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.

Learning Hack of the Day: Free Write in Your Journal

Several days ago, we started a journal because we know whatever career we choose, we will have to be good writers. Journals are practice writing and they help us to be more creative and to think through problems. Journals are to written in daily. To begin with, you might make your journal a diary, but more and more, you will want to get into creative thoughts or explore your feelings or devote the journal to dreams or special topics, like your pets or children or hobby. Every journal is individual. A good journaling trick if you are having trouble finding entries is to do some free writing. Free writing is writing as fast as you can. If you can't think of a word, skip over it. If you can't spell a word, spell it the way it sounds. If you can't think of anything to say, just keep repeating, “I don't know what to write,” Eventually something will start coming out, and you will be surprised at your insight. I remember a student who started out, “I don't have anything to say today.” Then he started writing about his feelings and ideas and ended, “I guess I had something to say after all.” Set a time limit or a page limit on your free writes. If you set a time limit, set a timer for five minutes. Ten minutes might be too long for beginners. Journals are a great way to keep in touch with ourselves. They also make great future reading.