How do you write an essay?

Pre-College Issues High School Life
1

<p>How do you go about beginning your essays for English class? Are you the type of person who can sit down and bang out a decent essay in little time? Do you brainstorm or create outlines before beginning, or just start writing?</p>

<p>I'm wondering because I always have to spend hours on papers to get them just right, though perhaps it's because I'm just too much of a perfectionist. I need the right word or phrase before writing something down. I'm beginning to realize this might be the undoing of me in college English classes.</p>

2

<p>I live off outlines. Once you have one, the paper essentially writes itself.</p>

3

<p>Same here. Actually, I’m writing an outline for a Psych paper right now. Haha. I find that once I have the outline, the structure of my essay and my argument makes sense so it’s easier to write the paper. And it goes much faster too.</p>

4

<p>I just start. This helps me because I don’t like doing outlines. It takes me a while to begin, so but when I start I’m flowing. </p>

<p>I brainstorm when I’m sitting on the toilet. Sounds weird but the toilet is my thinking seat.</p>

5

<p>^ Omg I thoguht I was the only one who has epiphany moments and deep phiilosophical thinking on the JOhn</p>

6

<p>

Beginning an essay is the hardest part for me. I can spend half my writing time on the intro paragraph sometimes. Second hardest is concluding it - body paragraphs tend to write themselves if you have a good intro. It’s very hard to describe the exact mental process that I go through. I know that that’s not really useful, so I’ll try to explain it as best I can. The first thing I do when I’m sitting down to write the essay is to read the prompt (obviously). Generally, the first thing that comes to my mind ends up heavily influencing the essay, if not outright becoming the interpretation I use. The first sentence is very important, and is also the hardest sentence to write. I really can’t explain how I do the first sentence, but it usually is an intelligent interpretation of the prompt at least in some way. I then use the next few sentences to elaborate on the first sentence, and end the intro paragraph with the thesis statement, which is a clear statement of what I am trying to prove (Critically, in the intro paragraph I have learned NEVER to state how I am going to prove it. Hint at it, yes, that’s OK. State it, no.). This whole thing has to come out exactly right. If it does, the essay will write itself and I’ll do well. If it doesn’t, I’ll struggle to write the essay and get a bad grade. That’s why it can take me half of my writing time. It usually goes through a lot of revisions, rewriting and thinking. I have had essays where the intro comes out OK, then I start writing the body and I realize that it’s not going to work, so I start over.</p>

<p>I personally don’t use first person, but that’s definitely another phobia drilled into me by middle school English teachers. If you can use first person well, do it.l</p>

<p>One piece of advice that I definitely can give you though is that the wrong way to do a thesis statement, though, is to list the topic of each body paragraph. One teacher I had somewhere along the line told me to do it that way, and it messed me up (my GPA out of 100 would probably be two or three points higher if that teacher had not said that) until I realized that that’s wrong this year.</p>

<p>

This depends on the type of essay and the prompt. If I like the prompt and it’s good, I can write a good essay in a few hours or less (3 hours, including distractions, is the max I’ve spent on a good prompt). If not, I can write a bad essay in a few hours or a good one in many hours. I can usually tell if I’m getting a bad grade on the essay because I will hate writing the essay. Usually, even though I know that, I hate it too much to write any more.</p>

<p>

I do not. I have a few times, but usually if I write a good intro paragraph it’s better than an outline. When I did write an outline on a few essays, I found that by the end of my first body paragraph I had shattered the outline beyond any hope of anything even closely resembling repair, so it went into the garbage (and I was OK with that, because writing a good essay is more important than doing what I planned to do). I got the same grades on those essays as the ones that I went in without anything - two good and one bad when I had a bad prompt. This is just one reason why you don’t state how you’re going to prove your point in the intro paragraph - it’s stricter than an outline, and you can’t throw it in the garbage without revising your whole intro paragraph, at which point you might as well restart your essay.</p>

<p>

That’s OK, and even good - in the intro paragraph, where it really takes a lot of thought and is extremely important. I’ve done that in the intro paragraph. Through the rest of the essay, I just go with the flow. I usually don’t even edit the rest of the essay, if I like it while I’m writing it.</p>

<p>tl;dr It’s complicated, yes, my intro paragraph is my outline since when I wrote an actual outline it ended up in the garbage.</p>

<p>EDIT: Wow, I wrote a lot more than I thought I did. I bolded the tl;dr for those of you who don’t like reading huge blocks of text (I would hate whoever posted this if I saw it when I was asking for advice).</p>

7

<p>I have quite a difficult time analyzing fiction. Especially when its the type of fiction where the book practically writes itself, and where there are no intentionally imposed themes, etc. I just think in those scenario’s it is futile to try to intellectualize the novel. Usually just when my ideas start seeming true I realize they are so complex that they couldn’t possibly be accurate.</p>

<p>Now what I generally do is just have fun and come up with radical analysis that I know was not the author’s intended message (if they intended to convey anything at all, that is) but which probably reveals something about the time and place in which the author wrote the novel. I think what most serious fiction writers do is more conveying than interpreting, though there are exceptions. So our role as the analyzer, then, is not to speak for the author (to give there interpretation), but to, rather, speak of what what the author conveyed says about the author, the time and place, etc.</p>

8

<p>i never use outlines. i think of main examples in my head and then just write. the specific details flow once i have the main ideas</p>

9

<p>I am a master of churning out high quality, sugar-fueled bullsh</p>

10

<p>I hate using outlines. Generally the essays we write (unless they’re research papers) are between 1-5 pages. For me, this isn’t enough space to need an outline. I’d use an outline if I’m writing a research paper or something longer than 5 pages, I don’t use an outline.</p>