How are essays written? Structure, Style, and Best Practices

Essays are one of the most common types of written content that people have to write. And that does not just involve students. Rather, writers and academics all have to write them.

When it comes to ensuring quality in an essay, you can go a lot far if you just know how one is written. After that comes the best practices that you can apply to make the essay come out even more polished.

In this blog post, let’s take a look at the typical structure and style of essays as well as some of the best practices that you can follow for them.

How Essays Are Written | Structure

Let’s first talk about how essays are written with regard to the structure.

In the most typical of settings, an essay is structured in the following way:

An introduction (this is the part that introduces the essay i.e., what it contains and what information it is going to be featuring.)

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After that comes the main body (this is the main part of the essay i.e., that contains the main arguments and discussion on the topic.)

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Last of all comes the conclusion (this is the part where the essay is wrapped up with some closing comments about the topic.)

When it comes to length, here are the metrics that are usually followed:

• The introduction is typically 5 – 10% of the entire content length. For example, if the whole essay is 1,000 words long, the introduction would be 50 – 100 words. This can vary if the provided instructions stipulate a different length.
• The same goes for the conclusion. It is usually 5 – 10% of the entire content length, and it comes right at the very end.
• The main body of the essay is what takes up the rest. Its length is around 80% of the whole content, and it is typically made up of different sections.

How essays are written | Style

Moving on, let’s talk about the style in which essays are usually written.

When we say “style,” we mainly refer to tone and tenor. The tone that essays are universally associated with is a formal and professional one.

To make your essay carry this type of tone, there are different things that you have to do. Instead of needlessly elucidating anything else, we’ll just list those here:

• You have to ensure that there is no slang in your essay. Slang is basically the type of informal language people use in normal conversation. Saying words like “bucks” instead of “dollars,” for example, is an instance of slang. It is completely contrary to the expected tone of an essay to contain these types of words.
• Likewise, you have to ensure that you don’t use contractions and other “informal” writing elements in your essay. Contractions are basically the instances where two words are shortened and joined together using an apostrophe (like “I’ve” instead of “I have”). The other “informal” elements refer to things like using symbols and numerals (like “&”) where they are not supposed to be.
• You should also make sure that the arguments and points in the essay are properly separated and segregated. Merging two arguments together or going off on a different tangent when discussing a point are the sorts of things that make an essay look unprofessional.

Essays | Best Practices

We’re done with the style and structure parts above. Let’s move on to look at some of the best practices that you can follow:

·Do your research early on and do it properly

When you’re writing an essay, it’s not a good idea to just do your research and then instantly start writing the essay itself. That way, your writing style and your content can get drastically affected by the research material. This can lead you to copy something directly or very closely from the sources.

So, what you have to do here is:

• Do your research a little while before starting your essay
• When doing your research, make sure to branch out and use multiple sources so that your information stays unbiased and uninfluenced

·         Take help from online tools

Another helpful thing that you can try doing when writing essays is getting help from online tools.

Nowadays, there are many different online tools available for a whole lot of different purposes. Using these tools, you can do stuff like:

• Get help with generating ideas and outlines for your essay (using an online idea generator, etc..)
• Get help with proofreading the essay content, i.e., checking for grammar errors, spelling mistakes, and readability issues (with an online grammar checker or readability checker)
• Get help with improving the essay content, i.e., by paraphrasing it for better clarity, engagement, and uniqueness (with an online paraphrasing tool)

These tools can help you save time and effort and also help you polish and improve the quality of the essay itself.

·         Always manually proofread the essay before finalizing it

Another good practice of essay writing is to manually proofread the content once you are done writing it.

While there are tools that you can use for proofreading and while there are tools that you can use to minimize the actual instance of errors/issues occurring in the first place, you should still give the essay a once over yourself.

At times, there are errors that the tools can miss and at times, there are some issues that the tools themselves create.

Manually proofreading the content allows you to find and tend to such errors and imperfections.

Wrapping up

And there you have it.

Essays are very commonly written. As a student, you may be asked to write one every week or every couple of weeks, etc.

Knowing how essays are written and the tone they follow is important. In the post above, we have discussed that along with some best practices that you can follow during the whole essay-writing process.