Eduardo Moreno

ESOL1309 DrKline

10/05/2004

The Art of Writing an Essay

Every single student of UTEP needs to write essays. In modern life, communication plays a major role in everyone's life, so it is very important to know how to communicate your ideas correctly on a written text. In order to achieve this, there is an easy. Three-step technique to write a good and coherent essay. The three steps are: planning, writing and revising.

The first step is planning. First you need to choose a topic. Think about why you chose that topic. You have to develop your own opinion about it. Try to visualize your essay finished. Imagine people's reaction to it. You have to search for information in many places: books, magazines, WebPages. Then, you must organize all the information you have about the topic you chose. List all your ideas for the essay in a sketch. Then think about what you're going to write, how you are going to explain it and which examples you are going to give. Once this is done, you are ready to write the essay.

The second step is writing. You need to look and review all of the ideas in your sketch. Then you begin by writing on the first paragraph the introduction, in which you have to explain the main theme of the essay. In this paragraph, you have to tell the reader the thesis of your essay. Next, you write the body paragraphs. Each body paragraph should treat only one main idea, and each one of them should be relevant to the topic and have unity. Finally, you write a conclusion, in which you first need to restate the essay's thesis, and then write your final thoughts about the topic. If you are writing a serious and formal essay, it is a good idea to avoid using contractions and etceteras.

Once your essay is written and done, you go to the third step: revising. You must see if there are any mistakes or grammatical errors. You have to check if your introduction has a clear topic sentence, make sure that your body paragraphs communicate their ideas correctly, and see if your entire essay has unity and coherence. Also, you can see if you can change some things or words in order to make your essay more understandable. You can rewrite, change the order of the paragraph, give more examples or explain more certain ideas. It is a good idea to ask someone else to read your essay, so you can have a second opinion about it. Also, he or she can tell you if there are any mistakes that you haven't noticed.

This step-by-step guide is designed to help you write a good and decent essay. Of course, it is not an official guide, and you can make other techniques to help you write essays. Just don't forget to be original. Don't go just repeating someone else's ideas; think for yourself and put a bit of your personality in every essay you write.