12 november, 2013 rachel mccombie, a graduate of st johns college, oxford, shares actionable tips on taking your essays from good to outstanding. detail of the hunt in the forest by paolo uccello for ambitious students, essays are a chance to showcase academic flair, demonstrate original thinking and impress with advanced written english skills. The best students relish the challenge of writing essays because they’re a chance to exercise academic research skills and construct interesting arguments. Essays allow you to demonstrate your knowledge, understanding and intelligence in a creative and relatively unrestricted way provided you keep within the word count! but when lots of other people are answering the same essay question as you, how do you make yours stand out from the crowd? in this article, we’re going to show you the secret of writing a truly brilliant essay. Essays test a wide variety of skills, including your ability to absorb and analyse information.

Before we get into the nitty gritty of how to write an outstanding essay, we need to go right back to basics and think about what essays are actually designed to test. Only by understanding the purpose of an essay can you really begin to understand what it is that tutors are looking for when they read your work. No matter what the academic level of the student is, essays are designed to test many things: knowledge fundamentally, essays test and help consolidate what you’ve read and learned, making them an important part of the learning process, particularly for humanities subjects. comprehension they test your ability to make sense of and clearly explain complex concepts and issues.

They test your ability to understand the question and produce a considered response to it. They evaluate your ability to absorb and condense information from a variety of sources. Which will probably mean covering a lot of material in a short space of time this necessitates appraisal of which bits of material are relevant and which are not. They test your ability to write a balanced and coherent argument that considers a number of points of view. They even put your time management to the test essays are a part of your workload that must be planned, prioritised and delivered to a high standard, to deadline. Now that we know why we’re asked to write essays, what are the characteristics that define the essays that impress? the tutors marking your essays may have their own preferences and things they look for in outstanding essays, but let’s take a look at a few of the irrefutable traits of the best.

That doesn’t have to mean coming up with an entirely new theory most of, if not all, the topics you’ll be studying at gcse. A level or even undergraduate level have been thought about in so much depth and by so many people that virtually every possible angle will have been thought of already. But what it does mean is that the essay stands out from those of other students in that it goes beyond the obvious and takes an original approach perhaps approaching the topic from a different angle, coming up with a different hypothesis from what you’ve been discussing in class, or introducing new evidence and intelligent insights from material not included on the reading list.

It goes without saying that the brilliant essay should demonstrate a strong knowledge of the facts, and not just knowledge but sound comprehension of the concepts or issues being discussed and why they matter. The perfect essay demonstrates an ability to deploy relevant facts and use them to form the basis of an argument or hypothesis. It covers a wide range of material and considers every point of view, confidently making use of and quoting from a variety of sources. The perfect essay provides a coherent discussion of both sides of the story, developing a balanced argument throughout, and with a conclusion that weighs up the evidence you’ve covered and perhaps provides your own intelligent opinion on how the topic should be interpreted based on the evidence covered. Everything written in the perfect essay serves a purpose to inform and persuade.

There’s no rambling or going off at tangents it sticks to the point and doesn’t waste the reader’s time. This goes back to our earlier point about sorting the relevant facts from the irrelevant material including material that isn’t relevant shows that you’ve not quite grasped the real heart of the matter. The words in the perfect essay flow effortlessly, and the reader feels in safe hands. Sentences need never be read more than once to be understood, and each follows logically on from the next, with no random jumping about from topic to topic from one paragraph to the next. So how do you go about writing this mythical perfect essay? read on to find out! the long room library, trinity college, dublin. Guaranteed to impress, wide reading gives you deeper knowledge than your peers and gives you the extra knowledge and insights you need to make your essay stand out. Whose opinion do you most agree with, and why? background history so that you can appreciate and refer to the context in which the author was writing we’ll come back to this last point a little later.

Ap Biology Essays

It sounds like a lot of extra work, but you don’t necessarily have to read everything in full. It’s fine to dip into these other resources providing you don’t inadvertently take points out of context. You’re probably sick of hearing this particular piece of advice, but it’s important to start out with a clear idea in your mind of what you want to say in your essay and how you will structure your arguments. This needn’t be a big deal, or time consuming all you need to do is to open a new document on your computer, type out the ideas you want to cover and drag and drop them into a logical order.

Your essay should include an introduction, a series of paragraphs that develop an argument rather than just jumping from topic to topic, and a conclusion that weighs up the evidence. A common problem with students’ responses to essays is that rather than answering the question they’ve been set. They try to mould the question to what they’d prefer to write about, because that’s what they feel most comfortable with. Be very careful not to do this! you could end up writing a brilliant essay, but if didn’t actually answer the question then it’s not going to be well received by the person marking it. Good essays give both sides of an argument, presenting information impartially and considering multiple points of view. One sided arguments won’t impress, as you need to show that you’ve thought about the evidence comprehensively.

Show that you’ve made your own mind up based on your weighing up of the evidence. This shows that you’re not just hiding behind what other people say about the topic, but that you’ve had the independence of mind to form your own intelligent opinion about it. Use quotations from academic works and sources to back up points you want to make. Doing so strengthens your argument by providing evidence for your statements, as well as demonstrating that you’ve read widely around your subject. However, don’t go too far and write an essay that’s essentially just a list of what other people say about the subject.

Quoting too much suggests that you don’t have the confidence or knowledge to explain things in your own words, so have to hide behind those of other people. Make your own mind up about what you’re writing about as already mentioned, it’s fine to state your own opinion if you’ve considered the arguments and presented the evidence. Understanding the religious and political context of the times in which blake wrote is essential to understanding his writing and art. As we’ve already touched on, if you can demonstrate knowledge of the context of the subject you’re writing about, this will show that you’ve considered possible historical influences that may have shaped a work or issue. This shows that you haven’t simply taken the essay question at face value and demonstrates your ability to think beyond the obvious.

Good Ways to Write Essays Text

Ap Biology Essays

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