How your paper being prepared
1) Follow the proper essay structure
Right after you received your assignment, the first step you should take is defining the kind of essay and complete an outline, which you’ll use to write your paper. After this is done, continue straightly according to the points: title – introduction – several paragraphs of the main part – conclusion. Be sure to follow this structure of the essay. Otherwise, your work will not be evaluated well.
2) Use drafts
How to be successful in college essay? The answer is simple – write drafts. Since usually teachers don’t give students a lot of time on of time on implementation of essays, writing a draft is a must. If the time frames are too tough, we advise outlining the ideas and arguments regarding the topic of your paper in a form of short theses just after you found out about the task and its theme. It will allow not to forget important ideas while writing a final version.
3) Be prepared for any topic
To know how to write a successful college essay you have to be well prepared for anything, so consider reading books and short stories on different topics for inspiration. It will help you to widen an outlook, learn new things, even new words, and phrases that you will be able to use in your writing works.
4) Leave time for proofreading
As a rule, those people who proofread their works are eventually making certain changes in it, so it’s a great opportunity to improve your paper by fixing mistakes that you didn’t notice before. It will show everyone that you really know how to success in college essay.
5) Define proper style
Find out to what style of writing is the most suitable; must it be informal, semiformal or formal. Maybe it is not appropriate to use slang and reductions of words, for example, instead of “can’t” you should better use “can not”, instead of “wanna” – “want to” and so on.
If the question how to start a narrative essay for college stuck in your head and bothers you, consider thinking about the point mentioned above.
6) Be concise
The essay is a short written work. So to define for yourself how to write a good college essay you have to remember that being concise and brief are two essential things of essay writing! Some students write long papers and think that the method of “the more, the better” may work in this case. Alas, teachers not only will not increase but will definitely lower your grade because you failed to follow the required volume.
7) Prove your statements
Every written idea shouldn’t sound groundless; support it with arguments, bright example and statistical data.
8) Express your thoughts correctly
The essay is a written expression of your thoughts on a particular subject, and they must be expressed correctly so that reader won’t find it unclear. Also, try to avoid themes that can offense someone (like politics or religion), in this case, it is better to stick to the formal tone, and your teacher will agree that you know how to succeed in college essay. If it is required to write an essay for a college, and you want to find the answer to the question how to write a good essay for college, then you need to know the basic rules of writing. We will consider how to write a good college essay step by step on an evident example, let’s suppose that you need to write an essay about nature of your home country.
We will adhere to three basic parts: intro; the main body; conclusion.
Introduction
The opening clause acquaints a reader with the theme of the text and gives him a chance to get an insight of fundamental aspects of work. An entry must engage a reader, and compel him to read further. The way how you will manage to write your introduction will define whether you know an answer to the question of how to write good college essays. Describe the theme of the work, expose the essence of its name, and set a question (thesis), an answer to which will be presented in the main body and summed up in a conclusion.
Let’s come back to our suggested topic about the nature of your home country. In this case, your introduction should describe what notable things you can outline in nature at your home, and why its beauty served the theme of your essay. If you decided to talk about an individual season, describe why you have chosen exactly this particular one, what life examples affected your attitude to this time of the year and why you like it the most.
Main body
This part is the most important one; it’s the fundament of the whole work, which discloses the theme. Show your vision of nature, as other authors describe it in their books or poems. Avoid simple exposition or retelling, try to describe the brightest impressions that nature gives you, draw a picture from words, let your readers visit your favorite places while they’re reading your paper.
To ease this task, try to accomplish a walk mentally into the places you like in the forest next to your house, glance into your favorite corners of home country’s nature, describe what you see around. The main task of this part is to clarify the topic and the purpose of your essay to the reader. The way how you express your thoughts and add facts to prove your thesis will show whether you know how to write a good persuasive essay for college.
Final part
In conclusion, you have to demonstrate results and summary of the whole paper. The conclusion must be not large, but sound. In a final paragraph, you can smooth out all shortages and unclear moments that appeared in the text, if conclusion will be clear, short, and will make your text look completed.
If you will adhere to advice showed in this article, then you can be confident that the question how to write a good narrative essay for college won’t be a mystery for you anymore!
Among different variations of tasks in this genre, narrative essays differ from other ones because their purpose isn’t to persuade someone, but to tell the story. This fact makes this kind of assignment a little more difficult than, for example, persuasive essay. It requires more talent in description and creating right atmosphere of the story instead cold-minded summary of data and facts. Many students, who not by hearsay know how to write a college persuasive essay, are asking themselves how to write a narrative essay for college, and to give an answer we’ll look at some advices.
How to start a narrative essay for college?
Choosing topic goes first in this process, you will have to tell about some story that will be engaging and also enlightening. The story needs to have a good main idea. Our first tip is to write about some situation that is important personally to you, because in this way you add more passion and enthusiasm into your paper and give readers a chance to feel positive energy. It can be really anything, maybe some life-changing and motivational story or funny accident – you are the one to choose!
Don’t make it a novel
Of course, essays assume freedom that allows scholars express thoughts in their own way, but it’s important keep it short. Be specific and start with the action right away. If you will include too much clarification about the pre-story, you risk making your readers bored.
The moral of the story
While learning how to write a college level narrative essay you already found out that it has to be creative, well-written and should have many details. Although from the first glance almost every student will conclude that it’s all about the immediate context of the story – it’s not; you need to put some information in “between the lines” to make your paper look complete. This means that your story must to give reader direct or indirect conclusion, tell them about what you’ve learned from this situation and give a valuable lesson for your audience.
Create a picture with your words
If you want to know how to write the best essay for college, you first need to learn how to turn simple words into a real piece of art. Which means that if you want to describe, let’s say – an apple pie, it won’t be enough to explain how it looked like, you have to make your readers almost smell it and feel its taste. This task is not easy to do and it does require special talents, but if you want it and put some efforts to achieve your goal – you can do it!
Avoid telling your story in a second person
The main idea of narrative essay is that its author had experienced the story he’s telling about, so it’s important to write it in a first person. The academic writing itself isn’t easy or fast, but it gets only worse when the goal is to change reader’s opinion, make readers agree with you. And many students get really frustrated and stressed out because they lack understanding on how to write a good persuasive essay for college.
The talent of persuasion is something that not every one of us has, and this skill is not that easy to develop. So what to do if you were assigned to complete a work of this type and you have no idea how to write a persuasive essay for college, what is its structure or how to conclude a college essay, but also don’t feel that you really can convince someone? We present you a number of tips that can help you handle this task.
What is a persuasive essay?
Before we hop to the next part to tell you how to write a college level persuasive essay, we should clarify what it really is, what questions to reveal, what are primary goals, etc. It’s obvious that such work aims to persuade someone in something, usually, for such task students select some discussable, urgent problem. Since we are here to learn how to write the best college essay, first we’ll look at few primary questions that students have to reveal in the paper:
- What is the issue?
- Are you “for” or “against” and why (proving your position)?
- Why your reader has to agree with you (convincing your audience)?
How to write a persuasive essay for college?
1) Choosing topical issue
To impress everyone with your work, pay particular attention to the topic selection. The problem you’ll discuss has to be relevant and topical to everyone, so you have to know your audience. Another important nuance is understanding of chosen topic if you seem to be just briefly familiar with the subject you won’t convince someone.
2) Building opinion and doing research
Before writing, you have to have a strong position regarding your problem. To create your personal opinion – consider doing research to make sure that you understand the problem well. Useful tip: while doing your research take more notes! You probably will stumble across some interesting articles or find decent arguments during your research, so note it down right away!
3) Writing your paper
Before you started, it’s better to have an outline. Bellow, you’ll see example of proper persuasive essay’s structure:
- First part – include some attention grabber along with your thesis and general description of a problem. Attention grabbing component can be pretty much anything; it has to present your issue and/or position regarding it and must catch readers’ interest from the first glance.
- Main part – The main body has to include decent arguments and some references that support them.
- Final part – Restate your thesis at this point, provide short summary and highlight what conclusions can be done.
Writing of essay is a frequent task in colleges and other educational establishments. There’re many methods how to prepare to it and write great paper. We will reveal the secrets that will help you write a perfect essay.
Don’t copy works of other authors
Don’t use someone’s work as template for your paper, even if you will manage to rewrite and make look unique, usually, a teacher will easily distinguish paper written by his student (note that he already saw your abilities) from work of some other student.
Don’t panic
If you were suddenly assigned to craft such work and it seems like you can’t write high-quality paper on none of the themes offered to you, don’t fall in panic! Sit down and relax, letting your thoughts refresh. Probably, after a while this situation won’t appear to you so critical and you will remember how to write the best college essays.
If you don’t know what topic to choose or how to write the best college essay ever
The topic of your future paper must correspond with your abilities. You also shouldn’t choose a super-easy one. To test your possibilities try to outline few possible topics (or take list given by your teacher) and write down everything that you know regarding each of them. This way a student gets an opportunity to examine how much knowledge you have on every theme and can choose the best for you.
Focus
Carefully read your topic, try to define what the meaning of every word is, and then clarify for yourself the whole phrase. Think in which direction this topic can be developing, what additional questions may appear, what arguments and examples can be provided, etc. Ask yourself if you already know how to write the best essay for college on this particular topic, and if the answer is no – it’s better to choose another one.
Honestly assess your knowledge
Choosing the theme, base your selection on the knowledge and experience you have in the certain field. Don’t hope to reach excellence and craft a masterpiece right away. This task is given to give you possibility to show that you can write such work, can support your ideas with proofs, know how to head college essay or how to end a college essay, and can follow instructions.
Write a plan
Write down basic moments that you want bring up in your work, combine them in logical order. This notes can be used as your plan, follow it during writing your text, and will help to save time and fully expose a theme. After your plan is ready – start writing a draft, which not necessary will become your final version, but will definitely help you see where you are in the process of essay writing and what needs to be improved. College essay on any topic consists only of three parts: introduction, main body, and conclusion. Each of them is valuable and important, but the most important roles play beginning and end of your paper. Intro aims to catch attention and make readers interested, while final part is your last chance to impress reader and make him remember your essay. Depending on different purposes of such task you can differently approach your conclusion, for example, if you are writing admission or scholarship essay you want to try to make it stand out and make sure that it will be memorable. You already know how to head a college essay, you’ve written your introduction and noted your theses and arguments, found out how to format college essay, so now it’s time to learn how to end college essay.
People better memorize the ending part of any performance, speech, book, and paper as well, so this part will create the overall impression that reader will keep after he finished reading your work. Your final paragraph has to make your essay look complete, and leave a feeling that this topic is valuable for the science or humanity.
How to conclude a college essay?
To add this feeling of completeness, use the following tips:
- Link your last part to the first paragraph; to do so you can even repeat certain phrases or words that were used in the beginning of your text;
- Use simple language;
- Make your last sentence compound or parallel in structure.
How to write a college essay conclusion and what to avoid?
Remember that conclusion is not just summary of data given in the text. It is aimed not only to give readers a sense of closure, but also leave the discussion of your topic open thus letting them know that the subject is not closed, and it still has the prospect of further development. To do so you can end your essay with some quote or reference to famous person’s opinion that either supports your ideas or offers to look at the same problem under a different angle. Another trick is to raise the question in a larger context.
And now we will introduce to you some common mistakes to avoid:
- Since your essay is short, there is no need to summarize all your arguments in the conclusion, this might be useful for some longer papers, but in this case it will sound like unnecessary reiteration.
- Avoid banal phrases in your final paragraph.
At the end, we would like to give you another useful tip – consider ending your essay in some unexpected way, you want to make your essay memorable so try to end it in some creative way, add more individuality and soul into it.
Now you know how to end a college essay, and we hope that our tips will inspire you and help you in creation of an outstanding work. What would you call the most valuable detail in essay writing? Many of you will answer – content of the paper, which is true. However, it will be also helpful to know how to format a college essay, what structure to follow, how to express your thoughts, and how to set up a college essay heading.
Heading is an irreplaceable part of any written paper; its purpose is to tell a reader right away some information about essay’s author and subject. So correct formatting of heading can play critical role in determination of your overall grade.
Many scholars can confuse meanings of “heading” and “title” and make a common mistake not including the heading into their essay. Other students just don’t know how to head college essay and fail to craft a correct one.
How to do a heading for a college essay?
Before we will start talking about how to write a heading correctly, let’s refresh our memory and remember few main rules of essay formatting. According to common standards of academic papers’ format we know that for any kind of paper students must choose size 12 of Times New Roman font, it’s also required to set double space between lines, and 1-inch margins from all sides. All of these format requirements have to be applied to your heading as well.
Now let’s take a closer look to the rules of heading the essay. First thing that you need to take care of is its location on the page; you have to place it on the top of your paper, above the title. Also, it has to be aligned to the left.
What kind of information contains a heading?
The main purpose of this part of your essay is to introduce you to the reader, so your heading must include the following data in the same order:
- Your first and last name;
- Full name of your teacher, instructor, etc.;
- Subject and its code;
- The date when you will be submitting your essay.
For example, a good college essay heading will look similar to this:
Jane Stevenson
Pr. Michael Blake
Biology 0000
15 September 2016
What else to keep in mind?
Another important thing in essay is header. Note, that heading and header are two different things! Many college students get confused with these two things. However, to avoid mistakes you should memorize that a header includes only your last name and number of each page, and, unlike heading, has to be aligned to the right.
If you want to know how to write a perfect college essay you need to understand how to express your opinion and support it, choose arguments and convince your reader, structure and format text properly, and so on. Essay, just like other college papers is meant to help you build certain skills that will be useful in future, so don’t give up on it and you will succeed! To learn how to write the perfect college essay you first have to find out what is its purpose and why it’s so important for college studies. This genre of writing is known for its brevity and conciseness, and it pursues the goal to develop and improve students’ ability to structure and express their thoughts in a written way, build personal opinion regarding given topic, and choose strong arguments to support it. In this kind of paper formatting plays a vital role, so knowing how to format college essay properly will give you a huge advantage.
The majority of students make mistakes in style and formatting simply because they don’t know how to format an essay for college and didn’t take time to research this question. To help you avoid such issues we gathered all rules and requirements regarding essay format.
General standards
First things to pay attention to while formatting your work are spaces, font style, its size, and margins. Usually, if you will make research on how to write a college essay format, you will see few basic rules that are easy to follow. First of all you will have to set a 1-inch marginal space; this can be easily done in Microsoft Word if you go to the page layout section and find there margins’ options, and then just choose the normal settings.
Regarding the spacing – there is a standard that requires essay author to use double-spaced option for the whole text, which can be also done in MS Word.
Also, don’t forget to choose Times New Roman font and set 12 pt. size for it.
All these requirements are universal standards for different academic papers.
Heading
Along with general guidelines there are certain requirements regarding proper styling of heading in your paper. Heading is one of the most important parts in any paper, but many students ignore it, which is a common mistake that you should avoid. It should be placed in the top corner on the left side of your page and should be left-justified. Correctly written heading must include the following information about you and your essay:
- Author’s full name is supposed to be placed on the first line;
- The second line should include full name of your instructor;
- Then you have to specify your subject and it’s code;
- The bottom line of your heading must include the submission date.
Title and paragraphs
The title of your essay has to be placed right under the heading and it has to be centered. Between your title and introduction paragraph it’s necessary to click enter two times. Every paragraph, starting from the first and up to the last one should be left aligned.
Final words
All these rules are simple to follow, and if you will keep all of them in mind – your paper will be perfect! Apart from formatting, there are still many nuances that can help you perfect your paper. One of the most essential is knowledge of how to answer college essay questions and fully reveal the main theme of your work. 1) Answer questions that is set
Never try to write a “universal” essay. More likely, such essay will not impress admissions judges of any university. You must know how to answer an essay question for college; moreover your answers must be correct and logical. Besides, different colleges have a different culture and value different abilities and qualities in their students, so you should underline what necessary abilities and experience you possess for every college.
2) Tell the story
Base your essay on demonstration of your experience and support it with specific example from life. One of the worst things that can make your essay a complete fail – is making it boring and banal. Your paper should be emotional, differ from others, be bright, creative and memorable! It doesn’t matter what your work is about, readers have to feel its energy and admire what he sees from the first words.
3) Be specific
For example, don’t declare that you could become an excellent doctor, if you can’t give any certain examples that would confirm this statement. Your desire to become a lawyer, engineer, or anything else, must be the result of certain experience that is described in your essay. Your statement must be logical completion of your life story.
4) Find “the right angle”
If you raised the question of how to write an essay for college scholarships, you should know that it is very important to show your story from the interesting perspective, make it unusual. Find the method of description that will help you to “hook on” anyone who reads your essay. It will help you not only to declare oneself as a talented person but also win desired grant.
5) Pay attention to the first paragraph
First part (opening paragraph) is critically important. This is where you will either catch readers’ attention or lose it forever. This paragraph becomes the foundation of all that follows.
6) Tell about what you know
“The heart” of your paper are your interests and experience in the field where you want to study. Extremely many people want to apply to a certain specialty without any knowledge about it and not knowing how to make a perfect college essay, which is an essential part of application process and further studies. Tell what you know about an interesting to you sphere, using a professional language.
7) Consider all college requirements
Study character features of a certain college and program. Ask teacher’s opinion, preferences and expectations regarding writing of essay. Maybe, if you’ll listen to his wishes you will achieve bigger success and receive higher grade.
9) Pay attention to grammar and punctuation
The majority of teachers highlight that literacy plays a decisive factor in the evaluation of each academic paper. So if you are interested in how to write the perfect essay for college, you have to refresh your memory and once again remind yourself about the basic rules of your language. Also, stick to the requirements regarding word limit. The answer to the following query – how to answer college essay questions in a greater measure exposes the aim of essay. Almost all essays pursue an aim to answer the questions that were specified in a task or arise up during the process of writing essay. It is the main idea of all essays; in fact, answering a question writer expresses his point of view and demonstrates ability to defend it. About how to answer essay questions college university read farther:
Be defined
Carefully think about what you’ll write. Ask yourself: what questions I must answer in this specific part of my work? What will be the best way to answer it? What will be my introductory suggestion/ my main thesis of the work? What facts or arguments can I give as an example to support my introductory suggestion or my thesis? How can I do this paragraph interesting? Is there any need for more information on this theme and where to find it? What result do I want to get? How to write a college scholarship essay?
First of all write down answers to every above-mentioned question separately in the notebook. An answer must be short and contain a basic idea of what you will write in the final draft of your work. It won’t take plenty of time, but it will help to get organized.
Clarify questions
Find and write down enough facts and arguments that are related to the theme of your composition (essay) or with the theme of questions in an applique form. To save time and not do the same work twice, make sure that you are searching for certain facts that must answer on particular questions.
Write down your own ideas on questions / theme of work. Ask yourself, what else you could add in order to make readers interested in this theme? Why is this theme important?
Your answer on a question or work in general must contain a basic idea. Define for yourself what your major arguments are and form a main idea that you will support in the work.
Follow the sequence
Give the arguments and facts in such sequence, so that they expose your basic idea logically. When you are already determined with the primary idea of text, it remains to be able to present it correctly to the reader. Give a glance on facts that you found, and on your own thoughts on a theme. If you want to know how to write a great essay for college, choose those questions and answers that support your point of view in this work the best. However, gathering and forming all necessary facts and own ideas is only half of your way. Next and not less important step is developing all of these thoughts on a paper in a successive order. Herein you can use a small chart as a guide-book that can help you in writing of your answers and paper in general.
