Crafting Compelling Essays: Tips for Writers
Writing good essays can go a long way to benefit you. If you are a professional writer working for an institution, your essays can help polish your reputation. If you are, on the other hand, a student, your essay can help you get the good grades you need.
There are a lot of reasons why you should write good essays. But…how exactly is it done?
The first thing to remember about essays is that a good essay is that which is compelling. The very purpose of writing an essay is to elaborate on a certain point or present arguments on a topic so as to make the reader agree with you. The more compelling the write-up is, the more successful it will be in its base purpose.
To help you make your essays more compelling, we’re going to give you some helpful tips.
Perform extensive research before writing
If you want your essay to compel and convince the reader, you need to fill it with helpful information. You need to fill it with information that draws readers to it.
To do this, you have to do extensive and proper research. This type of research can be done if you do the following:
- Pick reliable sources for your information. The reliability of the information in your essay is the reliability of the sources that you took it from. If the latter is unreliable, the same attribute is passed on to your essay. You just have to ensure that the sources you use are well-known and have an acknowledged reputation for being credible.
- Pick multiple sources for your information. Basing your research on one or two sources is never a good idea since it can lead to the acquired data being lackluster and biased.
- If you are writing an argumentative essay (or something that has two sides or perspectives to it), make sure that you research all the available arguments/evidence. By addressing the counterpoints in your essay, you will be able to make it more thorough and convincing.
Use strong and assertive language in your essay
Another useful tip that you can follow to write compelling essays is to use strong and assertive language. You should not make your tone doubtful or confused.
This is something that partially depends on how good your research is. For example, if you do proper research and get the right facts and figures, you will be able to say the sentence :
There are 8 billion people in the world, out of which 4.56 billion people are situated in Asia alone. That means 57% of the entire world’s population lives in Asia alone.
But if you have not done proper research and just know the vague facts, it would come out as something like this:
There are a lot of people in the world. More than half of those people live in Asia.
Of course, other than the richness of information, there are other things that decide the assertiveness of the tone. Some of the things that you can do to make your tone authoritative is:
• Use active voice
• Avoid using words like “probably” and “maybe.”
• Be concise. Don’t use words and phrases that you don’t necessarily have to.
Use visual aids in your essay
This is something that a lot of people may not think about. Essays are usually academic, sure. But they don’t have to be written as long blank swathes of text with no visuals in them.
Adding visuals to your essay has two benefits.
- First of all, the visuals break the dullness of the content. They make the content pleasant and engaging to look at.
- Visuals can also be used for illustration purposes. They can be used to explain a point or demonstrate a specific concept, etc. This can add value to the essay and make it more informational. All of this can collectively make the essay more compelling.
Ensure uniqueness in your essay
Uniqueness is another element that makes your essay compelling and convincing. An essay that you write yourself based on your own thoughts, ideas, and arguments is more compelling than something that you plagiarize…even if it is just in terms of ideas and concepts.
However, more harmful than taking ideas and concepts is directly taking words and sentences from existing content. Plagiarism can ruin the integrity and credibility of your essay. It can also severely damage your reputation.
The bad thing about plagiarism is that it can occur unintentionally – and that too quite frequently. This type of accidental plagiarism is what you have to keep an eye out for.
There is a simple enough protocol for this. All you have to do is write your essay originally, i.e., using your own words and your own concepts. Then, once you are done, you should use an online plagiarism checker on it. The plagiarism checker will scan the content and highlight any parts of the text that match anything already existing on the Internet.
Once that is done, you can remove those parts or reword them to make them unique.
Conclusion
And that is all that we’ll be covering in this post. There are, mind you, a lot of other things that make an essay compelling. We’ve merely talked about the major ones above. We hope these tips will come in handy the next time you have to write an essay.
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