Essay writing is a great way of polishing your writing skills, as well as honing your mind to be skilful at presenting arguments. Of course, not all essays have to be argumentative, so you may even experience creative essays and descriptive essays.
Regardless of the type of essay, one thing is certain, it has to be engaging and informative in some way. However, these things are, as we say, pretty vague.
You can understand that the essay needs to provide information, but describing “engagement” is a different beast altogether. Simply put it is the measure of how likely a person is to read the essay till the end.
In this, article, we will teach you some tips for writing such essays in a relatively simple, and straightforward manner. So, let’s get started.
1. Select an Interesting Topic
If you are writing for an institute such as a school, college, or scholarship committee, then chances are the topic is fixed. In that case, there is no need to select an interesting topic, and you have to make do with what you got.
However, on the off-chance, you get an open topic, i.e., you have the choice to choose your own topic, and then choose one that you are personally interested in.
This is really important because as a human being, you are more likely to put in more effort if the topic is to your liking. This means that you will be better suited to research the topic and expound upon it.
According to a study by the University of Southern California, people are more likely to do better at a job if they like it.
The reason stated was that, if you are enjoying the experience, you are more energized, which makes you perform better.
2. Gather Information About Your Topic
Information gathering is one of the most important things that you have to do for writing an engaging and informative essay. This requires that you research your topic in depth.
The most obvious method is to simply go online and do a general search for your topic. From there you can move on to more specific parts and find out information that is not generally known.
You can also consult:
- Books
- Journals
- Newsletters
- Newspaper columns
A great resource is a website called Research Gate. It usually has a lot of free articles available on most topics. You may have to pay for some articles, but usually, things do not come to that, as you can find a free alternative.
When you have a lot of trustworthy information for your essay, you can write about it in a really engaging manner.
You should understand that what makes an essay not engaging is when the reader feels as if they are learning nothing.
3. Create an Outline for Your Essay
Information is nothing if it is not presented appropriately. You need to provide structure to your essay and say things in a guided way.
You have to lead from the main sub-topic to the more specific ones in a smooth, flowing manner.
The best way of doing this is to create an outline for your essay. A typical outline can have the following structure:
“Introduction=> Body => Conclusion”
In the body section, you add more stuff that typically moves from general to specific.
You present information in each section that leads to the next point, and in this way, you can guide your reader to the main point you want to convey to them.
This also makes for an engaging read. A rhythmic progression is very easy to follow for most people. Another thing that outlines do, is that they prevent you from getting sidetracked.
This keeps your content very centred and focused which further boosts your essay’s engagement.
4. Write Short, Readable Sentences and Paragraphs
One of the most important aspects of content engagement is readability. Readability is the level of difficulty that readers face when perusing some written text.
Higher readability means that the reading difficulty is low and vice versa.
Since your essay is supposed to be educating your reader, it has to be understandable. This should make a lot of sense if you think about it this way; how can anyone understand what you’re saying if they can’t even follow your sentences?
Hence, keeping things short is a good idea as most people are able to follow them. This also applies to the paragraphs in your essays.
They should be roughly the same length, and should not span more than five lines. This will improve the engagement of your essay. It will also make it easy for your audience to grasp the information you are providing in your essay.
If you have any trouble keeping your essay readable, then you can try to paraphrase the troublesome parts with external help.
In some cases, you can get either an editor to help you out, and if that’s not possible then you can utilize an online paraphrasing tool. Below you can see a paraphraser improving the readability of a given passage from another blog post of ours.
5. Add Statistics
To make your essay look authentic, you need to add statistics and cite sources. If you claim that something is done a certain way, then you must provide some evidence to back it up.
If your essay is digital, then doing all of this is really easy. You just have to provide a link to the source where you got the information and you are done.
Similarly, you can add some stats to back up your claims and link the study where you got that from.
Even in this article, you have seen that we linked studies and resources to support our points.
If you do not add any sources or statistics, the readers of your essay will not believe your information.
They will be skeptical of your claims as you do not provide any basis for them.
The thing to understand here is that what may be an axiom to you, maybe completely unknown to your reader. Hence, always add stats and sources.
6. Proofread Your Essay Multiple times
This is one of the most important tips in this article. Proofreading your drafts is essential for many reasons. It helps you to:
- Weed out any grammar mistakes
- Fact-check yourself
- Check your essay for plagiarism
The last one is particularly important because believe it or not, people can realize that they read something similar before.
If they suspect that your work is actually copied from somewhere else, then they will not bother to read it.
Apart from that, your teacher (if you are writing an essay for school) may not accept the essay. If you are writing for a journal or a magazine, they will reject your essay.
A scholarship committee will deny you a scholarship if they find out you committed plagiarism. So, do proofread thoroughly.
Once you do find plagiarism, you can get help from a plagiarism-removing tool to make your essay unique. In the image attached below, you can see this happening.
Conclusion
This article taught you some tips for creating an engaging and informative essay.
The thing about providing any kind of information is that you should provide a source for it too. This makes the essay very authentic.
The other tips were mostly about the engagement of the content, such as maintaining readability, removing plagiarism, and following an outline.
Hopefully, you learned something new from this article, and it helps you out in your essay-writing endeavours.
Thanks For Reading
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