Essay writing tips – part 2

Here are some more tips to help you improve the quality of your English essays:

Tip #1 – Plan before you write. There are many reasons why you should plan an essay before writing it. One of those reasons responds to many students’ excuses for not planning. In an exam, students don’t plan their essays because they think they don’t have enough time. This is not true.

Writing one word every 12 seconds

To illustrate this, let’s look at the speed that you must write at. If your writing exam lasts 1 hour and you must write an essay of about 300 words, this means that you must write 1 word every 12 seconds. The first GIF on the left shows you how quickly (!) you must write. Not very quickly, right?

Writing one words every 7 seconds

However, if you spend 15 minutes brainstorming and planning your essay, and you leave 10 minutes to check your essay before the end of the exam, that still leaves you with 7 seconds to write each word. The second GIF shows you how slow that is also.

Furthermore, if you have created a good plan, this means that you will have plenty of good ideas in a logical order. As a result of that, you will be able to write far more quickly, with no stopping to scratch you head while you think of ideas. Another consequence of that is you can concentrate more on writing more accurate English. The final result of all this is that the quality of your essays will rise dramatically. You could actually spend 25 minutes planning very carefully and still have time to write and check your essay. Try it if you don’t believe me. My experience has shown me that students who plan their essays carefully write better essays – and get higher exam scores.

Tip #2 – Check your essay extremely carefully. This may sound obvious to you, but many students check too quickly. Their brain is telling them this: “I understand this bit, and I understand this bit, and I understand this bit…” etc. Or, “This looks right, and this looks right…” Of course you understand it. You wrote it. Of course it looks right when you quickly look at it. You must look at your work as if under a microscope. However, it is common for students not to leave enough time at the end of a writing exam and so they rush through the checking process. What will get you more points: doing a fast check of all your essay and finding two mistakes, or very carefully checking the first two paragraphs and finding twelve mistakes? Careful checking is essential. Look at each sentence and check grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Be mindful of spelling rules, like double consonants in gerunds (sit – sitting, swim – swimming). Check to see that the verb agrees with the subject ("My exams last year WERE easy," etc). Lastly, if you follow tip #1, you will have plenty of time to check your work carefully.

Tip #3 – Be careful about problems of logic. If you are panicking during an English writing exam, very often you don’t notice logic problems in your ideas. You should ask yourself: Does this sentence answer the essay question? Is this sentence related to the topic sentence, and does it add strength to the paragraph? Does this sentence run logically after the previous sentence? Does this sentence need a conjunction (linking word/phrase) to help the reader understand my train of thought?

Here are two real examples that I have seen in student essays: “The products were expensive. As a result, buyers must pay more money for them.” The second sentence is obvious. It doesn’t add an extra idea. It’s not really a result because “expensive” means “more money.” It’s a form of repetition – and repetition is very bad essay style: it’s boring to read and will score you fewer points. A similar example is this: “Climate change is a consequence of global warming.” NO! Global warming IS climate change.

Tip # 4 - Cut out all repetition. This follows on from tip #3. I see many forms of repetition in essays. First, students sometimes repeat the subject of a sentence in the next sentence instead of using a pronoun. Consider this example: “The vase which was on my mother’s coffee table was very expensive. My mother bought the vase which is on my mother’s coffee table last year. I broke the vase which is on my mother’s coffee table yesterday.”

This student thought, “I want to write more words because more words means more points.” This is not true. I took away points for this. The student should’ve written: “The vase which was on my mother’s coffee table was very expensive. She bought it last year. I broke it yesterday.” If you think “I need more words” this is because you really need more ideas. And you get more ideas if you brainstorm and plan (tip #1).

Second, another form of repetition is writing synonyms, or similar sentences one after another. Look at this: “He ate a large, big, huge dinner.” You only need one of these adjectives. Similarly: “It was raining, and the weather was wet.”

I hope these tips have helped you. I will give more essay tips on my blog at a later date.

If there is a topic that you want me to write about, fill in a form at the bottom of the homepage and send it to me, or you can post it on the Video English Facebook page. If you have little questions on any English topic, ask me those as well. I will write all of my answers to your questions in a Q&A blog post some time soon.

Happy writing!