A Student's Guide

How to Write an Essay

You're about to learn how to write an essay. Everything I will tell you is important. I can't stress enough how important these things are. When I tell you to do it, you need to do it, even if it's "extra" or "too much work". I got a 5 in the AP Language exam and essays are a breeze to me because of what I know and do when writing an essay. So when I tell you to do something, you better do it.

My AP Lang teacher made us by our own textbook rather than use the required textbook provided by the school. IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK IN MY LIFE. It has everything that I learned about AP Lang and essay writing. You go through the different types of essays and how to analyze and write them. It provides essay examples for you to analyze and prompts for you to practice writing these types of essays. It provides great explanations and recommended reading excerpts of fictional and non-fictional works WITH analysis questions. 

I brought the book to college for reference. Everything I'll be telling came straight from this book. It's available on Amazon and I really recommend you buying it for yourself. The book is "Patterns for College Writing: A Rhetorical Reader and Guide, Tenth Edition" by Laurie Kirszber and Stephen R. Mandell. That was my edition but you can choose others. I looked it up on Google and there's a free pdf of a "brief edition" of the textbook, but I still recommend buying your own physical copy.

I love the book so much, I'm even going to reference it in "Broken Glasses" (which is a book I'm writing that you can read *cough*).

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Writing an Outline

You. Need. To. Always. Write. An. Outline.

Remember when I said you need to listen to me even when something is too much? Yeah, it's for this.

I'm not asking you to make several drafts, I'm telling you to make an outline. For the AP Language exam and many other in-class essays, you won't have time to make several drafts but only turn in one final essay. That's why it's important to write an outline.

My AP Lang teacher told us a story that during an in-class essay, one girl took 75% of the time working on her outline until she realized how much time she had left. She ended up getting one of the best scores despite the little time she had left because she had such a great outline. Making an outline is practically your first draft as it's the skeleton of your essay. Your essay is just filling in the gaps to put all the pieces together for the reader.

I'll go over what your outline should consist of in the next section.

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Essay Structure

Here is my general outline of an essay. I'll elaborate on it afterward.

Introduction

- Thesis Statement

- Concluding sentence to transition to the First Body Paragraph

First Body Paragraph

- Introduction sentence with the main idea

- Evidence, Comment, Comment

- Concluding sentence with a transition to the next Second Body Paragraph

Second Body Paragraph

- Introduction sentence with the main idea

- Evidence, Comment, Comment

- Concluding sentence with a transition to the next Third Body Paragraph

Third Body Paragraph

- Introduction sentence with the main idea

- Evidence, Comment, Comment