 Essay writing, step-by-step with examples. Do you just hate writing essays? We all do. Here's a step-by-step approach to help you get through the process. Watch this video to the very end for some great tips and ideas. In English class, you're often asked to write essays following a standard format. While you seldom find this style outside of English classes, it is helpful to know how the format works and why teachers often assign it. Let's take a look at the standard essay format and some variations on it for real life. Where do you begin? It all starts with ideas. The ideas come from you inside your head. But in order to see the ideas, it's best to put them on paper. This is called brainstorming. And it is essential to the writing process. Brainstorming. Write down everything that comes to your mind about the topic. It doesn't have to look pretty. Just get your ideas out there where you can see them. This is the first step in the overall writing process. As you can see, it's like a staircase starting from pre-writing, brainstorming, going through writing, then post-writing until you get to the final product. See the step-by-step approach here. Brainstorming is the first step in the process. Sometimes you have too many ideas from your brainstorm. What do you do? You might want to put them in categories to see how they relate to each other. You can use various graphic organizers to classify your ideas. Put them in boxes. Put them in circles. Make lists. Here are some examples of graphic organizers. This one is boxes and listing. Let's say your topic is Olympic sports. There are so many different kinds of sports. You can make lists of different sports, such as summer sports and winter sports, categorize them into such things as indoor sports or outdoor sports. This is an exercise in helping you see how things fit together. Then you can start to choose which ones you want to talk about. Here are some other graphic organizers. For example, let's say your topic is what do I want out of life? Well, you can think like Benjamin Franklin. Health, wealth, wisdom, and add fame to that. You can make a circle or an oval to gather all of your ideas together. Let's go from general to specific here. Subdivide your ideas to include more of them. So you could take this oval or circle diagram and add different ideas to it. You can talk about the benefits and costs of health, wealth, wisdom, and fame. Put more of your ideas within the oval or the circle diagram. The next step in the process is selecting ideas. You see here, this is still in the pre-writing stage. So we're down at the bottom of the staircase still. This is what we call narrowing down. You have the topic, what do I want out of life? Let's say you don't have time to write about all of these different topics. So you're just going to choose a couple of topics. So let's say we delete or eliminate the wealth and wisdom ideas and focus on two of them, health and fame. You can eliminate and highlight even further. Let's say you just want to choose one of those topics. So you take out health and focus on fame. And you're going to talk about the costs and the benefits of fame, if that's what you want out of life. So this helps you focus and narrow down your topic to something that's a little bit more manageable for a shorter paper. The third step is organizing ideas. And this is where you take the ideas that you have and put them in some kind of structure. Now, this is for the overall essay. One type of organization is what we call a box diagram. And we put containers for all of these ideas in a certain order. Now, you can see from this box diagram that it follows a certain pattern. We start with the introduction, which takes us from some general ideas and gets us to a specific thesis statement or main idea for our paper. Then each of the next boxes is going to be one paragraph of our essay and contain those ideas there. And then the last box will include the conclusion. We'll talk a little bit more about introduction and thesis statement later. Another way to organize your essay is what I call the skeleton outline, where you just list the points and the support for each of those points within just a few sentences or a few phrases. Start again with the introduction. Point 1, support A, B, and C. Point 2, support A, B, and C. Point 3, support A, B, and C. And then conclusion. So this is just for the structure. You'll put the meat on the bones later. OK, it's time to write. This is the biggest step in the process, it's composing. This is where you write down your ideas more in sentences and put the words that you want into your writing. It's time to begin writing. Look at your brainstorming and outline of ideas. Then write words and sentences to bring your ideas to life. Add content and substance to your structure. Like we say, put the meat on the bones. This will probably take a little bit more time because you have to do some more thinking and put everything together. Let's talk a little bit about paragraph structure and more. You want to put your ideas into paragraphs. Here are some tips for doing that. You'll need to use transition words to connect ideas between paragraphs. We'll talk about this a little bit later. Also, paragraphs contain what we call topic sentences, which typically come at the tops of paragraphs and the details follow. The topic sentences are the main ideas of the paragraphs. Then below that, you have the supporting ideas in each paragraph. And types of supporting ideas may include examples, specific details, facts, evidence, anecdotes, which mean short stories, illogical analysis. We'll look at some examples of these later. Step five is revising. After you've written your essay in a draft form, or sometimes we call that a rough draft, then you're going to take that writing and revise it. Sometimes you want to wait just a little bit of time to think about it some more before revising. What do you do in the revision stage? Well, sometimes you go through various drafts or versions of your paper. Your ideas won't be written perfectly the first time. Revise them to make them better and easier for the reader to understand. What can you do to revise your essay? Well, here are some things you can do. You can add ideas, subtract or omit, eliminate ideas, move ideas around, clarify ideas with words and sentence structure, grammar, polish or refine your ideas. I like to say TTT. This takes time. Make sure you leave enough time to revise your paper. Here are the types of revisions that we mentioned before. I put them in different colors so you can see what you might do with a draft of your paper to make it better. Let's say your first draft looks like this and you want to add something to it. So I put the things that we added in green. Maybe we want to add a sentence to the bottom of the second paragraph. Sometimes you want to take something out so we might wish to delete a section of a paragraph and then find it down at the bottom. We have refine. Maybe we need to change some of the words or rephrase some of the sentences. And also you might want to move things around within your paper. Maybe you can take a sentence from the introduction and put it later on down in the paper. There are a lot of things you can do to revise your essay. Step number six, getting feedback. Over here on the right, it has two kinds of feedback, peer feedback and teacher feedback. And these can be important in helping you get your paper to the final stage. Sometimes it's good to have others' opinions on your writing. Ask your fellow students, peers, or colleagues to look over your paper. They might be able to give you some helpful insights. Sometimes your teacher might wish to see a rough draft of your paper before you submit the final essay. He or she can also provide some good tips and feedback for improvement. Finally, the last stage is editing ideas. This is right before the final product. This is where you want to make sure everything is perfect before you turn it in. Here are some things you can do for final checks. Proofread, check your ideas again to make sure you don't have any mistakes. Read it over again and again to make sure you've gotten all the errors out of it. Editing means checking for format. That's how the paper's going to appear. Mechanics, which mean punctuation and capitalization, things like that. Grammar, of course, sentence structure, verbs, different kinds of phrasing and wording. Spelling is important, check for that. Also, check for typos. Typos are mistakes in typing. Sometimes that happens. Think about the essay format. Do you need a title or subtitles? Double check everything before you turn it in. A good technique is to read your paper out loud. This is what I call double input. When you just read it silently, you only see it with your eyes. But if you read it out loud, you see it with your eyes and hear it with your ears. That helps you catch some of the mistakes that you don't see with your eyes. Finally, you're going to submit your essay. We like to show you a sample of a typical five paragraph essay. This is written by a college freshman in response to the question, should a college student own a car? We'll take you step by step through the process of brainstorming, organizing, composing, revising and editing. And we'll also use a graphic organizer to help you see how the ideas are put together in the essay. Okay, let's look at the example. The topic is should a student own a car? So this person has decided to write down in a graphic organizer some ideas for and some ideas against. So you notice that they've categorized them into two sections here. So some ideas for owning a car. It's fun, convenient. It's cool, you can be popular. You can help other people. You have transportation anytime you want it. On the other hand, some ideas against owning a car would be, of course, expenses. It's gonna cost a lot of money for insurance and repairs. You could have a lot of car trouble, accidents. Other people might wanna borrow it and sometimes you become a taxi driver for your friends. Step two, we're going to select one side. Now, sometimes you can write about both sides but for a simple essay, you probably want to just take one side because that's all the space and time you have for a short essay. So this student decided to choose the con side which means a student shouldn't own a car. And you'll notice that they circle these ideas over here and they decided to eliminate one of the ideas which is accidents. They say, well, let's not talk about that. Let's talk about just three or four of the other items. So the focus is going to be on a student should not own a car and then the student will give the reasons why they shouldn't own a car. Step three in the process, of course, is organization. And this person chose to use a skeleton outline. So you can see the introduction. Then he has the first point, which is money or expenses. The second point is car troubles. The third point is others often exploit you or take advantage of you when you have a car and then there's the conclusion at the end. So this is the outline of ideas this person is going to write about. Step four, composing. And you can see the different colors here in the first draft. You see that the top paragraph is the introduction and it focuses down on a thesis statement or the main idea of the paper. Then the student has three different main points within the essay. And the student organizes them into paragraphs with the first sentence as the topic sentence, which comes at the beginning of the paragraph and then the details come later. And then at the bottom, the student has put a conclusion and that's in green. Let's take a look in a little bit more detail at the opening paragraph. Now sometimes an essay or a piece of writing might have more than one opening paragraph in the introduction, but this one, since it's a short essay, only has one introductory paragraph. And what they do with the introduction is they give background information and focus on the thesis statement, which is the main idea of the paragraph, which comes at the bottom of the introduction. To the essay. So you can see how it goes here. The title should university students have their own cars. Then this student starts out talking about the other side of the story and then he turns it around at the end to bring out his idea of by owning a car is not a good idea for students. Step five is revising. And let's just take a look at a single paragraph, one of the paragraphs in the body of the essay. There you see what this student needs to do to revise his or her paper. Okay, we start with the topic sentence and notice that the paragraph is indented at the top five spaces. They have five spaces and then they start the paragraph. This is a typical way of opening a paragraph. So the student starts with the yellow sentence, which of course is the topic sentence. And then he or she has several supporting details below that. But you can see that this paragraph is not perfect. So we're gonna look at different ways that they can revise it. For example, let's look at the bottom part of the original paragraph. And this student decided not to talk about accidents. So they cut that sentence out and they replaced it with another sentence. So we added other ideas, which are in green at the bottom. So we put those into the paragraph. Now look at the middle of the paragraph and you see that they're changing some words here. Or a word in this case. You see the word repair in one line and right below that it's repeated, repair. You don't want to repeat the same word again and again, especially that close. So this person decided instead of writing repair twice, that the student would put the word fix in that place. So they take out the word repair and put fix up there. So you have a little bit of variety, a different word. You're not repeating the same thing. So these are some things that you can do to revise a paragraph. Add words, omit words or sentences and change words or sentences to make them sound a little bit better. Step six, getting feedback. It's good to have another person's opinion. Ask for tips and suggestions. Now you have to be careful with this. This is your paper. You don't have to accept every suggestion that is given to you. Also, do not have other people write your paper for you. That's not the way to learn. Ask your teacher what kind of help is allowed. Sometimes they'll allow your friends to help you with suggestions or ideas. Sometimes they don't want other people helping you with papers. So make sure it's okay with your instructor what kind of help you can get from other people. Finally, the last step here is editing. Proofread, double check for errors. Make sure you go through your paper very carefully to make sure you don't have any major or even minor mistakes and correct them if you see them. Let's take a look at an example here. This student made some mistakes and I put them in kind of a pink color. There were some spelling mistakes. There were some places where there were typos, where there were typing mistakes. And even down at the bottom, can you see the last sentence? What's wrong there? They forgot to capitalize the B on by at the beginning of a sentence. You need to catch all of these kind of mistakes. It's better that you catch them than your teacher catches them because the teacher has the opportunity to grade you and it's better that you make sure your paper is perfect and clean before you turn it in. Finally, submit your paper. Here's the final product. It may be hard to see on this one page but here's what a five paragraph essay might look like on that topic. Now we have a variation, a sample here in something that's a little bit more realistic. It's an article from real life. It follows the same basic principles. As we said earlier, in English classes you are taught to use the standard essay format but that's not commonly used outside of classes but the principles that you learn can be used. So this next article is professionally written and it's published in an online magazine. Note the usage of sentence structure and vocabulary and it follows the same basic format but it doesn't look like a student's essay. Instead of using transition words between the paragraphs it uses numbers and subtitles. The title of this article is The Five Greatest Obstacles to Success and How to Crush Them by Daniel Milstein and it's from Entrepreneur Magazine published in 2017. Look at the article in the description, link in the description below and you can see how this is done professionally. It follows the same principles but it doesn't look like a college or high school essay. It looks a lot more professional and it's done in a very good way using vocabulary and grammar at a higher level than what you might see in some of these typical college essays. So take a look at this article in the link in the description below. Hope that was helpful. If you liked the video, please give it a thumbs up in the comment section below and don't forget to subscribe to our channel. Thanks for watching. Please check out our websites for more information. 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