Brief Overview of the 10 Essay Writing Steps

Below are brief summaries of each of the ten steps to writing an essay. Select the links for more info on any particular step, or use the blue navigation bar on the left to proceed through the writing steps. How To Write an Essay can be viewed sequentially, as if going through ten sequential steps in an essay writing process, or can be explored by individual topic.

1. Research: Begin the essay writing process by researching your topic, making yourself an expert. Utilize the internet, the academic databases, and the library. Take notes and immerse yourself in the words of great thinkers.

2. Analysis: Now that you have a good knowledge base, start analyzing the arguments of the essays you're reading. Clearly define the claims, write out the reasons, the evidence. Look for weaknesses of logic, and also strengths. Learning how to write an essay begins by learning how to analyze essays written by others.

3. Brainstorming: Your essay will require insight of your own, genuine essay-writing brilliance. Ask yourself a dozen questions and answer them. Meditate with a pen in your hand. Take walks and think and think until you come up with original insights to write about.

4. Thesis: Pick your best idea and pin it down in a clear assertion that you can write your entire essay around. Your thesis is your main point, summed up in a concise sentence that lets the reader know where you're going, and why. It's practically impossible to write a good essay without a clear thesis.

5. Outline: Sketch out your essay before straightway writing it out. Use one-line sentences to describe paragraphs, and bullet points to describe what each paragraph will contain. Play with the essay's order. Map out the structure of your argument, and make sure each paragraph is unified.

6. Introduction: Now sit down and write the essay. The introduction should grab the reader's attention, set up the issue, and lead in to your thesis. Your intro is merely a buildup of the issue, a stage of bringing your reader into the essay's argument.

*Note: The title and first paragraph are probably the most important elements in your essay. This is an essay-writing point that doesn't always sink in within the context of the classroom. In the first paragraph you either hook the reader's interest or lose it. Of course your teacher, who's getting paid to teach you how to write an essay, will read the essay you've written regardless, but in the real world, readers make up their minds about whether or not to read your essay by glancing at the title alone.

7. Paragraphs: Each individual paragraph should be focused on a single idea that supports your thesis. Begin paragraphs with topic sentences, support assertions with evidence, and expound your ideas in the clearest, most sensible way you can. Speak to your reader as if he or she were sitting in front of you. In other words, instead of writing the essay, try talking the essay.

8. Conclusion: Gracefully exit your essay by making a quick wrap-up sentence, and then end on some memorable thought, perhaps a quotation, or an interesting twist of logic, or some call to action. Is there something you want the reader to walk away and do? Let him or her know exactly what.

9. MLA Style: Format your essay according to the correct guidelines for citation. All borrowed ideas and quotations should be correctly cited in the body of your text, followed up with a Works Cited (references) page listing the details of your sources.

10. Language: You're not done writing your essay until you've polished your language by correcting the grammar, making sentences flow, incorporating rhythm, emphasis, adjusting the formality, giving it a level-headed tone, and making other intuitive edits. Proofread until it reads just how you want it to sound. Writing an essay can be tedious, but you don't want to bungle the hours of conceptual work you've put into writing your essay by leaving a few slippy misspellings and pourly worded phrases.

Why is writing an essay so frustrating?

Learning how to write an essay can be a maddening, exasperating process, but it doesn't have to be. If you know the steps and understand what to do, writing can be easy and even fun.

This site, "How To Write an Essay: 10 Easy Steps," offers a ten-step process that teaches students how to write an essay. Links to the writing steps are found on the left, and additional writing resources are located across the top.

Learning how to write an essay doesn't have to involve so much trial and error.

What is a thesis and why write one?

thesis/"Ti:sIs/ n 1 a proposition to be maintained or proved. 2 a dissertation esp. by a candidate for a degree. [Middle English via Late Latin from Greek = putting, placing, a proposition, etc.] [1]  

hypothesis/h2I"p6TI:sIs/1 a proposition made as a basis for reasoning without the assumption of its truth. 2 a supposition made as a starting point for further investigation from known facts. [Late Latin from Greek hypothesis ‘foundation’; Greek hypo ‘under’] [1] One might infer from the etymology above that a thesis is an (obligatory) offering placed at the desk of the examiner by a candidate who wishes to get a degree. This is the most common, and often only, reason why a thesis is written. But there are other reasons for writing a thesis.

A thesis is a written record of the work that has been undertaken by a candidate. It constitutes objective evidence of the author’s knowledge and capabilities in the field of interest and is therefore a fair means to gauge them. Although thesis writing may be viewed as an unpleasant obligation on the road to a degree, the discipline it induces may have lifelong benefits.

Most of all, a thesis is an attempt to communicate. Science begins with curiosity, follows on with experiment and analysis, and leads to findings which are then shared with the larger community of scientists and perhaps even the public. The thesis is therefore not merely a record of technical work, but is also an attempt to communicate it to a larger audience.

10. The Design and Statistical Procedure:

Provide a well thought-out rationale for your decision to use the design, methodology, and analyses you have selected. Name your research methodology and describe your research design. Be aware of possible sources of error to which your design exposes you. You will not produce a perfect, error free design (no one can). However, you should anticipate possible sources of error and attempt to overcome them or take them into account in your analysis. Moreover, you should disclose to the reader the sources you have identified and what efforts you have made to account for them.

Specify the statistical procedures you will use, and label them accurately (e.g., ANOVA, MANCOVA, ethnography, case study, grounded theory). If coding procedures are to be used, describe them in reasonable detail. This labeling is helpful in communicating your precise intentions to the reader, and it helps you and the reader to evaluate these intentions. Indicate briefly any analytic tools you will have available and expect to use (e.g., Ethnograph, AQUAD, SAS, SPSS, SYSTAT).

9. Instrumentation and Procedure:

Outline the instruments you propose to use. If instruments have previously been used, identify previous studies and findings related to reliability and validity. If instruments have not previously been used, outline procedures you will follow to develop and test their reliability and validity. In the latter case, a pilot study is nearly essential. Because selection of instruments in most cases provides the operational definition of constructs, this is a crucial step in the proposal. Strictly speaking, results of your study will be directly relevant only to the instrumental or operational statements. Include an appendix with a copy of the instruments to be used or the interview protocol to be followed. Also include sample items in the description of the instrument.

Outline in a step by step approach your procedure to carry out your research and the general plan for collecting the data. This may include survey administration procedures, interview or observation procedures. Include an explicit statement covering the field controls to be employed. If appropriate, provide a general outline of the time schedule you expect to follow. Procedures help answer questions such as: How do you plan to carry out your study? What activities are involved? How long does it take?

8. Sampling:

The research must choose a sample that is most representative of the study population (the larger phenomenon or group to which we wish to generalize). When a sample is drawn out of convenience (nonprobability sample), rationale and limitations must be clearly provided. To do so, you must outline the characteristics of the population (by gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or other relevant characteristics of the sample) and take this in consideration in choosing the sample.

The key reason for being concerned with sampling is that of validity, the extent to which the interpretations of the results of the study follow from the study itself and the extent to which results may be generalized to other situations with other people or situations. Sampling is critical to external validity, the extent to which findings of a study can be generalized to people or situations other than those observed in the study.

To generalize validly, the findings from a sample to some defined population requires that the sample has been drawn from that population according to one of several probability sampling plans. By a probability sample is meant that the probability of inclusion in the sample of any element in the population must be given a priori. All probability samples involve the idea of random sampling at some stage. In experimentation, two distinct steps are involved:

• Random selection: Participants to be included in the sample have been chosen at random from the same population. Define the population and indicate the sampling plan in detail.

• Random assignment: Participants for the sample have been assigned at random to the experimental and control conditions.

7. Research Methodology:

The Method section-chapter is very important because it tells your Research Committee how you plan to tackle your research problem. It will provide your work plan and describe the activities necessary for the completion of your project.
The guiding principle for writing the Method section is that it should contain sufficient information for the reader to determine whether methodology is sound. Some even argue that a good proposal should contain sufficient details for another qualified researcher to implement the study. You need to demonstrate your knowledge of alternative methods and make the case that your approach is the most appropriate and most valid way to address your research question. Please note that your research question may be best answered by qualitative research. However, you may need to justify your qualitative method.

Furthermore, since there are no well-established and widely accepted canons in qualitative analysis, your method section needs to be more elaborate than what is required for traditional quantitative research. More importantly, the data collection process in qualitative research has a far greater impact on the results as compared to quantitative research. That is another reason for greater care in describing how you will choose the sample and collect and analyze your data.