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Although essay is an important part of scholarship applications, many students find writing essay dreadful. It shouldn’t be this way, though. With our comprehensive essay writing guide, you can compose one on your own that won’t prompt you to pull your hair out.
In this post, we’ve compiled tips to make your essay stand out to a scholarship committee. They’ll answer questions you probably have as you begin your scholarship applications. So, without further ado, here’s the ultimate essay writing guide you need to write a winning scholarship essay.
What is an Essay?
An essay is generally a short piece of writing that aims to express a point in an engaging manner. An essay is more than just a collection of sentences or even paragraphs. Everything lines up and points in the same direction.
Essays incorporate supporting evidence as well as the development and expansion of concepts or arguments. A typical essay will have an introduction, several body paragraphs, and a conclusion.
There’s no predetermined limit on how many paragraphs should be in an essay. The key aspect is that the argument is built logically through a string of coherent paragraphs.
How to Start Essay Writing
After understanding what an essay is, you might be asking what the various processes are for writing one. You’ve come to the right place. Follow these instructions on how to write your essay from beginning to end.
1. Read Your Instruction Carefully
Making sure you fully comprehend the instructions is the first and most important stage in preparing an essay. You should make sure you grasp the topic, the style of essay that is requested, and any formatting specifications. You don’t want to get penalized for not attentively reading the prompt and lose points as a result.
2. Do Some Research
When you are clear on your assignment, you can begin researching your subject. Get as many materials as you can by doing an online search or going to the library. Even if you don’t use them all, it’s a good idea to start with a wide variety of sources before focusing on a smaller number as your essay’s topic becomes clearer.
3. Start a Brainstorming
There are various techniques to begin a brainstorming session. You might reflect on the research findings that most piqued your attention. As an alternative, you can use word clouds to group terms or concepts together based on how related they’re.
4. Write Your Thesis Statement
This is usually the most challenging step since you need to construct a compelling thesis that you’ll support throughout the entire essay. Therefore, you should pick a thesis statement that’s both general enough that you can say enough about it and not too broad that you can’t be specific.
5. Create an Outline
Your thesis statement should be at the beginning of the outline after which you should begin constructing the fundamental framework for your essay. Utilizing topic sentences is a smart strategy for writing an essay.
A topic sentence, which is typically the opening sentence of a new paragraph, functions as a miniature thesis statement. The main idea is introduced in this clause, and it’ll be developed throughout the paragraph.
6. Write a First Draft
Your essay’s entirety doesn’t have to be flawless when you write it for the first time. However, you must get everything down on paper so that you can go on to create a second draft or to evaluate it later.
Make sure your essay fits your outline, that all of your ideas are supported by the research you completed, and that everything relates to your thesis statement.
7. Revise
Try to set your essay aside after completing the first draft for a few hours or perhaps a day or two so that you can review it when you return to it.
You can discover errors or inconsistencies you overlooked or more effective methods to present your arguments. Maybe you forgot to restate your thesis by making the same point with other words in your essay conclusion.
3 Essay Examples that Worked and Expert Analysis
Essays all follow a similar format despite having various topics and objectives. When we talk about essay structure, we’re talking about how the essay appears on the page and the particular paragraphs that were employed to achieve that look.
The three types of paragraphs that make up an essay are represented in this essay outline:
- Introduction: A reader is introduced to the subject and the primary point or argument is presented in the introduction.
- Body: An academic paper is mostly made up of this section. The goal and required word count of each assignment determine how many body paragraphs are needed. Here, you can employ essay headings to organize your document and prioritize its most crucial components.
- Conclusion: The conclusion of the discussion should include a summary of the paper’s overall focus and an explanation of its significance.
To better understand how each part works, take a look at this essay outline example.
An Eye-Catching Essay Introduction Example
Children’s daily life are heavily influenced by media, especially television. They can be influenced by the media in both positive and harmful ways. While high-quality television and written texts can offer learning opportunities, media that promotes excessive behavior can be detrimental to how children develop their views and values. First, a discussion of the various forms of media will serve as a reminder that not all children will be affected by media in the same way. Additionally, it will be demonstrated how media can be actively employed to benefit children. On the other hand, the detrimental effects of media will be looked at. To emphasize that media exposure to children becomes detrimental when it is not regulated, the quantity and nature of media will be covered in the last section.
What makes this a good example is that it ticks every component of a strong introduction: it’s general, narrowing, and specific. Your audience will better understand the specifics of what your article will be about if you go from a general subject to a focused thesis.
An Example Body Paragraph
A few examples of technical mediums that are frequently used for communication even in education include television, books, and computer games are computer games, television, and textbooks. When defining literacy, how students receive information, and how they master the skill of developing their competences, this must be taken into consideration. Literacy used to be narrowly defined as the ability to read and write in spoken language or on paper and ink, but that definition is now mostly evolving to encompass fluency with current technology, such as computers and other digital sources of information. Students can use digital applications, for instance, and, in the words of Kervin (2016), “Digital play with correctly selected apps can give active, hands-on, engaging and empowering learning possibilities. By giving kids the chance to read, write, listen, and speak in a variety of situations and activities, apps can help kids have more versatile literacy experiences” (p. 70). According to this justification, a tablet app can offer children a different format for learning while introducing them to technological literacy. Despite the fact that not all of the apps that are available are made to enhance a child’s educational experiences, the guided use of selective apps for digital play can be an effective teaching tool in academic settings.
This body paragraph has the following parts:
- Point: Establishing the point of the paragraph and what it will discuss.
- Information: Providing information in the form of evidence to support the topic sentence.
- Explanation: Connecting the information with the point and the thesis through an analysis, elaboration, evaluation, or interpretation.
Make sure to have these elements on your body paragraphs to create a strong essay body.
A Great Essay Conclusion Example
Even though no single measure can undo centuries of unmanaged environmental damage, reducing society’s reliance on plastic seems like a reasonable starting step in the right direction. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be crucial for maintaining the climatic balance of our environment. Small adjustments like this could accumulate over time to restore climatic constancy, reduce natural disasters, and improve human health. The evidence suggests that doing so could result in a future where it is possible to say that climate change has been solved. Whether such seismic adjustments in human habits are achievable is a separate topic.
A strong conclusion, like this one, should reaffirm the key ideas of your essay and highlight the importance of the conversation for the reader. Consider your conclusion to be an upside-down version of your introduction, with specific, broader, and concluding statements.
Common Essay Formats to Follow
There are many different essay formats, but in this essay writing guide, we’ll focus on two of the most popular essay styles: MLA and APA.
Does it really important what font size you use or how exactly you credit sources in your paper? It does. In fact, style formats were created as a means of standardizing the appearance of written works and the works cited lists that accompany them.
This is important since everyone benefits from following standards for essay formatting. Instead of having to decide for themselves which formatting options are ideal, writers can adhere to a set of rules. Additionally, readers don’t have to search for the information they’re looking for.
Let’s see how the two most common style formats for essays work.
Essay MLA Format
MLA style was designed by the Modern Language Association, hence the name, and it has become the most popular essay format for students. Because it includes straightforward, easy-to-follow guidelines, it is frequently the style that professors like their pupils to employ.
For instance, unlike APA style, MLA just requires a header in the upper left-hand corner of the page and doesn’t call for a title page.
One of the benefits of formatting your works mentioned in MLA is that all references, whether they’re from a book, newspaper, etc., are organized in the same way. Citing references is made simple with this essay format type.
Essay APA Format
The American Psychological Association is known as APA. Research papers, particularly those in the social sciences and behavioral sciences, are the ones that use this format type the most frequently.
Compared to MLA style, APA style has a stricter format to adhere to because it’s frequently used for papers that are more research-focused.
APA papers all start with a title page. The abstract is the first page of your work after the title page. The paper itself follows the abstract. The APA essay structure suggests that writings be brief, direct, and communicate their point succinctly.
The list of sources utilized appears after the paper. In contrast to MLA style, APA essay format references every type of source differently. Therefore, the guidelines for citing a book differ from those for citing a journal article.
What if the scholarship sponsor hasn’t made it clear what kind of essay format they prefer? Asking them whatever type of format of essay for scholarship they like is the simplest method to address this issue. If you can’t reach them or if they have no preference, we suggest using MLA format.
The MLA format is the most widely used essay format for students, and since its formatting guidelines are so universal, anyone shouldn’t have any trouble using them. An added plus is that this citation style includes one of the most straightforward sets of guidelines.
What’s Next
This essay writing guide should help you to get that scholarship money you deserve. However, we agree that writing isn’t for everyone. If you’re drowning in scholarship essays, here are no essay scholarships that you can apply for some easy cash.
