Believe it or not, it's not using the biggest words; because most of the time they don't make sense in the context of your essay.
Don't procrastinate.
First and most importantly of all, above all techniques, all tips to make you sound smarter, and everything I'll say in this post; don't put it off till the last minute. Writing a great essay isn't a one-hour task, so definitely dedicate around 4 days to writing your essay and these four days should end about three days before your due date.
In other words, spread out your work across 4 days, with 3 days of rest for completing other tasks so a total week of work. If you dedicate a week to your essay, because you weren't stressing out over the fact that you had 3 hours to finish it the day before it was due, you'll probably have a better end result. Along with this, a week is normally how long you have to submit an assignment; in this case, your amazing essay.
A trick for properly dividing and conquering your work, is dividing the needed amount of pages or words due by three. Then allocate one day to research (be it reading the required chapters or looking through an extract and highlighting key quotations and phrases) and simply because I can't think of any other way to express it otherwise, if n is the amount of words you need to complete then do 'n÷3' and do that amount of words every day for three days.
After you're done writing, dedicate three days to rest because it's stressful to work on an essay especially if you're not really in the habit of writing or if you don't like to write. Plus, if you professionally overthink like me, three days gives you a chance to edit. But, if you follow these tips, your essay will be so good that you won't need to. But if you want a second opinion, as someone who's working on a novel and loves to write and help, my inbox is always open. Email me at 'thestudentblogger2223@gmail.com' for a bit of essay editing or some help if you have the very common writer's block.
Analyze the question
Now that you have a week to write your essay, it's time to hunker down and start writing. Essays are responses to specific questions. An essay has to address the question directly, so your first step should be to unequivocally analyze the question. Make sure you know precisely what is being asked of you. And, if you zoned out while your teacher was setting your assignment like we all do occasionally, don't be afraid to ask your teacher, we've been given beyond helpful resources in this day and age; use them. Send your teacher a message on Teams, or email them, and ensure that you are speaking in a professional tone.
Most essay questions have three main things:
Content terms: Key concepts that are specifically related to the task.
Limiting terms: The scope of the topic.
Directive terms: How you should respond to the content, e.g. discuss, analyze, define, compare, evaluate.
Here's an example:
Image from here: https://students.unimelb.edu.au/academic-skills/explore-our-resources/essay-writing/six-top-tips-for-writing-a-great-essay
Define your argument
In planning, writing, and preparing to write your essay, you must clearly define your argument-and make it water tight. This means taking an informed position or perspective on the topic suggested in the question, then defining and presenting a specific argument. Enough said.
Armoring your argument
To make your argument even stronger, use concrete evidence that has been fact-checked multiple times, using Google Scholar is good for this, which leads on nicely to my next point; ditch Wikipedia for information. And don't get me wrong, Wikipedia is great for fast facts, but if you're writing an essay that defines your grade, do not use Wikipedia alone. You'll hopefully have noticed that I added 'alone' to the end of the prior sentence, and that's because you can use Wikipedia, but don't base your entire essay off of Wiki.
Don't copy and paste
Please, just...don't. Teachers can tell and you can get in serious trouble (and I mean lawsuits and money loss, unless of course you have Harvey Specter on your side) for plagiarism. If you want to use facts or quotations then make sure you properly cite your source, I recommend installing the "Zotero Connector" which cites your source automatically.
Use mind-maps to organize your ideas before writing
If you need to write a pretty long essay and you're a big idea generator like me, you're gonna want to organize them and a mind-map is a great way to do it. I use mind-maps when planning blog posts like the very one you're reading right now to organize my ideas and research so that I can write an organized and cohesive post.
Tap into the flow of your writing
Let me start this off by saying that no one wants to read an essay that's all over the place; in fact sometimes you can lose points for not organizing your essay well. My simple advice for this is to dig wayy too deep and look for any possible link even when you think there isn't one. I don't mean grasp at straws, but just put in a bit more effort into looking for ways to join your paragraphs and make your text more coherent. If you find that you still just can't write, try searching up writing up 'writing prompts' on Pinterest or Google and you'll find hundreds of websites and images with short sentences that can inspire pages of writing. And you know how people say, you can only write as well as you can read? It's true. Crack open your book and get reading before bed instead of being on your phone for 30 minutes and ruining your sleep schedule.
Write clearly and distinctively
You're probably not gonna get amazing grades if you sound like someone writing from a textbook replacing "like" with "such as." Having a unique writing style is the key to being an amazing essay writer. Are you professional yet friendly-it does exist- or do you take on a conversational tone? There are hundreds of writing styles and everyone has their own, even if you're speaking about something you don't necessarily know about or don't particularly enjoy, don't waffle on. It's pointless. Speak about what you need to and nothing more; by all means, go into detail but don't say unnecessary things, what's unnecessary is up to you to decide. If you think you might be going off on a tangent, just keep asking yourself, "How does this relate to my argument and do I need it?"
The moral of the story is, plan thoroughly, be coherent, and be distinctive. Now go write that amazing essay. See you next time,
-thestudentsblogger
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