Top Ten Essay Tips from FYP Writing Coach Molly Rookwood

Essay writing is objectively tough. It’s why we do it—why pretty much all of your professors in pretty much all of your classes will ask you to write a paper. Essays force you to think deeply and critically about a subject, bringing your own interpretation and analysis to the source material. And this is no easy task!

You may, therefore, find the prospect of essay writing daunting. You might be familiar with the feeling of sitting down and staring at a blank page and having no idea what to do next. I’m here with good news: It doesn’t have to be that way!

Yes, essay writing will always be a challenge but it doesn’t have to feel like a completely new task every time you sit down. There are tactics that make essay writing less daunting. Here are few of my favourites.

Getting Started

1. Start early. This might feel like a frustrating first piece of advice, because you’ve likely heard it from people before, often when it’s too late. And while this isn’t always possible—I too have found myself with multiple papers due in the same week and no choice but to hammer them out as quickly as possible—starting early really makes such a difference. You need time to think about your ideas, work through them and decide if you’re on the right track or need to try something else.

2. Choose a topic that excites you. If you want to write something interesting, you as the writer need to be interested. You will have more ideas and more analysis to provide if you choose a topic that intrigues you, so make sure that’s your priority when you decide what to write on.

3. Brainstorm! Don’t try to start with the essay itself. Start by thinking on the page—write down everything you can think of about your topic to work your way to the thing you actually want to talk about.

Structuring Your Essay

4. Start with your essay structure. This is the key element to almost all of my sessions with FYP students. There’s so much pressure on the thesis statement, but your thesis statement is essentially the concise description of your full argument—and that’s hard to write if you haven’t worked through your full argument yet. Consider how your overall argument will evolve through your body paragraphs in a clear flow.

5. Build a progressive argument. In FYP in particular, your professors want an argument that builds. Think about the idea you want to explore and start with the most basic part of it. What do you need to establish before you make your main argument? That’s your first point. Then think about where the idea progresses from that starting point, and you have your second point. Repeat as needed, building each new point upon the previous one, until you get to the crux of your argument. That, your final point, becomes the main point of your thesis statement. That’s your argument.

6. Write your thesis statement. Once you’ve done the work of laying out your argument—and in doing so laying out your essay structure—you have everything you need to write your thesis statement. Write a statement that follows the course of your essay, starting with the necessary foundations that you laid out in your early paragraphs and then concluding with your main argument.

Writing the Paper

7. Think about direction. All your careful planning and the progressive structure you built in Step 5 should help prepare you for this. As you write, think about how you are building an argument that concludes with your thesis statement. How is each new paragraph adding a layer to that thesis? Can you follow the arc of the argument from one to the next? Always keep your thesis in mind, and work towards it as you write.

8. Choose textual examples that support each new claim. The essay should be primarily your thoughts, but if you are analysing a text (especially in a FYP essay), you want to tie your claims to textual evidence any time you introduce a new point. For FYP essays, you should probably be including two to three examples per body paragraph as you work through your ideas. The rest should be you!

After You Write

9. Leave time to check your work. Part of starting early means that you’ll have time after you write to do some editing. Have a friend read your paper to check that your ideas make sense and read your paper aloud (or use Microsoft Word’s Readaloud function) to make sure your sentences all make sense and you didn’t skip any words. Use Microsoft Word or Google Doc’s spellcheck and grammar check function—but be aware that they aren’t always correct, so you should review each suggestion before accepting. Look at your sentences one at a time—in isolation!—to make sure they each convey a complete idea and aren’t sentence fragments. Check your citations to make sure you don’t have anything uncited in your essay or your Works Cited page, and make sure they align with the appropriate citation style (MLA for FYP).

10. Submit it and let it go. Not every paper is going to be your best, and that’s okay. Look, there will always be another paper to write. Do the best you can, revise it after you write, and then move on to whatever is next. Don’t fixate on things you can no longer change—sometimes you just have to accept that you’ve done all you can and send it off. Remember that this paper, whichever paper it is, does not define you as a student, or how smart you are, or your moral worth as a person. Take a breath, look forward, and let it go.

Bonus: Be proud of what you’ve done! This is a learning process, and no matter how this essay went for you, you have learned something. The goal for all university papers is for you to develop your skills for analysis, critical thing, and writing, and every new essay you write is another step on that journey. Try to celebrate what you achieved in your paper, regardless of whether that achievement was simply making it to the finish line or, ideally, turning in a paper that you loved writing. So be proud! With each new paper, you are growing as a writer and a thinker, and that alone is something worth celebrating.

Inset photo: Molly Rookwood, FYP Writing Coach