Do you need help structuring, editing, proofreading or writing an essay or other academic paper?
My services are designed to fill this need. If you want the entire weight off your shoulders in terms of getting your work written, I can help there. I have great feedback from previous clients, and can do your essay for you, in practically any subject, with just a few bits of information from you first. My essay writing service is reasonably priced and gets top results. A typical undergraduate essay will cost you around £300. If you are looking for essay proofreading or other academic proofreading, give me a shout too!
If you’re looking to start writing an essay, here’s some information about how to compile and structure it which is essential to success. You can always contact me at any stage of the essay writing process to help you.
My journey to becoming a Good Essay Writer
In this article, I’m going to discuss what an essay is, and isn’t. In another article I will briefly explain the different parts of an essay and what they should contain. These are general guides mainly based on undergraduate essay writing. However, all academic writing contains some variation on these guidelines. If you are an undergraduate student, just starting out, you will gain from these tips from a professional essay writer. If you feel that you’d like one to one help with your essay, then I am available to help you to get a good pass.
Though now I consider myself a professional essay writer, and many of my former clients have given Testimonials to the quality of my work, I wasn’t born with the knowledge of how to get good marks. When I first went to university in my early twenties, I had very little idea what an essay was supposed to look like. My school didn’t teach this and I wasn’t taught it at university either. They said they could not “spoon feed” us, whilst giving us absolutely no guidance, not even guidance on where we could find guidance! It actually took me a few years before I gleaned how to write an essay in the way universities want. My rebellious youthful idealism of “why should I stick to their blasted structures and rules? It’s MY writing!” rather stood in the way. Which is all very well in fiction writing (on the whole). Nevertheless, in essay writing, if you want to pass and get a decent mark, you do need to do it “their” way. So think of this as a means to an end. Do you want that good degree? I’m sure the answer is yes. And you don’t need to throw out all your creativity either. When I was that bit older, I realised that I could still be creative, just within those parameters.
The problem is that this writing skill isn’t knowledge that we are born with. It doesn’t matter how good your ideas are, if you don’t know how to compose an essay, you’ll fail or get poor marks. Once I learned what is expected, I started to get marks in the 80 and 90 percent range. I hadn’t changed the content of my ideas, but I knew how to structure them. The creativity comes from choosing your argument, and getting the facts to fit it.
Even though universities are constantly changing and updating things, the need for a smoothly written paper never wavers. Tutors want to be able to read something without scratching their heads. They have so many to get through, that the clearer your argument and the fewer spelling and grammar mistakes the better. Don’t be tempted to use AI either. They can normally see through that, and it’s unlikely to be very original.
What an essay is not
OK my quirky sense of humour feels like listing everything in the universe an essay is not. But that would take too long and I need to get the dogs out for a walk. So let’s stick to the topic.
And that is actually an example of something an essay isn’t… a rambling collection of thoughts that wanders here and there and doesn’t stick to any plan or position, with no real beginning, middle and end. Likewise it is not about your opinions, though that’s not to say they can’t come into it. It is never about data or “common sense” ideas that are not backed up by other researchers, writers, etc. Nor is it about lots of backed up data or facts with no particular reason for putting them there apart from to show off.
That’s right. An essay is not you spouting off a lot of facts just to trumpet your superior knowledge of a subject. (Actually you should carefully choose what facts are and are not relevant to your case.) Nor is it a place to hold forth on your knowledge of jargon. Nor is it a place to ramble and use a lot of extraneous words. Or multiple multisyllabic words just to look impressive. It can be tempting to fill pages that way. But tutors are not impressed by length, as long as the thing is up to the word count. They are impressed by content. Find chunky and informative content, and word fill as little as possible.
So what IS an essay?
OK, so here is the golden egg, so to speak, the key to all essay writing. It’s really simple. An essay is basically an argument. Not like the sort you have with your student housemates about the washing up, but a more sophisticated argument, a discussion if you will. A hypothesis is the “posh” word for that. Your one job is to convince your reader that your hypothesis is correct. Now here is a surprising thing. Even though your tutor could be a Nobel prize winning don in the subject you are writing about, at undergraduate level at least you must write as if your reader knows very little about what your are presenting. So even if you’re writing an essay for Noam Chomsky on Universal Grammar, (which is his very own theory), you still have to explain it in relative layman’s terms, and back absolutely everything you say up with research.
You must include all the cited references from your reference list in the text. Tutors want to see you’ve consulted a variety of sources, and this is very important as you need to convince the reader that your ideas are right, and how can you prove that unless you’ve looked at other ideas, compared them and demonstrated why yours are better. By finding other people that agree and disagree with your stance you show that you’ve read widely and have a firm understanding of your subject.
So how does this hypothesis thingy work?
So far one thing we have established is that an essay is NOT a collection of ideas, beliefs or common sense assumptions that are not backed up by research or data. Think of an essay as a tightly bundled collection of facts and arguments, all of which are held together with the string of your main hypothesis.
You’ve probably heard the expression, lies, damn lies and statistics. (The origins of the phrase are not clearly known.) As long as you can convince your reader through your writing that you have a sound case, you can argue just about anything. The reason that statistics are so easily manipulated is because, on their own, they mean very little. They have to be collated and the data organised into some kind of position – that’s a hypothesis. There are nearly always statistics available which can support both sides of an argument, even if one side seems overwhelmingly right… that’s the nature of experimentation, whether it’s in the natural sciences, humanities or social sciences. Statistics that seem to mean one thing could even be argued to mean another thing (especially if cause and effect can’t be established).
In these days of the internet (showing my age there) we see this more clearly than in days of yore, as anyone can publish content, not just those “approved” by publishers or reviewers. If you look up a topic, say for example, climate change, you can find many different arguments all claiming that they have the correct data and it means a certain thing, all the way from “We’re all going to die tomorrow” to “Climate change is a hoax”. Certainly we live in what seems to be a “post truth” world, where things that were once accepted as fact universally are being debated in the public arena. People who have opinions can always somehow back up their suppositions with some kind of data.
Statistics? Data…? Come on I’m a literature student…
Not all essays contain statistics, as such, but they do contain ideas, which are just another kind of data. So it doesn’t matter if you are writing about psychology or literature, physics or nursing, It’s the essay writer’s job to use ideas to support their argument and hypothesis, whether they are trying to show the relative effectiveness of a certain type of cow feed, to whether they are arguing that Jane Austen was the most unique voice of her day. So the first thing that you have to do, is decide what you are going to try to prove or disprove. Often you’ll be given this information in your essay title itself. For example, Cheddar is the most popular British Cheese: Discuss. Here you can argue for or against the statement.
Those dreaded essay titles
You’ll often be faced with a few different types of essay titles such as analyse, compare, contrast, evaluate, outline . Have a look at this handy guide to these commonly used titles. Sometimes the argument will be contained in the essay title itself, but often you won’t be given such a concise matter to thrash out as in the cheesy example above. In that case you need to decide yourself what you are going to present. This is still the same for arts or sciences. Even if you have done experiments in the lab and proven something, you still need to thoroughly explore what you’ve done, and whether you have missed anything. You’ll present your argument as that, an argument. For example, “In this paper, we argue that adding salt to cheese makes its shelf life longer”. You know almost categorically through your experiment (and centuries of knowledge before you) that is does, but you still have to make your case convincing. After all there are other preservatives available and people busily typing up their own supportive statistics for those! The format of an argument still stands even with the differing essay titles.
So, in this article we’ve learned the basics of what an essay is or isn’t. In my next article, I’ll give you more guidance on how to shape those convincing arguments into a beautiful piece of work! If you can’t wait to get help with your essay, or other academic work, contact me today!
Recent Comments