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10 Great Essay Writing Tips

Knowing how to write a college essay is a useful skill for anyone who plans to go to college. Most colleges and universities ask you to submit a writing sample with your application. As a student, you’ll also write essays in your courses. Impress your professors with your knowledge and skill by using these great essay writing tips.

Prepare to Answer the Question

Most college essays ask you to answer a question or synthesize information you learned in class. Review notes you have from lectures, read the recommended texts and make sure you understand the topic. You should refer to these sources in your essay.

Plan Your Essay

Many students see planning as a waste of time, but it actually saves you time. Take a few minutes to think about the topic and what you want to say about it. You can write an outline, draw a chart or use a graphic organizer to arrange your ideas. This gives you a chance to spot problems in your ideas before you spend time writing out the paragraphs.

Choose a Writing Method That Feels Comfortable

You might have to type your essay before turning it in, but that doesn’t mean you have to write it that way. Some people find it easy to write out their ideas by hand. Others prefer typing in a word processor where they can erase and rewrite as needed. Find the one that works best for you and stick with it.

View It as a Conversation

Writing is a form of communication, so think of your essay as a conversation between you and the reader. Think about your response to the source material and the topic. Decide what you want to tell the reader about the topic. Then, stay focused on your response as you write.

Provide the Context in the Introduction

If you look at an example of an essay introduction, you’ll see that the best essays give the reader a context. Think of how you introduce two people to each other. You share the details you think they will find most interesting. Do this in your essay by stating what it’s about and then telling readers what the issue is.

Explain What Needs to be Explained

Sometimes you have to explain concepts or define words to help the reader understand your viewpoint. You also have to explain the reasoning behind your ideas. For example, it’s not enough to write that your greatest achievement is running an ultra marathon. You might need to define ultra marathon and explain why finishing the race is such an accomplishment.

Answer All the Questions

After you finish writing the first draft of your essay, make sure you’ve answered all the questions you were supposed to answer. For example, essays in compare and contrast format should show the similarities and differences between ideas, objects or events. If you’re writing about a significant achievement, describe what you did and how it affected you.

Stay Focused as You Write

Writing requires concentration. Find a place where you have few distractions and give yourself time to write without interruptions. Don’t wait until the night before the essay is due to start working on it.

Read the Essay Aloud to Proofread

When you finish writing your essay, read it aloud. You can do this by yourself or ask someone to listen to you read it. You’ll notice places where the ideas don’t make sense, and your listener can give you feedback about your ideas.

Avoid Filling the Page with Words

A great essay does more than follow an essay layout. It has something to say. Sometimes students panic and write everything they know about a topic or summarize everything in the source material. Your job as a writer is to show why this information is important.

MORE FROM QUESTIONSANSWERED.NET

One of the main things we learn in English Grammar is writing essays, letters, stories etc. This helps us develop our language while exploring our creative sides. Let us learn more about the formats and tips for writing.

• Descriptive Essay
• Diary Entry
• Formal Letters
• Informal Letters
• Letter Writing
• Non-Classified/Display Advertisements
• Story: Characters
• Story: Setting

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How to Write a Letter or an Essay in English | Useful Tips

How to write a letter or how to write an essay in English? Useful tips for writing letters, essays in English.

Table of Contents

How to Write a Letter

How to write a cover letter.

How to Write Informal Letters

How to end a letter in english.

Useful Words and Phrases for Writing Formal Letters

Writing a letter or an email.

How to Write a Great Essay Quickly

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Commonly Used Preposition Collocations in English with Useful Examples

Friday essay: a lament for the lost art of letter-writing – a radical art form reflecting ‘the full catastrophe of life’

PhD Candidate, The University of Melbourne

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Edwina Preston received funding from the Australia Council for her latest published novel.

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Letters did not count [as writing]. A woman might write letters while sitting by her father’s sick-bed. She could write them by the fire while the men talked without disturbing them. The strange thing is, I thought, turning over the pages of Dorothy’s letters, what a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of a scene.

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Last year I went to the funeral of a friend with whom I shared a house in Melbourne in the early 1990s. While I and my other housemates went on to the full array of box-ticking life experiences – children, careers, relationships, houses – our friend was diagnosed with an aggressive form of multiple sclerosis in her early twenties. When she died, we had not heard her voice for many years.

Of all the eulogies at her funeral, the most arresting was a letter she’d written at 23, read aloud by a former housemate, Delia. Our friend had been travelling at the time; negotiating a fledgling relationship, digesting the reality of her diagnosis, preparing for the suddenly precarious unfolding of her life.

She hadn’t spoken for so long but here in this letter, this imprint of her voice on paper, she sprang suddenly into life. Funny, irreverent, honest, scared: we could hear her. The occasion was sad; but the letter was joyful.

I had forgotten what a powerful time capsule a letter could be.

Read more: Post apocalypse: the end of daily letter deliveries is in sight

Gen X-ers occupy a distinctly precious cultural position – straddling the analogue past of letter writing and the hyper-digital present of TikTok and Instagram. One of my earliest school memories is of learning how to transcribe an address onto an envelope in the form required by post offices (carefully indented at every line, return address on the back). It seems almost archaic now.

We may not have been “the last generation of devoted letter writers” – that title goes to our parents’ or grandparents’ generation – but letter-writing was still a necessary, carefully taught skill when we were growing up.

It was the normal way to communicate with grandparents, international pen-pals, and school friends who had moved to the country. We all sat down at school camp on the first night and wrote our parents a letter, Camp Granada style, supervised by prowling teachers who made sure we gave our parents a worthy account.

I remember too how important it was, as a young adult in the world of pre-internet travel, to land in a far-flung place, track down the Poste Restante and find miraculously waiting for you – as though your arrival was predestined – a handful of pale blue aerograms, enscripted with miniscule, space-saving writing. Letters from home.

In momentary deferral to the anti-hoarding gods, I recently threw out a tranche of these aerograms, sent to me when I travelled India as a 19-year-old. I not only curse myself when I think of this now, but I feel an actual pain in my chest. What insights have I lost into my former self, my family and my friends as a result?

The human condition

The disappearance of letter-writing from Western cultural life is such a recent phenomenon that I don’t dare proclaim its death. From Abelard and Heloise’s 12th-century love missives , dense with biblical references but no less dense with longing, to the letters of Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo, it’s hard to imagine how we might have made sense of the human condition without the insights gleaned from letters.

What would we know of the interior worlds of artists and writers, scientists and politicians, sisters and friends and lovers? What would we know about life itself? Or, as importantly, about how to live ? In the first century AD, Seneca articulated his philosophy of stoicism via a series of 124 “ moral letters ” to his young friend Lucilius.

These letters are only nominally a private correspondence between two men; in fact, they were written for a much larger readership that might benefit from Seneca’s solutions to the moral dilemmas of living in the world.

Even if one side of the conversation (Lucilius’s) remained unheard, the letter, as a form, lent a sense of reciprocity and intimacy to Seneca’s words – it enabled him to speak to many as though he were speaking to one. With titles such as “On saving time”, “On old age and death”, “On the relativity of fame”, “On care of health and peace of mind”, Seneca’s letters continue to resonate 2,000 years later.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s ten Letters to a Young Poet , written in 1903-08 and published posthumously in 1929, provided creative guidance to his young recipient, a Czech poet and military student. These letters are famous for Rilke’s inordinately gentle manner, his tenderness and warmth.

Yet it seems that, in breathing a philosophy of art and life into the ear of his young admirer, Rilke also breathes it affirmingly into himself, and into the generations privy to the correspondence since. I noticed traces of his philosophy of creativity – which emphasises patience and attentiveness to the small things of life – in a 1961 letter from Patrick White to Thea Astley I recently read:

Read, think & listen to silence, & shell the peas … concentrating on the work in hand until you know what it is to be a pea — and drudge at the school, & sleep with your husband & bring up your child. That is what I mean when I say “living” …

Unlike the essay or the novel, letters facilitate a kind of collapsing of low and high, profound and profane, the life of domesticity and the life of the spirit. They are not master accounts of ourselves, with all the incidentals written out.

Writer Maria Popova, commenting on the mid-century correspondence of illustrator Edward Gorey and author Peter F. Neumeyer , says the two men wrote to each other of everything “from metaphysics to pancake recipes”.

This democratic levelling of subject matter is perhaps nowhere more evident than in letters, where hierarchies of value don’t prevail as they do in more authoritatively literary forms: the traditional novel, for instance, in which everything must gear toward thematic and narrative resolution.

Letting the real world in

Megan O’Grady, in the New York Times , has described letters as “leaky” in the way they allow a seepage of the real world to occur: “the baby wakes from the nap and cries; the air-raid siren sounds; the social mores and psychodynamics of other eras filter in”. In correspondence, even the rhetorical devices of transition, the elegant segues that smooth a jagged change of subject, are largely dispensed with.

No one, writing a letter, agonises over the wording of a sentence that links two paragraphs. A trail of unexplained ellipses has a particular function in a letter – to break a chain of thought, to attest to bodily movement in temporal space: a kettle being put on, a doorbell answered, a nappy changed.

My friend Delia, reading over letters from her friends in the early 1990s when she was a student in America, said:

It was funny reading these letters back. Sometimes they would be written over days, or even weeks, they’d stop and start and stop again: “Sorry, got distracted with something. Anyway …” Or be continually updated: “Well, I finally got a phone call from X, you won’t believe what happened …”

They were provisional, real-time, patched-together accounts of life as we lived it, as it occurred, on the spot. An unspooling of self onto the page in real time.

Or selves perhaps; each letter, each recipient, facilitating an adjustment of the self, a tweak: there’s the correspondent we make laugh, the correspondent we confide in, the correspondent to whom we offer advice and comfort. Like a diary, a letter can function as a “chronicle of [one’s] hours and days”, but because it is, in essence, a two-way communication – an ongoing, unfinished conversation – a letter invokes a relationship so it needs to be sensitive to the reader in ways a diary need not.

It needs to configure itself for entertainment value. It’s one of the few writing forms that allows the mind of the writer to roam freely, independently, and yet actively connect with an attentive, and presumably sympathetic, reader: a known reader.

The materiality of letters sets them apart from today’s electronic equivalents. Letters are disarmingly tangible when we chance upon them in a forgotten box or tin or bundle: we might have forgotten them, but they didn’t cease to exist. They offer curious subtexts too, not least to do with the presence of the human hand on paper.

A different kind of utterance

I have in my possession pages of my late grandmother’s “scribble” – a self-deprecating term she used (for her handwriting or for the thoughts her letters contained? I was never sure which).

Her backwards-scooping scrawl carries with it her personality somehow – occasionally, I see an echo of it in my own handwriting, a certain soft flourish in an “h” or an “n”. I remember the pale blue pages on which her letters were written, and my habit of placing a heavy-ruled piece of paper beneath my own when I wrote back to her, to ensure my lines were straight.

Particularly precious in my family is a letter written to my father as a little boy by his own father, stationed on an air base in New Guinea in 1943. The letter, on tiny yellow paper, is written in flawless copperplate – a skill my grandfather was particularly proud of, having left school at 12 – and the front of the envelope is illustrated with an image of Ginger Meggs, hand-drawn in coloured ink.

Returning after the war, my grandfather was a difficult, traumatised man, but in his letter there’s a glimpse of the loving young father and husband he was before:

Dear Barry Just a few lines from your Daddy hoping it finds you well; and I also trust that your little yacht arrived alright; and I do hope it sails well for it has really big sails though I think you shall be able to manage it alright after Mum has fixed it all up for you […] Now Barry I guess you are wondering when I shall be home, well I really thought that I would be home for Xmas but now it looks like it shall be early in the new year so I am hoping I get back in time for your birthday for if I do, we shall sure have a birthday party, won’t we, with just you and Leslie and Mumie and me …“

In the last years of my own father’s life, this tiny hand-inked letter had pride of place in a glass display case in his residential care unit: a beautiful relic, the ephemeral trapped on paper.

It reminds me of a similarly gentle, loving letter written by John Steinbeck to his son in 1958, upon his son’s announcement that he had fallen in love:

Dear Thom: First – if you are in love – that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you. Second – There are several kinds of love […] The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

Did Steinbeck speak as honestly and tenderly to his son in person? Perhaps, I don’t know. But it’s possible that letters allowed a different kind of utterance for "strong, silent” men of past generations: a benevolent “father-tongue” (lower case) which enabled them to shed, if momentarily, the practised hardness of masculinity.

I know that my grandfather’s letter contains a grace and sweetness that was not present in person. In person, his expression of love was to teach my father how to box.

Read more: Hold the post: there's no such thing as a dead letter

Famous love letters

Love letters, of course, occupy a place of their own within the “genre”, if it can be called a genre. The 5,000 or so letters between Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Steiglitz , penned across 30 years, provide a window onto the mutual creative inspiration that existed between the two artists, but also include searing love letters that testify to an enduring sensuality.

“Dearest,” writes Georgia:

— my body is simply crazy with wanting you – If you don’t come tomorrow – I don’t see how I can wait for you – I wonder if your body wants mine the way mine wants yours – the kisses – the hotness – the wetness – all melting together – the being held so tight that it hurts – the strangle and the struggle.

On a voyeuristic level, the love letters of the famous gratify our curiosity – what went on between these two giants of the screen/literary world/art scene? Were they (are they?) like us in their lusts and their pettinesses? Often, yes, they are like us – we’re reassured by their broken promises and bickerings and insecurities.

They say things they shouldn’t, embarrassing things, things they later regret. T.S. Eliot later disavowed his fervent love letters to American speech and drama teacher Emily Hale – they “were the letters of an hallucinated man,” he said. Nevertheless, these letters have an ardour, a heart-on-the-sleeve earnestness, that reveals a different side to the cool modernist poet, a side that was warm-blooded, ruled by the heart, even, possibly, vulnerable.

Letters are immediate; we write them from inside the moment, and so the immediate, the moment, becomes the truth. Their vigour, and their value, lies in this unedited, uneditable quality: they document us, trap fleeting moments in glass. We might even say things that bare our souls. “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia,” wrote Vita Sackville-West famously to Virginia Woolf in one such moment in 1926.

Some of the funniest/“dirtiest” letters on the public record are James Joyce’s letters to his wife Nora Barnacle , in which he joyously catalogues her repertoire of farts:

big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole … I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.

The publication of the letters in 1975 upset Joyce’s grandson, but the correspondence reveals a healthy mutual sexual relationship, free of any false social pieties and, certainly, of embarrassment.

The love letters of famous writers have a pith and poetry the rest of us might not be equal to, but even the simplest love letters, if they’re heartfelt, speak of who we are, or once were, and how we affected other people. They are testament to the risks we take to express deep and difficult feelings; the things we might not have been able to say in the flesh.

My first boyfriend says he wrote me a love letter when we were 16 and I sent it back to him with the spelling corrected in red pen. I can’t remember the spirit with which I embarked on this particular revision, but it’s retrospectively both very funny and an insight into my own priggishness. Nor can I imagine making such amendments now using tracked changes – somehow I think it would be less funny and more tragic.

I have in my possession other love letters from the pre-internet age – not many, a few. They embarrassed me, mainly, at the time, but I’m glad I’ve kept them – they are charged with a force that cuts through time, and connects me with myself as a younger, if more callous, person.

Read more: 'Weaponised irony': after fictionalising Elizabeth Macarthur's life, Kate Grenville edits her letters

Email and autocorrect

And while famous love letters of the past are collected, collated and curated for public consumption, I’m not sure a 21st-century romantic email correspondence will have the same longevity. For one thing, emails are less spontaneous: if only because they are infinitely revisable, deletable – as well as easily forwardable (accidentally or otherwise).

They don’t contain the mark of the person, the pecularities of handwriting or, yes, spelling mistakes – autocorrect puts out these interesting little fires. Writes O’Grady: “It’s hard to imagine that in 50 years we’ll be picking up The Collected Emails of Zadie Smith.”

Email won’t ever be a replacement for the unfolding, from a wadded envelope, of several pages of lovingly tended text. For me, at least. I use email for collegiate communications, friendly transactions, social to-ings and fro-ings. While it might provide the last vestige of formality in an increasingly informal communications world, email remains an inadequate substitute for letters.

Delayed gratification – part of the frisson of a traditional correspondence – is a bad portent when it comes to emails. It’s easy to interpret even the briefest email silence as unwillingness or neglect on the part of the recipient. O’Grady writes:

Email – already an old-fashioned form – isn’t really the electronic replacement of the letter but a different mode of communication entirely: fleeter, tactical, somehow both more and less disposable. It is unwise to commit too much of oneself to electronic code, which lives on in some ether or another, unflung into the fireplace.

Text messages are semiotically interesting in the way they codify language and narrative, but their idiom is brevity. You can flirt in a series of text messages, you can also argue, but you can’t reflect the way you might in a letter; it’s easy to send a platitude or establish a rapport in a text, not so easy to tease out a philosophy.

Letter-writing is a commitment of time and an offering of trust, both an indulgence and an act of generosity. It must trust that what is being related will be accepted. It must assume that its confidences will be honoured.

‘The stuff of life’

As a writer looking for a literary device with which to capture the voice of a troubled female poet in 1960s Melbourne, first-person narrative didn’t work. I tried and got nowhere. It couldn’t satisfactorily make visible the ruptures and randomness of my character’s life, its trivial details and entertaining side-notes: the nappies she had to run off and attend to; the soggy egg cartons glimpsed dishearteningly through a window; the clothesline she feared being garrotted by.

If it’s not doing something to further the narrative , goes the traditional novel-writing wisdom, cut it out . But I wanted to put in the things that didn’t further the narrative: the ephemeral things, apparently unimportant, that are actually the stuff of life.

Letter-writing allows this stuff to be present. Perhaps it’s the only traditional writing form that does, and it gave me a credible reason for putting the trivial, the small, the fleeting into my story. And when I did, to my surprise, my character came to life: she became spontaneous and real and began to speak in a language and voice that seemed authentic.

In her wonderful 1988 essay about writing and motherhood, The Fisherwoman’s Daughter , Ursula Le Guin used the term “mother tongue” to describe an “authentic” women’s language. The mother tongue, she says, speaks with intimacy, proximity, connectivity; it’s the voice with which we talk to a neighbour over the fence, or to our children when they come home late, or to our partners when it’s their turn to take out the bins, or our friends when we’re trying to make them laugh over a drink.

Its power is not in dividing but in binding … We all know it by heart. John have you got your umbrella I think it’s going to rain. Can you come play with me? If I told you once I told you a hundred times … O what am I going to do? … Pass the soy sauce please. Oh, shit … You look like what the cat dragged in …

In its use of the mother tongue, correspondence actually corresponds with the ways we interact with people in our lives, as well as with the spontaneities of speech itself. It doesn’t pretend the writer is not a real person, speaking in an authoritative void, like an oracle, to untethered, disembodied others. It allows the full catastrophe of life to be present and visible.

Researching the letters of women poets in preparation for working on my novel , I realised letter-writing has always been socially acceptable for women in ways the “master” forms of literary production – the novel, the poem – haven’t been. So long as they were literate, women have always written letters – as an essential form of communication and self-expression, but also because writing letters didn’t disturb the status quo or conflict with domestic or mothering responsibilities.

A woman didn’t need to consciously conceive of herself as a “writer” in order to be an avid letter-writer. And a woman didn’t need a “room of her own” in order to write her letters; she could write them among the potato peels and bills and children’s laundry. Quietly, (apparently) benignly, women have for centuries been able to refine and experiment with their writing practice under the guise of merely “writing a letter”.

So perhaps letter-writing has functioned as a kind of ruse or subterfuge for women: a way of writing without seeming to have “unseemly” writerly ambitions. I think of my grandmother’s characterisation of her letters as “scribble”.

It was not the done thing for a woman of her generation to publicise her accomplishments, but I knew she knew she was a good writer, with lovely handwriting, and a gentle and responsive style. Calling her writing “scribble”, I realised, was a way of repudiating the criticism of thinking she had something to say, but getting on with the job of saying it nevertheless.

As I wrote my character’s letters to her sister, I became more and more convinced that letter-writing has functioned as a radical, maybe even revolutionary, writing form for women. This is because, on the one hand, it was considered so socially unthreatening that it went under the radar, and, on the other, because it allowed the small daily realities of women’s lives to be made visible.

It could be written from within the midst of their lives – not separate, not in a garret room or writer’s hut — but right there, on the kitchen table amongst the scraps and the bills and the children’s toys.

Gregory Kratzmann, editor of Australian poet Gwen Harwood’s voluminous correspondence, says Harwood wrote her correspondence in precisely this way:

She wrote letters quickly and with great facility, often when she was surrounded by domestic activity […] sometimes three or more long letters in the same day […] the activity of writing was an essential part of living […]

The prolific 19th-century novelist Margaret Oliphant used this same “kitchen-table” approach to write her novels – and there were nearly one hundred of them. Far from imperilling her progress, she felt that

her writing profited, from the difficult, obscure, chancy connection between the art work and emotional/manual/managerial complex of skills and tasks called “housework,” and that to sever that connection would put the writing itself at risk, would make it, in her word, unnatural.

If letter-writing can tolerate interruption, distraction, diversion, it stands to reason that novel writing can too. And poetry writing. And even philosophical treatise writing. Perhaps being interrupted is not so terrible nor so damaging to artistic creation as we have always thought. Who says that the uninterrupted thought is better than the interrupted one?

Read more: Gwen Harwood was one of Australia's finest poets – she was also one of the most subversive

‘The framing of a sentence’

I have never had an inviolate writing space of my own. Everything I have written has been interrupted constantly by children and domestic demands. I stop to remedy problems; attend to outbursts of screaming; acquire and prepare drawing materials; find lost books; answer spelling enquiries; listen to an imaginative narrative just written; lace on rollerblades; deal with insistent lamentations that “There’s nothing to eat”.

My writing space has been fundamentally accessible to my children: they remove pens and papers and post-it notes, use my desk as a place to apply nail-polish, leave tell-tale trails of crumbs and rings from glasses. Yes, it’s annoying. Does it make my writing worse? No. Sometimes it makes it better.

Writing my character, contemplating all this, I thought – dare I say it? – that perhaps Virginia Woolf was wrong. Perhaps “a room of one’s own” has never been necessary to the writing of prose. Perhaps the seeds of a different kind of writing practice, one that served women’s realities and responsibilities better, can be glimpsed in the practice of letter writing.

Correspondence has always enabled women to become caught up, immersed, in the moment of the work, yet remain equally available and connected to life around them.

Thus it deserves our attention, even as it fades from view as a writing practice. To return to Virginia Woolf’s silently observed letter-writing girl at the beginning of this essay: “[W]hat a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of a scene.”

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A short guide for writing an essay.

Essays are written for a variety of purposes. A particular essay can talk about one’s childhood and another one can be to argue a certain point. There is no limit on what can be talked about in an essay. However, the one thing that would define it is its revolution around a particular theme.

Just in case you are wondering:

Essay: An essay is a piece of writing (usually a few thousand words) that delivers the authors own, more or less witty, perspective on a scientific, cultural or social phenomenon. The criteria of scientific methodology can be neglected; so the writer has relatively great freedom to express his personal view.

Servicey: Servicey is urban slang, and describes the capacity (or attitude) of a person, to tell other people information, which they think those want to know before they even ask.

Structure of an Essay

You have to use a certain structure when writing an essay; especially if you want to have a perfect ending. You have to follow a certain procedure so that you can end your essay without leaving your readers in suspense. There is no way you can write a perfect end if you do not have the beginning and the middle. Your conclusion depends especially on the middle part of an essay. That is why you need to know how to write your beginning and the middle before you can draw the best conclusion.

An essay involves three significant parts:

• The Introduction
• The Conclusion

The introduction is designed to lead people into the subject and simplify what the essay paper will particularly deal with. It usually involves one passage, but this will depend on the time you invest in the composition and the amount of history the situation needs. The beginning will contain key introductory phrase (or, if necessary, more than one).

Each idea in the body is offered in an individual passage and developed with assisting proof by means of information, descriptions, or similar, and supported with examples where appropriate or necessary. This is where the bulk of your essay writing lies. It is in the body where you will present your facts; discuss them and present supporting information to ascertain their validity. You can never write a body if you have no information about the topic. You need to do research so that you can get the right information. A perfectly written essay paper body will help closing your argument / statement.

One major objective of an essay is to present all relevant points before making any thoughts on the result of the discussion/argument. And what does an excellent conclusion look like? The framework of any essay work is not as formalized as that of a report. Like reviews, however, you must still offer a disagreement or controversial point of view that is clearly sustained.

Basic instructions

As you write your essay there several things that you should put in mind if you want to write the best essay. One of the factors that you should consider is the purpose of your essay. Why are you writing the essay? If the essay is about college application you need to put this in mind as you ponder of ideas for your essay. Never diverge and write irrelevant things.

The other factor is your grammar. This is important because if your grammar is poor, it will be hard for your essay to be understood.  You need to employ the art of using the perfect tense.  Tense is the backbone of all writings and many students fail here. They might have the best ideas or points, but their tense will undo all these.

The perfect tense to use in your essay writing include the present perfect, the past perfect, and the future perfect tense. The present perfect tense is to form the present perfect tense; using the auxiliary verb has or have with the past participial. Use the present perfect tense to show an action:

• That was completed at an indefinite time in the past
• That began in the past and continues into the present.

For example:

• He has left without his books. (Action completed at indefinite time)
• We have worked here for ten years. (Action continuing into the present)

The past perfect tense is to form the past perfect tense by using the auxiliary verb had with the past participle. Use the past perfect tense in your essay to show an action in the past that came before another action in the past.

I had already finished when you called. (Action preceding another past action)

The future perfect tense is to form the future perfect tense by using the auxiliary verbs will have or shall have with the past participle. Use the future perfect tense to show an action in the future that will occur before another future action or time.

The above tense suggestion will help you write a grammar free essay that has uses the correct tenses. All you need to do is to adhere to each of the category.

Another point to note is to check on the grammar and spelling. You may have very enlightening information but if spelling mistakes are present, it can be a major turn off and distraction even to the passionate readers. To avoid this, it is advisable to use a competent word processing program that automatically checks the spelling for you. If you opt for handwritten material, proof reading should be done by a person well versed in grammar and spelling.

Writing Guide

Check our How to write Good guide for writing tips. And if you can not find the right word, check out this great list of Synonyms which is sorted by categories. See also this helpful article about Alignment Rules for attributes of a letter

Effective Application Essays

After examining your essay paper with the key elements and asking for views from your instructor and your friends, you should have at least one or two exciting composition issues. Consider the following suggestions.

These Are The Basic Features Of An Application Essay

• “ Diversity ” is the best trick to improve your essay paper. Every institution, expert educationist, or college student, wants to increase variety. For this purpose, so many people are inclined to assert what makes them different. However, basically saying you are an assassin won’t add you any points. While a essay makes use of this information and probably is your best subject idea, you must finalize the issue by dealing with your own individual attributes and how you changed preconception, treated cultural ostracism, etc. You must display strongly to your individual attributes, pursuits, inspirations, etc. Address, particularly how your format will promote the world view in university, the instructional atmosphere, and self-confidence.
• Be genuine , but not for honesty’s cause. Unless you are a truly good writer, your best and enthusiastic writing will be about activities that actually took place. Write a composition about your lifestyle that shows your character.
• Don’t refer to your weakness unless you need to describe them anyway. You want to create a good perception , showing all the good attributes that will increase your chance of being accepted. Why to confess to weakness and failures when you can instead display your strengths. It not your weakness that will make you essay great but your strength. So list them all in your essay paper.

Improve Your Technique

Being proficient in writing essays is a skill that can be learned. Unfortunately many students who set out to write don’t have the slightest clue what to do. However with a little research, it is possible to improve on their skills. This article sets out to highlight various tips that anyone can apply when writing.

• The first thing is make a list of all the keywords and ideas that have to be discussed. This will enable them to execute a logical flow of thoughts when writing. It will also ensure that none of the important points are left out.
• Secondly, as you set out to write, organize the whole work into sections . That means that there should be an introduction, body and ending. All these parts should be highly impressionable on the reader.
• Thirdly, the best way to make writing essays interesting is to include stories that try to explain your points . These stories are usually called anecdotes and are used by professional writers especially in the beginning to captivate the audience. These stories should encourage the reader to relate with what is being discussed. The reader should be able to relate at what is being discussed at a personal level. These stories also contribute to the whole essay becoming an immersive experience to the reader.
• Finally make sure that your work has educational value in that it will give the audience the incentive to see things differently. If someone is trying to explain for example the downside of female circumcision, they should leave the reader with no doubt as to why it is unacceptable.

Remember, as a student, writing essays needs not be a drag. With a little help and a change in attitude, it can become a whole lot enjoyable.

Final Words

Although essays tend to be subjective in its point of view, it is different from mere rambling. A certain theme holds the essay together and serves as the point of writing one. If you want to write an essay , below are some steps to get you started.

• Have something to say. This is important in any essay that you write. Again, the theme of your essay is where much of its weight can be found.
• Be able to condense your theme into a single statement. This is called the thesis statement.
• Do your research. While writing an essay is a subjective exercise, you need to have background information to support your arguments. This helps in convincing your readers about the point that you are pushing for.
• Write your essay. This is the point why you’re reading this how-to guide, right? When writing your essay, begin with an introduction that will pique your readers’ interest. If you cannot grab them by the first paragraph, you may have a hard time convincing them to read the next, much less, the entire piece.
• Your succeeding paragraphs should be logically structured. They should also support your thesis statement. In other words, each paragraph should contribute to the essay as a whole. Otherwise, you are wasting ink, white space and your readers’ time.
• Finally, edit your work. This is the most surefire way of having a well-written essay. If Rome wasn’t built in a day, an essay isn’t done in one sitting. Unless of course, a lousy one is what you’re aiming for.

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Formal Letter Writing: How and What for

How to write a professional letter in English: features and nuances

Essay-editor team wants to share useful tips on the creation of formal letters, their styles, structure, proper formatting, greeting, and closure. Official letter creation can make many people worry about their writing skills and poor vocabulary for official correspondence. However, if you adhere to our recommendations, you will manage to create an excellent business letter and you can always rely on support of our qualified paper editor anytime.

Proper official letter format

The composition of official letters usually consists of such components as:

• Letter heading – your name and address
• Name and address of receiver.
• Sender’s initials.
• Attachments.

General writing rules

Use proper format and greeting. There are particular standards of official letter formatting in English, though some deviations are also acceptable (for instance, when it goes about correspondence in British English and American English).

It is crucial to make a good first impression when a letter is started. Use proper greeting for this purpose. If needed, in case if a letter is not in electronic form, mention the address and last name of a receiver in upper right corner. Then start writing.

Make sure that receiver’s full name is correctly written. Use “Dear Sir/Madam” in case when it is unknown whom exactly you appeal to.

How to start a formal letter: samples of the forms of address

• Dear Sir/Madam
• Dear Mr. Green
• Dear Jack Johnson
• Dear Customer

As a rule, official letters are of an official nature and the manner of speech should always be respectful. Inquiry letters always maintain modal verbs to make a request as much respectful as possible. For instance, it is rude to say: “I want to see you in our office on Wednesday”, it would be better: “Could you be so kind and visit our office on Wednesday?”. Letters of complaint should be respectful as well and not too exciting. For instance, if delivering was delayed and, consequently, it delayed the production, it would be correct to say: “The delivering was six weeks delayed and that led to delay of our production transportation”. If you inform about sad news or apologize, it is necessary to indicate nicely and tactfully the reason for a problem. Do you want to know more about a complaint letter? Follow the link then: http://essay-editor.net/blog/complaint-letter-make-everyone-take-you-seriously .

Mention your aim

In an English official letter, the aim of address is clarified in the first paragraph, after that the main idea follows. There are 3 common features of formal letter types:

• They clarify the essence and answer the question “what is it?”.
• They are concise and not rude.
• They contain positive words: “thank you”, “welcome”, “glad”, “obliged”, “appreciate”, “congratulate”, “successfully”, “approve”, etc.

Formal business letter format: tips on official letter creation

1.   When creating your letter, it is necessary to adhere to simplicity and targeting so that the essence of your letter would be clear.

2.   Try to speak simply.

3.   The finest option to begin a letter is to present its aim. It is called a direct approach, and it defines the tone of the whole letter, gripping the reader’s interest.

4.   However, if your letter contains sad news, the straightforward approach is inappropriate. Instead, use an indirect approach, pointing at sad news in the 2nd or 3rd paragraph.

5.   Greeting and introductory part should be respectful. Always be attentive to the attempts and sensitivity of a reader.

6.   It is required to present the nuances of a problem after introduction.

7.   Inform about the causes for a made decision.

8.   Keep single line spacing and double spaces between paragraphs, use left-alignment, and adhere to shorter sentences and precise paragraphs.

9.   Be honest and treat with respect time of a person who will read it: this person is working (most likely) so cut to the chase.

10. Put the needs of other people ahead of yours. Instead of speaking about what you expect from them, say what they can get from you.

11. Be careful and attentive with the name of a receiver (either person or company).

12. Make your tone casual but professional, do not be too official.

13. Avoid slang, excessive self-confidence, arrogance, and boasting.

14. Prefer passive voice along with personal pronouns. Read more about active and passive sentence structure on our blog.

15. A request for action should finalize your writing every time.

16. Leave space after greeting and before closure.

17. Make double space between the final sentence and ending part.

18. If necessary, leave 4 or 5 spaces for a hand-written signature.

19. Official letter should be printed on white paper of A4 format.

20. Finalize letter professionally and respectfully as well.

We want to emphasize an essential point: bear in mind to check your letter for errors at least twice. Of course, the best option is to delegate this task to the specialists. Send us your letter and Essay-editor professionals will polish it.

E-mail advantages

An electronic business letter is much easier to create than an ordinary one. However, it happens sometimes that a letter does not open – this is a disadvantage, of course. It is better to make sure that a letter will be delivered. For this purpose, control the process and enable the reverse notification option.

Also, it can be required to submit a letter with a hand-written signature, documents approved by the seal, scanned papers, etc. (it depends on the purpose and receiver). Here the decision is obvious: send a regular one by post. However, remember that e-mail is money-saving (it is usually free unlike regular letters that require to pay for the envelope, stamps, delivering, and so on) and environmentally friendly (unlike those that require using paper). Remember about the trees!

Also, bear in mind our on-line writing agency: here you can specify all the nuances related to official English directly from experienced experts: http://essay-editor.net/blog/a-tricky-task--how-to-proofread-my-document-properly . Take your chances and be acknowledged!

Formal letter closure

The final part of your written masterpiece should contain something like “Do not hesitate to contact us in case you have any questions”, or if you attach additional materials, use such words and phrases as: “I am enclosing…” or “Please find the attached …”

Closure mainly depends on the relationships with the receiver. Prefer “Yours faithfully” if the receiver is unknown to you, and “Yours sincerely” for the receivers you are familiar with. Do not confuse them! Your sincerity for a strange person may seem pretty suspicious and cause embarrassment.

For less official letter, it is allowed using: “Best regards” or “Kind regards”. When finishing your writing, it is required to mention your last name, title, and sign the paper. Once again, we emphasize the importance of checking the letter for errors before sending it. Our team of professional editors and proofreaders will cope perfectly with the task.

After the closure phrase, put comma and write your data in a new line: a) name, b) e-mail address, c) phone number. Of course, there should be no “Later”, “Thanks”, “TTYL”, “Warmly”, “Cheers”, and other similar colloquialisms.

Formal letter writing in English can make many people worry about their skills and scarcity of vocabulary for formal correspondence. However, if you follow our tips and recommendations, you will create an outstanding formal letter in English. Trust is above all!

The structure of a typical letter is the sequence of the following elements:

• Name and Address of Recipient
• Typist initials

Left-hand side: recipient’s details in this order

• [Company Letterhead]
• [Recipient’s Name, Position]
• Dear [Name]:

This is the most typical way to present the details of a recipient when creating a formal letter. It can vary depending on the type of letter, however, in most cases it is more or less the same.

Proofread it

It is always obligatory to check a letter for mistakes, misprints and other possible inaccuracies. When you finish to create it, it is better to wait for a while, to have some rest, and only then to check the text. However, the best option is to appeal to a professional proofreader or another specialist who will check your letter competently. Our specialists are the best assistants, and they will be happy to help you. Thus, we would want to share what points you need to focus on when checking a letter for mistakes.

Once again, do not forget to recheck your letter for mistakes (at least twice).

Of course, it is always better to turn to a professional proofreader who will do it for you quickly and properly. You will not waste time but get a great error-free text that will make a positive impression on a reader.

How to check a letter in English?

Here are some more pieces of advice for better formal letter writing. These are the tips for a final check before sending:

• Check if the font size, style and color are appropriate for a particular type of formal letter.
• Have a break – drink a cup of coffee and, after that, reread your text again.
• A good tip is to print a letter and read it aloud. It will help notice the mistakes and some excessive elements that can be removed or shortened.

Read your text backwards, starting with the last sentence and moving to the first one.

So you have done it. Now read text carefully to make sure that you have presented your thoughts clearly and precisely. That is it! Send your letter to its receiver without hesitation.

Read, in addition:

How to Carry On Business Correspondence

15 Ways To Expand Your Vocabulary

Exceptional Personal Statement Services Just for You

The Finest Academic English Editor Online