You can’t ignore the fact that essays are part of getting anywhere you want to go in life.
If you want to gain the grades to get into your dream university, you need to know the importance of essays, and how to excel in your exam essays. If you’re a primary school student who wants to get into a top secondary school, you’ll have to pass entrance exams that include writing short essays.
Even things which don’t seem so academic to us, for example, covering letters for job applications or good blog posts, are more likely to succeed if we know about essays and how to structure them.
This is because essays develop our critical and evaluative skills. Essays are about proving why our position on a subject is the correct one, which also helps us prove to employers why they should hire us. Let’s take a closer look at what exactly essays are and what they should involve.
An essay is a piece of writing that explores the debates and research around a particular subject, and then takes and defends a position on it.
An essay should persuade the reader, through its style and critical evaluation, that the argument it puts forth is the right one.
But how do we know what an essay should look like and what it should include? Let’s take a deep dive into everything you need to know about an essay, and how to produce the best one.
There are many different forms of essays, for example, exam essays (which are usually shorter and timed), coursework essays, dissertations and even PhD theses. However, they all follow this same pattern – you must outline research, and defend your argument or findings on a subject.
Essays should hook your reader in straight away. An essay which makes a fascinating first impression is the key to persuading your reader (who is likely also your examiner) that you know what you’re talking about and deserve a top grade. Your first line must convince them that what you say has value. There are two ways you can do this.
Essays are important in many different ways, as there are so many different contexts in which we write essays. Let’s look at just a few ways in which essays are important.
Separate your essay into roughly five paragraphs or sections. Paragraph 1 is your introduction. The next two paragraphs should lay out the arguments for and against the topic in your essay question. For example, if you were writing an essay on whether assisted suicide is murder, you would lay out the established arguments for, and the established arguments against. This is how you show you know what you’re talking about when you then give your own argument.
Paragraph 4 is your critical analysis, where you evaluate the validity of the arguments you’ve stated and why, for example, assisted suicide is or isn’t murder. This is the most important part of your essay, because it shows your reader that you’ve evaluated the knowledge, which shows the important critical thinking skills that are key to succeeding in exams or college applications, as well as the general advancement of human knowledge.
Paragraph 5 is your conclusion. It is true that conclusions should always sum up your argument. However, to get extra points, your conclusion should also point to something further along in the argument. If you have a piece of research or opinion that you just couldn’t fit into the body of your essay, the conclusion is the perfect time to allude to it briefly. You then give the examiner the impression that you have even more amazing insights to put forth, and your thinking expands beyond just the exam question.
Your essay style is really important to your success. Don’t just observe, analyse. Don’t just state facts, always feed your observations back into the essay question or statement, to show that you’re always fully engaged. Back up your facts with quotations and dates, and always make sure you attribute quotations to the person who said or wrote them. This is how you avoid plagiarism!
Referencing is a more formal way of ensuring that you give credit to the quotations and excerpts you use of other people’s work and ideas. Plagiarism is a big offence in school at university, and could lead to institutions scrapping whole exams or degrees.
You are unlikely to have to formally reference in timed exams, but you certainly will have to reference any coursework or dissertations at university. Learning how to reference at school is a great way to get head start on this for university. A common form of referencing texts by other authors is the Harvard referencing system or the ‘author: date’ system’. This is where you use a quote of an author’s work and add in brackets their last name and the date of the work published. You then add the full reference, including the full title of the work, page number and publisher in a bibliography at the end.
However, there is another category of essay which blurs the lines between academic and non-academic – and that’s a personal essay. Don’t confuse this with your personal statement for university which, although it’s about you, is still an academic text because you’re using it to prove why you should study a particular course.
Personal essays are articles or narratives which weave in someone’s intimate experiences or life events, to make a particular academic point or argument, or simply to tell a good story. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay We Should All Be Feminists is a good example of a personal essay. It draws extensively on her own experiences, as well as talking more generally about the institutionalised sexism against women.
To round off our guide on what an essay is and what it consists of, let’s look at a few examples of essay questions from three subjects – English Literature, Ethics and History.
(these example essay questions are from Edexcel past papers)
We’ve now gone through exactly what an essay is, and how to write one. We hope you’ve found our complete guide to an essay useful and inspiring. You can now take everything you’ve learned about essays and essay-writing, and craft outstanding essays for school and university applications.