HOW CAN I IMPROVE MY ESSAY WRITING SKILLS?

How can I improve my essay writing skills?

Read lots of very good essays. A good place to find these essays is in “Best American Essays.” A new edition is published each year. I seldom buy the latest edition because they tend to be expensive. I wait until a past year’s edition is down to one cent plus postage in amazon.com.

Op ed (Opposite the editorial) pages in newspapers are a good place to find some great short essays. I like to read articles by Leonard Pitts jr. and David Brooks. Pitts won the Pulitzer for his op ed articles. I was assigning him to my writing classes before he won the Pulitzer for commentary in 2004.

These writers often use personal experiences in their columns.

Think about things that have happened to you and what they mean. How are these universal themes? We have all lost good friends and pets. We’ve suffered unfairness. Write about an incident in your life that changed you in some way. What challenges have you faced?

Practice writing essays in a notebook or a journal. Keep practicing. Know the importance of revision. Reread and rework your essays until they are as good as you can make them.

HOW DO I WRITE A TOPIC SENTENCE?

How do I write a topic sentence?

Think of a main idea as an umbrella. It’s usually one sentence long. It covers everything else in your essay. The main idea itself should be a statement that has to be proved and it is also called a thesis statement. It should invite examples, definitions, and comparisons. Some ideas are broader than others; some are narrower than others.

Decide: How long does you essay have to be? Make sure your main idea is broad enough to fill out X number of words or pages in the assigned essay?

Example: All of our U.S. presidents, with a few exemptions, have had wonderful people skills. That is a main point, but it would take at least a very thick book to cover all our presidents and their people skills or lack there of.

Example: John F. Kennedy possessed a wonderful sense of humor. Better. But if my essay has to be ten pages long, I had better make sure, I have enough examples to fill that many pages.

Beware of main points that degenerate into lists:

Example: Several of our early presidents were deists.You may have to define deists, but after that a list will be all you need. Instead craft a topic sentence that explains why these presidents were deists and how it affected their decisions.

Several high school and college texts have lists of topic sentences. Some are there to provide essay ideas. Some English books have lists of sentences that are really topic sentence tests. Which of these possible topic sentences is indeed a usable topic sentence? Then you have to read the sentences and do as I did above. You have to determine why they would make poor topic sentences. I suggest you look for some of these lists, to help you identify good topic sentences and how to write them when you have an essay assignment.