opening paragraph Archives - How to Write an Essay

Today I’d like to teach you a few simple concepts that will: Save you lots of unnecessary effort Get you on a fast-track to learning how to write an essay quickly and easily Teach you what really makes a difference in essay writing You’ve probably heard it a hundred times: It takes a lot of hard work to do learn how to write good essays. And you’re probably thinking: Gosh, I’ll never learn this stuff. Why does it have to be so hard? What most students (and even many teachers) don’t know is that it is actually relatively easy. Several key concepts to understand and a few exercises to complete – and you can get a full letter grade higher on your very next essay. Well, how is this information supposed to help you? Here’s an idea I’d like to throw at ya: Your Brain is a Goal-Seeking Mechanism So what? And what does this mean, anyway? You see, if your brain doesn’t have an exact goal, it will wander around and scatter its attention all over the place. As a result, you’ll keep bumping your head against all sorts of walls over and over, trying to get that special skill called writing and get that overdue essay written. On the other hand, if you know what your goals are, your brain will pick up all the relevant information in order to bring you closer to the goal and will exclude everything else. This little lesson can help you in your life as well, but since we’re talking about writing, here are two ways it can help you overcome essay pain: If you know what to focus on when learning how to write essays, your work will be 100-1000% more efficient. In other words, you will learn all the right things faster than ever before. If you know what to focus on when writing a particular essay, you’ll save yourself potentially hours of effort and will end up with an essay that will get you a higher grade. And here are the three things to focus on when learning the skill of writing: Essay structure – what a finished essay should look like The opening paragraph – what it should do How every part of the body of the essay should correspond to a part of the thesis statement In case you’re wondering, I’ll teach you how to do all of these things. Just stay tuned to my blog (and read previous posts, as well). :) That’s it – there are only three things to focus on. And forget the style, the voice, the catchy introductions, and other things that are useless when you’re trying to learn how to write. If you just focus on these three areas, you’ll be using your mental effort more efficiently than most students and learning way faster. And now here are the three things to focus on when writing a particular essay: Your essay subject and verb (your thesis, basically) How many sections you want to divide your essay into Writing one section at a time That’s it. And again – I’ll teach you how to focus on these things in future posts (and you may refer to my older posts that are already filled with practical advice how to do this). If you focus only on these three while trying to come up with all the words and pages that you need in order to submit a good paper, you’ll have easier time doing this than most students out there. So, what’s the big takeaway from all this? Establish priorities when writing and learning how to write Focus on things that matter and forget the rest (until you have the results you’re after) Structure is King – make yourself a master of structure (I’ll teach – no worries) Keep coming back to these ideas every time you find yourself stuck If you learn how to control your focus, you will write one A+ essay after another for the rest of your college career – I promise! Tutor Phil