Writing Tips for Short and Long Essays

We have already discussed the topic of an essay writing tips, but this time we have decided to focus on writing tips that help you write an extremely short or extremely long essay. It is always much more difficult to write very short or very long essays because such tasks require all the brain cells to be engaged in the thinking process. Suddenly you have to develop a thesis, come up with several arguments and recollect some good examples that may support your point of view. It’s great if you need to write short essay of 300 words, but what to do if you need to write three thousand… You should have even the slightest talent for writing, or you should learn to write about anything.

Well, today we are going to give you several tips on writing very short and very long essays that may be given to you at various stages of your studies. For example, for various standardized tests and exams that are given at different final stages of studies and usually such tests include an essay writing portion.

At first, let us define what an essay is. An essay is a short or a long piece of writing where an author discusses a certain topic, gives proper argumentation, provides examples, or answers a question set out as the major statement of such task. Essay-writing has different goals and purposes depending on its type. As a part of standardized tests essays can be:

• Narrative Essays;
• Descriptive Essays;
• Persuasive Essays;
• Expository Essays;

However, there are many other types of essays that may be given as written assignments at various stages of studies. They are cause and effect essays, compare and contrast essays, definition essays, critical essays. Each type of an essay defines the purpose and, subsequently, the main theme of writing. Usually, such essays are written to learn some new skills and practice already obtained ones. Of course, one of the key goals of every essay writing assignment is the demonstration of skills of spontaneous and creative writing about any kind of topic. This skill will be helpful for your future research and scholarly papers.

Depending on a type of a test or an exam, you may have to write a short essay (250 or 500 words) or a long essay (800-word essay or the five-paragraph essay). However, the five-paragraph essay can be rather short as well. There are many various essay writing tips, and each type depends on a type of assignment, for example, like essay writing assignment of the XAT exam. The PRAXIS I exam writing assignments differ immensely from those given in the XAT, and its essay tips differ respectively. Despite that, in today’s article we are going to discuss tips on writing short essays (a 250-word essay and a 500-word essay) and long essays (a 800-word essay and more). In addition, we will give an overview of the five-paragraph essay writing tips as well.

When you need to write a short essay, it means that you are to complete an extremely time-limited task. Essay writing assignments in standardized tests and exams already contain a topic for an essay, so you just have to come up with an appropriate outline for writing. First, define what type of essay you need to create. For example, whether you need to tell a story, to give a description of something or to give argumentation and so on and so forth. Defining a type of essay makes your task a bit easier. Structure your essay into three paragraphs and limit the number of sentences that provide a precise exposition of your thoughts or a point of view. Write an introduction with the thesis statement in the first sentence. Then, hook your readers with an intriguing idea in the second sentence, and this will represent the introduction of an essay. The next several sentences will constitute the body of your essay where you go on discussing the topic mentioned in the introduction. Here, you provide the best examples, the best arguments, and the best exposition. The conclusion is to summarize everything that you’ve written before. Let your readers know that this discussion comes to its end. The last sentence may well contain some creative finale that suggests an alternative, or contains an open question. So, you kind of end this story, but your reader goes on pondering about it. Ideally, if you have enough time, you should proofread your work, in case if you need to make some changes. At least, try to check your work for grammar and style mistakes.

There are many articles that contain writing tips on essay builder. Nonetheless, many such articles give a common structure of an essay, which is the introduction, the body, and the conclusion. The five-paragraph essays and longer ones have a slightly different structure, such as:

• The Introduction;
• The Body:
• The 1^st Body Paragraph;
• The 2^nd Body Paragraph;
• The 3^rd Body Paragraph;
• The conclusion (it can also contain several paragraphs)

The structure given above is called the five-paragraph essay because it consists of the five constituent elements that tell a story, give a description, an argumentation, or answer a question. Even if you need to write the five-paragraph essay, you need to define a type of essay, just as the previous time. Longer essays need more examples and more arguments to support your point of view. As is the case with short essays, longer ones should also contain a hook that makes readers want to go on reading, to know more than they know at the moment. This hook is to be directly connected with the introduction paragraph of your essay. If in the introduction you present the thesis statement, then in the first paragraph of the body you develop the topic. The first and the second paragraphs of the body should contain the best examples and arguments while the third paragraph contains worse examples or suggests an alternative for the topic. Another important detail that you have to remember is that every paragraph of the body must be implicitly connected with the previous and the next paragraph. Every paragraph must contain a hook that provides a continuation of the thought. The last sentence of the third paragraph must let your readers know that this is the last chapter in the story, and you are going to sum everything up.

Conclusion is the paragraph where you summarize the most interesting points that you have mentioned in the previous part of the essay. Here, you restate the main idea of the essay, your thesis statement. View this question from another perspective. If it is necessary, once again answer a question whether you agree or disagree with the main idea of the essay and repeat why it is so. The last sentence is to let readers know that this is the end. Longer essays writing tasks grant more time for reviewing the written material to be able to make amendments. Imagine that you are a person who sees this particular piece of writing for the first time, and think how you perceive this essay. Would you consider it a good essay, or even an excellent one?

If this task is to be submitted several days later, in such a case let your eyes rest from the work to be able to proofread later on. It’ll be perfect if you can give your essay to your friend to read it. Another person can see something that you’ve missed.

In our next articles, we will certainly focus on writing tips related to passing the XAT exam and the PRAXIS I exam. We hope that these writing tips you can use even when it comes to writing a college application essay, but it’ll be another story, won’t it?