How to Write an Academic Essay?

The ability to effectively express one’s thoughts is a skill that is highly useful for almost any modern person. There could be many practical tools that can help with developing this skill. One of them is the essay, or more precisely, the process of writing an essay in academia.

What is an Academic Essay?

An academic essay, more commonly referred to as a college essay, is a highly flexible and creative form of academic paper. It is already not a high school narrative essay (that all students are used to writing in high schools), but not a research paper or a full-fledged thesis yet. 

A college essay is something in the middle, a transitional form that still offers plenty of creativity, though has to follow a somewhat strict format and aim to discover (research) new knowledge or insights.   

An academic essay format requires strict adherence to academic writing standards, including the use of proper language and a defined referencing style (e.g., APA, Chicago, or MLA).

The main types of academic essays include:

Adhering to an Academic Essay Structure

Every essay begins with a structure, typically consisting of three distinct parts:

• The introduction is constructed in a manner that transitions from the general to the specific. In the introduction, you need to carefully plan how to start an academic essay and how to develop it: what will be discussed in your essay, what issue or problem will be considered, and in what sequence and chronology your thoughts will be presented. For example:

This essay aims to investigate the impact of solar radiation on skin cancer. In particular, we will review the physics of solar radiation and why it can lead to certain types of cancers.

• The body reveals your thoughts and ideas in more detail. Typically, this block is divided into several paragraphs: each of them contains an answer to the question (or justification of the problem) that is addressed in the essay. In the main body, it is important to show how deeply you understand the subject and how well you know the topic. 

Support your suppositions and statements with logic, arguments, examples, and words of authoritative (in a particular field) people. For example:

Robert Gilbert, a renowned British oncologist, claims that the main factor contributing to skin cancer is the intensity of received radiation, rather than the duration of exposure to sun rays. 

If the arguments you bring in your essay take up more than one paragraph, break each complex section into several parts. In this case, you can end up having 5-10 logically related paragraphs or a classic list of thesis points.

• The conclusion, or the final part traditionally sums up the results. While the introduction goes from the general to the specific, for the conclusion, the opposite is true: from the specifics, the author moves on to general conclusions. 

Briefly repeat your arguments, outline the main ideas and thoughts that you came to in the process of researching the topic, and conclude with a general conclusion. The brighter the ending, the better. It should be light, short, and slightly provocative. For example:

As the current essays shows, it is not the sun radiation as such that leads to skin cancer, but the inability of the Earth’s magnetic field to effectively shield the lower layers of the atmosphere.

Academic Essay Writing Tips

Here are a few useful tips to make writing your college essay easier and more effective:

• Each essay must have a goal, a task. Develop a habit of taking down all the thoughts and ideas that pop up in your mind while pondering over the topic of your future essay. Later, use these notes as the basis – the skeleton of the text.
• Start your essay with the main body. Only after completing the main and final sections, proceed to the introduction. It is easier to write the beginning of an essay when the main part and conclusion with arguments are already finalized.
• Quotes are a great way to add variety and depth to your essay. Besides, they increase the amount of text when necessary. If you insert a quotation (always mention the author), make sure to back it up with a context – an eyeliner or your comment.
• The beauty of the college essay is not in long and complex sentences. The simpler they are, the greater the value of the text. Shorten overly long sentences and paragraphs. Don’t forget about the punctuation marks: the fewer there are in a sentence, the better.
• When editing, find words and phrases whose absence will not affect the meaning of the essay. Feel free to remove this unnecessary “junk”. Such “cleaning” will only improve the quality of the text. Spend at least 25% of your time on editing and proofreading.
• Do not overuse clichés and banal expressions. It is better to use a complementary explanatory phrase than to overload your essay with metaphors and clichés.
• Be open and thankful for any academic essay help that you can get from your friends and colleagues. It’s also a good idea to search the Web for a relevant academic essay example before you begin writing your own.

The Key Takeaway

Writing an academic essay can be a road with many bumps, especially if that’s your very first experience of that kind. However, in the medium and long run, the skills and knowledge you obtain will serve you well in your academic and professional life.

College essays are popular types of academic assignments for students. Its main beauty is that it is the work with a high degree of freedom: you are not limited by rigid formatting boundaries and painful topic selection. For all its worth, an essay is an effective tool for developing the ability to formulate thoughts and ideas easily and convey them to others.