Writing Essays
Reading & Writing Essays
- qualities of good writing:
- clarity
- coherence
- logical organization
- accuracy and correctness
- sufficiency
- style
- planning
- take notes
- the act of thinking about what you have marked copied, summarized or paraphrased
- drafting
- consider your purpose
- be fair-minded: don’t over simplify or distort
- be cautious
- be logical
- be accurate
- be confident
- revising
- revision occurs throughout the entire arc of the writing process
- reconsider ideas
- reorganize
- work on style
- Are sentences concise and clear?
- Can you eliminate words that are not doing their job?
- Is you tone consistent?
- Is you level of language appropriate for the subject of your essay?
- Are there grammatical errors? Spelling mistakes? Punctuation?
History, Context, Etc.
Reading Essays
Types of Essays
- includes several interrelated acts:
- observing
- connecting
- inferring
- questioning
- concluding
- look for connections: details of image and structure, argument and evidence.
- be and active and deliberative reader
- make sense of gaps in texts: linguistic, literary, cultural conventions
- questions to ask:
- What strikes us most about this passage?
- What do we notice on first read it?
- What observations would we most like to make about it?
- What questions do we have?
- What feeling does the text inspire?
- What expectations do we have about where the essayist is taking us?
- essays explain what stories imply
- they are linked to poetry
- personal essay (use of I)
- formal essay (avoid the pronoun “I”
- expository essays explain ideas and scenarios using standard patterns of organization, including comparison and contrast, classification, and cause and effect.
- analytical essays offer analysis and interpretation of a text of performance, typically breaking that text or performance into parts or aspects and presenting both an evaluative judgment and the evidence on which it is based.
- argumentative, or persuasive essay advances a thesis or claim and present evidence that is organized as part of a logical demonstration utilizing the modes of deductive and inductive reasoning and including support of the argumentative claim in the form of reasons, examples, and data as evidence.
Why Essays
History & Context
- something for everyone
- voices, visions, styles to suit every taste
- can be about anything
- covers the broad spectrum of human concerns (race, culture, identity)
- can convey beautiful craft, style, beauty
• “essay” comes from the French: essais, or "attempts"
• essays
- have a personal tone
- are improvisatory
- are energetic
- and inquiring
• they tests opinions
• provide information
• sets us to thinking
• reveals the writer through exploration of subject
• reveals the act of thinking
Not until we are lost do we begin to see ourselves.
~Henry David Thoreau