A to Z of Academic Essays

This presentation will help you understand the qualities of the best essay. By nature, essays are short and require a clearly defined purpose of writing that you must adhere to in your paper. There’s a lot to be learned from essay writing: critical analysis, observation, interpretation, narration, persuasion, close reading, preparation, and time-management. All these skills can be valuable even beyond the school walls. An essay has a clear structure with an introduction, paragraphs with evidence and a conclusion. Evidence, in the form of quotations and examples is the foundation of an effective essay and provides proof for your points. It is important to plan before you start writing an essay.

These slides will summarize all that you should know about writing perfect essays: How to write an essay
It is important to plan your essay before you start writing. An essay has a clear structure with an introduction, paragraphs with evidence and a conclusion. Evidence, in the form of quotations and examples is the foundation of an effective essay and provides proof for your points. Learn how to plan, structure, and use evidence in your essays.
Planning: It is important to plan before you start writing an essay. The essay question or title should provide a clear focus for your plan. Exploring this will help you make decisions about what points are relevant to the essay. What are you being asked to consider?
Organise your thoughts. Researching, mind mapping and making notes will help sort and prioritise your ideas. If you are writing a literature essay, planning will help you decide which parts of the text to focus on and what points to make.
Introduction: An introduction should focus directly on the essay question or title and aim to present your main idea, in your answer. An introduction briefly introduces your main ideas and arguments - that the rest of the essay will explore this in greater detail.
Using evidence: When the essay question focuses on a single character from the text, such as Slim, your answer and your evidence should do the same. Evidence is the foundation of an effective essay and provides proof for your points. For an essay about a piece of literature, the best evidence will come from the text itself. Back up each of your supporting statements with evidence. The evidence should be relevant and clearly connected to the point you’re making.
Paragraph structure: Think about how you are going to organise each paragraph. You might want to start with a topic sentence that summarises the main point of the paragraph.
Conclusion: A conclusion is the final paragraph of your essay. It should tie all the loose ends of your argument together.