You need some help? Some people say essays are tricky. Here are some helpful hints to make them less difficult.

1.Take your prompt and pick it apart! Understand exactly what it is asking you to do. If it says evaluate, then you conclude, if it says to compare or contrast then do that. Take notes!

2.Look over whatever the prompt addresses and begin to pick that apart based on what your prompt is asking for, and do not discriminate yet, take all of it. Take notes on ideas for the prompt, and mark pages in any literature you may be using.

3.Look at the prompt and the information you've gathered and begin to group ideas together so you can create a working thesis. The working thesis will give your essay a focus so you don't digress in the middle of your writing.

4.Continue your brain-storming and write the topic sentence for your first body paragraph. Make sure it provides a focus for your paragraph and it isn't general. Find examples from life (direct quotes, paraphrasing, etc.) or from the topic literature that you can use in your first body paragraph. Make sure it follows your working thesis, but don't actually write the paragraph yet.

5.Do the same for the other body paragraphs.

6.Write your concluding statements for each paragraph. Please note that it is a CONCLUDING statement, meaning you need to bluntly say what point you are trying to make and lead it into your next body paragraph.

7.Brain-storm for your introductory paragraph. Start by either addressing a theme or a topic you've researched that is relevant to your essay. Now look at your working thesis. What parts of it look like a summary? Take those out and put them into your intro. Look at your working thesis again. You need a fact or some sort of event which is relevant to your topic, to put into that thesis. Paraphrase it, and add in whatever point you are trying to make to it.

8.Read whatever notes you took for your body paragraphs and look at your thesis for your concluding paragraph. You need to reiterate all the points you make in your body paragraph and relate them briefly to your thesis to show how they are all connected.

9.Write. This is the easiest part after you've outlined it all already.

10.Look for grammatical mistakes. Look it over today, and see if you can pick anything out that is really obvious.

11.Look at your essay once again on the next day and fix it. Redact it. Make sure it is grammatically perfect. Read it out loud to see if anything sounds awkward, and fix it.

tips:

Make sure your writing is logical. Don't just throw ideas together and hope they make sense.

Don't worry too much about grammatical mistakes, or synonyms for words you have just used in the sentence before. Just underline or highlight it and then go over it in your second draft. The important thing is to get it all down in the first place.

If you don't need the internet, disconnect! Nothing is more distracting than the internet when you're typing up your essay and are feeling extremely bored.

Have a thesaurus and a dictionary handy at all times, especially if you have the habit of using words whose meanings you are not completely sure of.