19 Sep 2017

It’s peak time for essay writing. You’re probably at the point where you’re trying to write and memorise essays for your exams coming up, or your teachers are making you do millions of practice ones in class so here are a couple of tips to help you out.

1. Actually answer the question

I know your teacher has said it a million times before but it’s about time you start actually doing it. While you might scrape together some marks for an amazing essay that doesn’t answer the question, you’ll always get more for a mediocre essay that does. Remember to incorporate the question the whole way through- chucking it into your intro and conclusion and forgetting about it in the body of your essay isn’t going to be enough.

2. Skip the intro

Seriously, starting with an intro will f*ck you up. You don’t even know what you’re going to be writing about yet, so stay away from introducing it. Trying to get all your ideas together into a neat little paragraph will trip you up before you even start, so skip straight ahead to the first body paragraph and come back to the intro when you actually know what you’re talking about.

3. Sandwich your quotes

Quotes are a good way to bulk up your essay and bump up the word count without actually having to come up with anything new. But remember, you need to sandwich your quotes with solid analysis. You’ll need to talk before and after a quote- they can’t stand alone- and you need to tell the reader why they matter.

4. Just write something

There’s nothing worse than staring at a blank page so just write something. Who cares if it’s shit and you’re making up half the stuff. Just get some words on the page. When you come back later you’ll be surprised at how much good stuff you actually wrote. When you’re on a roll you’ll find it so much easier to smash out a thousand words, even if you need to edit everything afterwards.

5. Don’t just send it in

I get it, reading back over your essay can be super painful and it’s tempting to just go ‘f*ck it’ and submit it without editing. But proof reading is something you need to do. First up, read it in your head and get the most obvious edits out of the way. Then, read it out loud and get the next round of mistakes sorted. If you have time, print it out and go through with a pen. Sometimes reading your words on a hard copy makes it easier to pick up things that you’ve missed the first couple of times round.