God Awful Essays & How to Write Them

Hello, all!

With the recent surge of #helpblogs going around and with the start of school brimming the horizon, I thought I’d put my many unfortunate years of essay writing to use and give y’all some tips on how to have an easier time with them.

While these are very general tips that can be applied to most academic writing, it’s nevertheless important to start off by mentioning that you should pay close attention to what the assignment is asking of you.

Which brings me to…

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#1. Understand what the prompt is.

I know it SOUNDS easy, and you’re probably sitting or laying there thinking, “Well, DUH, Rena, how else would we write it?” but you’d be surprised how much of my sessions with students is dedicated to dissecting essay prompts to make sure they understand what’s being asked of them. Not because the prompts are too complicated or because the students aren’t bright, but simply because essay prompts as a whole exist to be a nuisance to the ethical backbone of developing minds.

Sometimes the prompts are too vague and you’re left floundering in the great big shores of bullshit-ville, and other times they’re so exasperatingly narrow you’d think you were drowning in a glass of water. It’s okay, it happens even to college kids and the professors teaching them. Just sit back and, if you’re inclined to do so you can even highlight them, take the prompt sentence by sentence. What’s the first sentence asking you to do? What about the second? How might the two be related?

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#2. Outline!

Like when you write novels, except less fun. There’re multiple ways of going about this;

•A mind map! Something like this-

-that allows you to brainstorm general ideas about your topic without a whole lot of effort going into it. It’s easy to maneuver, and swap ideas around.

•An actual outline.

The most common I’ve seen with my students, since it forms a more solid skeleton for them to sculpt an essay later an hour before the deadline. There’re other, more simplified versions, where you can just slap your thesis up top and then jot your transitions with bullet points under detailing what goes into the body paragraphs.

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#3. Know your audience!

You wouldn’t use the same kind of tone or language talking to your friend about a book you just read as you would while writing a book report, and often times this affects how much information you need to present to the reader before stating your point. The so-called “essay fluff” might work to your benefit if you’re giving a reader who’s never encountered this topic some information, but it can be detrimental to your grade if you add too much and gloss over your point entirely for the sake of gap filling.

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#4. Just write it.

A lot of students, I feel, get trapped in an endless cycle of figuring out how to start the essay until they get either frustrated or just leave it for later all together. As difficult as it may seem, the best way to jump that hurdle is to just … write it. Chances are you’ll likely have to produce multiple drafts to show your teacher or professor regardless, and drafts don’t have to be any good so long as they exist. Get your first, second, or however many drafts out until you think you’ve gotten to the core of what you want to say, and then go back and make cosmetic changes like introductions or grammar corrections later.

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#5. Get started early!

If you take nothing else away from this post, PLEASE start your essays- or any assignments for that matter- ahead of time. It’s not worth the stress of having to do it last minute because you waited too long. Take it from the idiot that had to type an entire 25-page research report in one sitting because she forgot to do. Doing so much as just the outline of the essay will help you so much in the long run, I cannot stress proper time management enough.

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Godspeed, all.

Best of luck to y’all with your future essay writing endeavors.

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