An Essay itself is a short piece of writing on a particular topic or issue.
In colleges, an essay bears the same meaning, other than it is designed for college students with the objective of getting an academic opinion on a particular matter, which may come from class discussions or lecturers. These college essays may fall into the following categories: Analysis, Argumentative, Persuasive, Causes and Effects, Comparison and Contrast, Definition, and Division and Classification essays.Writing your college essays can be a tiring, confusing and exasperating experience; but it does not have to be if you follow these steps: Prewriting, Drafting and Editing. When you are writing a College Essay, you first need to pre-write. The Prewriting process begins with choosing a topic, it is very important to know exactly what you will be writing about, and that readers also understand what you are communicating in your essay.
After you have chosen your topic, you will need to research this topic, in order to write an intelligent essay and bring out your points precisely.Try to utilize as much academic sources as you can in gathering information on your topic, avoid depending solely on the internet as doing this will produce weak essays which sometimes turn out to be less informative. Ensure that you make notes of useful quotations in relation to your topic this will aid in supporting your main points. Immediately following is the drafting of the essay, at this stage all information that has been gathered in the first stage is compiled and organized in a logical form which includes having an introduction, constructing your thesis statement and dividing your essay into appropriate paragraphs.
Ensure that you have a good conclusion which summarizes the main points of the essay as well as the thesis statement. “Try to complete your essay skillfully, this will leave a good impression on the reader”, this point is strongly supported in Etherton (2001, p. 127). The main purpose of drafting is to bring all the ideas and information you ascertained in your research together and review them to see if there are any new ideas or points you need to include in your essay and to express your thoughts and opinions in clear and precise manner.This process affords you the opportunity to review and make changes before producing the final product.
Lastly is the Editing of the essay; this process may appear last in sequence but is very essential in producing a good graded college essays. The editing process is where checks for complete accuracy will be done. This step should be done carefully to eliminate incorrect grammar, spelling, capitalization and punctuation. It is recommended that after you have done your final check, to get your work proofread by preferably a lecturer who knows what to look for in terms of grammar, spelling and so on.
Minor mistakes may not take away from the quality of the essay; however some readers find these errors distracting. Writing your college Essays can be fun and less stressful if the three main steps discussed in this essay are properly applied. Always remember to Pre-write, Draft and Edit all your Essays in order to produce high quality essays which readers will appreciate and understand, and also ones that your lecturer will find welcoming and satisfying.
