It’s Time to Write That Essay You’ve Been Putting Off: An English Major’s Tips on Crafting a Successful Essay

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As an English major, many of my midterms are essays instead of exams—and this time of the semester, it feels like they all start to pile up.

My recommendation is not to put off writing your essays until the last minute—instead, take your time breaking down each piece of the writing process until you’ve completed it. But even if you aren’t a big procrastinator, actually starting to write can still feel so difficult.

These tips should serve as a helpful guide if you’re not sure how to go about writing a good essay—or want a refresher that walks you through successful strategies for outlining, writing body paragraphs, forming introductions and conclusions, coming up with titles, and revising your work.

1. How to Start: Breaking the Blank Page

Oftentimes the hardest part of writing something is figuring out where to start. I recommend doing some kind of strategy to break the blank page if you’re having trouble. There are a number of ways to do this—freewriting about potential essay topics, making bullet points of an outline (my favorite strategy), or just writing down random things to get your brain kickstarted. Even filling in the MLA headers for an essay can help populate the page and free you up to start actually thinking about what you want to write.

One of the ways to structure an essay outline is by describing the topic, background information, and sources used for each section.

2. Body Paragraphs: Finding and Scaffolding Quotes/Arguments

For me, the easiest way to write an essay is to start specific and work my way out towards more general statements. Finding quotes or arguments for each body paragraph establishes my structure for the essay. Then, I consider what quote or argument to begin my essay with and how to strategically order my arguments for smooth transitions between paragraphs. Each body paragraph starts by stating the general argument that it serves to prove, and then uses evidence and analysis to support it. The last couple of sentences wrap up the argument while connecting to and introducing the next paragraph.

3. Introduction: Hook and Preview

After writing my body paragraphs, I zoom out to write the introduction. The introduction is my favorite part of an essay to write because it’s an opportunity to look back at the bulk of what I want to communicate and find out how to successfully launch my reader into it. What do they need to know to be able to get something out of my essay? The first couple of sentences should serve as a hook (such as a relatable question, interesting related data point, or quick personal anecdote) to draw your reader in. Then, you can establish the topic and preview how your essay addresses it. Your final sentence of the introduction usually functions as a sort of thesis statement to summarize in one sentence what the rest of the essay will cover.

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4. Conclusion: Review and Takeaways

The conclusion can be hard to write because you want to say something meaningful, but you should have really already said everything you needed to say in the essay before this point. In my opinion, a good conclusion briefly reviews each important point in your essay and then spins it back to the reader (a nice mirror of how you may have started your essay if you used a relatable question to draw your reader in). The conclusion is not just about stating what has already been said but leaving your reader with a sense of how they should be changed. How should their perception of the world have shifted? What should they do about it? How can they apply this information to their life going forward?

5. Wrapping Things Up: The Power of the Title

Don’t underestimate the power of a good title! A title is the bow that wraps your story together. It’s also the biggest attention grabber of your essay—think about how many articles you’ve clicked on just because they had an interesting title. Whether it’s surprising, comedic, relatable, or inspiring, your title is your chance to bring readers in with as few words as possible. One of my favorite titles I ever wrote was “No, Drake, You Are Not a Lesbian Too: Problematic Media Representation of Queer Women”—a nod to popular culture and a fun joke, but also a sincere description of my essay as a whole.

6. Revision: Reading and Revisiting

This is the step that many students skip, but it’s just as important as every other part of essay writing. Before you submit your essay, you should revise it. And this doesn’t mean just glancing over it again. This means reading it out loud to find out what sentences work and which are sticky. Critically comb through each sentence to make sure that there are no typos, it accurately communicates your ideas, and it reads smoothly. Ideally, this also takes place on a separate day(s) from the majority of your drafting work, so you can revisit your writing with fresh eyes.

Breaking down each piece of essay writing from outline to revision should help structure and strengthen your essays going forward. But no matter how stuck you feel, the most important piece of advice I have is this: just start. You will thank yourself later!

If you are ever in need of writing help, the CHC writing coach, Ellen Williams, is available by appointment or during Drop-In Writing sessions on Wednesdays from 2-4 p.m. in the CHC Hub (Conference Room 235).