack the essay topic before starting is real important.

That gives you a better chance at getting a start. Once you get started, the ideas should start flowing together.

Answer 5

when you write, do not ask questions, because no one will answer them.. even if they are rhetorical . don't start sentences with if, when or but. find synonyms for these words instead. write as if you are explaining to your best friend about something , but use intelligent and sophisticated words.

Answer 6

Best quote EVER:



Writing is easy. All you do is sit

staring at a blank sheet of paper

until the drops of blood form

on your forehead.

—Gene Fowler



I majored in writing and was a reporter for a metro daily newspaper for quite awhile. You usually crank out 5-6 stories a day unless you have a HUGE project you're working on.



I find that the fastest way to kill creativity is to try and stuff it into the prison of an outline. Very often in my pieces, I don't really know where I'm going until I get there. Take this response, for instance. It's kind of an essay, albeit not one written in third person for general consumption. I didn't sit down and whip up an outline of any kind. I think if I did, it would sound stilted and mechanical.



I read something from the author of "BraveWriter" on being well-read...on experiencing the writing and narration styles of many varied writers. Try this one for size:



"After I finished my college degree, I spent a summer in former Zaire on the Congo River. I’ll never forget the first time I saw that big river. We’d been in the main city, Kinshasa. Our little team traveled to the outskirts of town for our first overnight stay in mud huts. The guide led us from the main road to a maze of trails.We had to walk really fast to keep up. Tall grasses were on either side of the single file path. I kept my head down, eyes forward.



Suddenly the trail turned and right in front of me a huge expanse of water burst into view. Muddy, violent, pulsing currents separated our side of the jungle from the other side in Congo. Over ten miles wide at its widest, this river was powerful and big and luminescent. Hundreds of tributaries feed into its 2,718 miles of water. At four in the afternoon, a round, orange sun (larger than any sun I’d ever seen) glinted on its surface. The jungle it supplied lined both banks. Dense, wild, lush and overgrown. That’s when I got it. Only a river that big could have furnished the jungles on either side."



Your writing is the jungle, and you want it to be lush and green, vibrant, tangled, alive. The Congo river feeds that jungle, and that river is everything you read. The greater your "water" supply, the better and healthier the jungle.



So...read. Read fun things, like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (a book I was so enamored with that I carried it for months in the bottom of my leather backpack in high school), like the Harry Potter series, like the old Oz books (although if you didn't get them by the time you were 12, I think some of the magic disappears from them). Try out The Hobbit (my third-grader loved it when I read it to him), if you're an animal lover try Redwall (there's a whole series of those). Read Laura Ingalls Wilder and James Harriot (kind of quirky, but fun) and James Thurber (short stories). Read the classics, read romance novels, read Stephen King late at night and scare the crap out of yourself. Read Anne Rice (Interview With a Vampire), read the newspaper.



In its purest form, writing is about ideas worth sharing. Otherwise, why bother to write anything down? It's the method of sharing that comes into play when we write. And that involves -- essentially -- puking up all your ideas onto paper (or chalkboards, or whiteboards, or glass doors or mirrors, or...whatever) first. (What? You never jotted down an idea with a dry-erase marker on your mirror?) Worry about mechanics and syntax later, worry about form later, worry about complete sentences and order all LATER.



When I would interview a subject for a story, I was either on the phone or in person. Either way, you can never write down every word they say, so you're scribbling furiously or typing furiously. When the interview is done, you go back and patch up those quotes so they're exact, you put certain phrases in quotation marks, and you start filling in holes here and there.



In this case, you're interviewing yourself, you're throwing ideas out there whether you'll use them or not. The most important thing is to get the ideas down. The pumpkin isn't round, it's actually kind of squashed flat into an oblong shape, and has these funny lobes that look like they're puffing out. Sure, it's orange, but there are undertones of yellow in there and speckles of brown, and of course the stem is green and dry and prickly. It sounds hollow if you give it a good thunk with your finger, it's smooth and cold and it smells like ... dirt? Dirt almost doesn't have a smell so much as a location guide. Dirt smells like ... dirt roads and rusty pickups and air that's rife with dust motes, or gardens and hot, cut grass and sunshine. Unless you cut into the pumpkin, and then it smells wet and heavy and full of promise, either of candy later that night or of pie with whipped topping, laced with nutmeg and cloves.



Pretty soon you had a computer screen full of disjointed paragraphs, but each paragraph made sense if you knew the context. So then you'd start cutting and and pasting paragraphs and filling in a little more, and a little more and little more. And this thing doesn't sound right here, so let's move it there and what about this one, and hey, I don't need this bit at all, let's cut it out entirely. So you'd print that out and look it over, and mark up the obvious "oops" errors and decide on some ordering changes, make those, and send it off to the editors.



I didn't have editors in high school, so I had a couple of people whose writing I respected and I asked them to look over my stuff. I also asked my mom, which is where I learned most of my writing skill. People don't do you any favors if they look at your stuff and say, "Ooooh, that's great!" I fire those people as editors immediately. I want people who will say, "WTF is THIS?" and "That's opinion. Got a reference?" or "Wait, what does this mean?" They help you to clarify and sharpen your writing.



If you want to look a little more at writing as a novel author, try this site:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/



If you absolutely MUST straight-jacket your writing, or you find yourself backed into a corner with a teacher who pulls one of those "Hand in an outline this week and your essay next week" tricks (I always made outlines AFTER I wrote the paper, personally), I guess this is as good a method as any:

http://teachers.emints.org/FY03/murphyt/4%20Square%20Writing.html