Helpful Essay Strategies

If you haven't began already, many of you are going to be assigned more and more essays.  Here are some strategies I think will really help you out.  The first thing you will want to do is organize your ideas. Once you have your ideas organized in your head, you can choose to either organize them on paper in outline form, or diagram form, whatever works best for you. We will go over each of these organization strategies in class.  You can find step by step instructions for creating your outline or diagram at http://lklivingston.tripod.com/essay/outline.html.  The next step is writing your thesis statement, which essentially tells the reader what your essay is about.  There are two parts of the thesis, first you will state your topic, and then you will state your point.  For more help with formulating a thesis statement, check out http://lklivingston.tripod.com/essay/thesis.html.  Next, you will want to write the body, first write out the main points, then the subpoints, and then elaborate on the subpoints.  Here will show you exactly what you should be including in the body of your essay http://lklivingston.tripod.com/essay/body.html.  After that, you will start to form the introduction and the conclusion.  Beginning with an attention grabber and then summarizing your essay is a good place to start.  The conclusion does need to have some strong summarizing sentences, and usually doesn't follow a structure.  We will go over both of these in class.  And the last step is add the finishing touches. Don't forget to read your paper aloud to catch mistakes spell-check can't!  It's easy as that, don't let an essay intimidate you before you start.