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A Guide to Writing an Effective Essay  - The Main Steps

Jun 13, 2023

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An effective essay is an essay that leaves an effect on its readers. How does it do that? It does that by being to the point, containing easy-to-understand language, proper organization and arrangement, visuals, and the like.


Such an essay would also need to be free of grammatical and spelling errors, fluency issues, plagiarism, and so on.


We did pretty much chalk whatever we were going to discuss in this post, but we’re obviously not going to leave it at that. Let’s take a deeper look into all these factors one by one. We’ll take it along as a guide to make it easier for you to follow.



A Guide to Effective Essay Writing


Here're the steps that you have to follow to write an effective essay:


1.     Do Proper Research


Without proper research, you can’t write an effective essay…unless it’s about something like “My First Pony Ride.”


There are different types of essays, basically. Some are descriptive, some are explanatory, some are narrative, and so on.


While it is possible for you to write some specific types of essays without any research, this is not typically the case.


Research makes your essay effective since it provides you with something that you use to back your claims and arguments. With some research under your belt, you won’t sound speculative, and your arguments will look more like arguments rather than guesswork.



This can be accentuated if you use some exact stats and figures from your research in your content.


Now, research is a multi-faceted process. It involves more stuff than simply looking at some material on the internet and nodding away, thinking, “Yeah, I get that.”


It’s also a lot more than jotting down some content from a source, rewriting it a bit, and then using it as your own.


Here are some tips for doing proper research for your essay:




  1. Firstly, you should pick some good sources to do your research. Since you are writing an essay, you can’t afford to take information from just any two-bit site on the Internet and elevate it to the pedestal of unquestionable credibility. There are some popular names on the Internet that you can utilize for research, such as:

    1. ResearchGate

    2. JSTOR

    3. Google Scholar



  2. Then, once you decide on the source that you will be using for research, you also have to ensure that you do the information garnering properly. Instead of taking information haphazardly and directly from the sources verbatim, you should be careful of only taking ideas. Taking ideas means understanding the content written on the sources and then noting them down in a shortened form using your own words. Then, you can expound on them later on while writing the essay itself.

  3. Also, when taking information from online sources, you should take meticulous care to save the data required for citations later on. In other words, you should save the website URL, the author’s name, the date of publishing, and so on.


2.     Create an Outline


Once you are done doing the research, the next thing on the list is to craft a plan for the essay itself. Creating the plan beforehand will help in making your essay effective since it will allow you to stay on point and not divert from the main topics during the writing phase.



Here's what you need to do when creating an outline:




  1. List the main headings that you want to include in the essay

  2. List the main sub-headings that you want to include in each of those headings

  3. Specify the number of words that you are going to include in each of those headings


Once you have this outline in mind, you'll be able to stay focused on the topic when writing.


Irrelevancy can wreck the effectiveness of your essay. It can make it look clunky and amateurish, which is something that you want to avoid.


3.     Keep your Wording Simple and Clear


Moving on, after you are done with the outline, you have to move on to the actual writing part itself. We’ll talk about some tips for this part now.


When writing, you first have to make sure that your wording is simple and clear. You don’t want to use difficult words in the content, even though you may think it to be something worth doing at the time.


When you use difficult words in your content in places where simpler words are very obviously available as an alternative, it does two things:




  1. It makes you look pretentious

  2. It makes your content look difficult to read


Both of these negate the effectiveness of your essay.



So, how do you keep the wording of your essay easy and simple?


Firstly, you have to take care of it consciously when writing the essay itself. In other words, you have to deliberately avoid using any word that you think will be hard for your readers to understand.


Secondly, whenever you write a passage or a part of the text, you should read it once and see if you’ve unknowingly written anything that is hard to understand. If there is any passage or sentence like that, you can simply paraphrase it.


What is paraphrasing? Paraphrasing is basically the process of restating or rephrasing something using different words and terms in such a way that it means the same thing.


Ideally, in a situation where you can’t keep a piece of text simple, you can take the help of a paraphrase tool online. Since these tools work on automated AI algorithms, they can understand the given content and make changes to it using their vast trove of synonyms and phrases, etc.


Here, you can see what we mean by looking at this screenshot of a tool in action.



4.     Substantiate Everything You Say with Evidence


This is probably the core step of making your essay effective. All the steps leading up to now can’t make the essay effective on its own if you omit this step.


Whenever you make a claim or a statement that unequivocally contains some sort of direct information, you should back it up with evidence. You should cite a reliable source or cite a study, etc.



In direct statements, you can add quotes, and when adding stats, you can leave a hyperlink on the same (if you’re writing the essay digitally).


If you don’t have any concrete evidence to back up a particular statement or a concept, you can do another thing to make it look effective. And that is to use visuals.


For example, if you want to denote something in figures, you can create a chart or table for it. This can also make it look more authoritative.


5.     Proofread and Perfect


Proofreading the content and removing imperfections from it is also a necessary step that you have to follow to make your essay effective. When proofreading the essay, there are a lot of errors that you can find and remove, which, if left as is, can severely damage the credibility and authoritativeness.


Here is what you should do during the proofreading phase.




  1. Look for grammar errors in the text. Grammatical errors can sneak inside your content without you realizing it. You have to carefully read through the content and look for any such errors. You can also take the help of an online grammar checker for this same purpose.

  2. You should also look for any missing citations in the content. If there are any, they can lead to plagiarism issues later on. Whatever information you take from somewhere, you should ensure that the citation for it is in place.

  3. While we are on the topic of plagiarism, we should also point out that plagiarism is something that you have to take care of during the proofreading phase. If plagiarism is found in your essay, it can do away with any traces of effectiveness that may be in it. To find plagiarism, you can use online plagiarism checkers, and to remove it, you can do things like quoting it, or citing it, or simply paraphrasing it using an online tool. This is something we have described above as well.

  4. You should also keep an eye out for the organization of your content to see if you have made any errors with the headings or sub-headings. For example, if you have accidentally collapsed a sub-heading to make it look like one on a level above, you can fix it at this step.


Conclusion


With the end of the proofreading part, the process comes to a close. You can wrap up your essay and finalize it for submission.


If we had to encapsulate this whole post into a couple of sentences, we’d say that: to make your essay effective, you have to make sure you do your research properly and back up whatever you say with the right evidence. And finally, you should properly proofread the content so that there are no issues or errors in the final draft.