Table of Contents
“Write a 1000-word essay on the reasons why people like eating street food.” Oh no! How can a student come up with 1000 words about something he or she doesn’t really know anything about? In this case, the student can’t write about liking street food because the closest he has gotten to street food is the school cafeteria cooking. Who can help her? She panics and screams “Somebody! Write my essay!” Sadly, nobody can write her essay for her. What she needs to do is research and take a chance on writing that essay herself. Regardless of how amateur it may sound. Hey, Tom Clancy didn’t become a writer to reckon with overnight. However, the essayist can be guided in developing the first essay, just to get him over that difficult hurdle.
And so on and so forth. Listing down the topics you want to discuss in your essay helps to aid the writer in developing his subject paragraphs. Since she already knows what she wants to talk about in each paragraph, developing the discussion should become easier. So, when you think you don’t know what to write about, tell yourself, “I want to write an essay about my personal experience.”
Writing from a personal point of view is the easiest way to develop the topic discussion. It does not require any research and allows the writer to freely express thoughts, opinions, and emotions. But what if the essay instruction says, “You have to research the topic.”? What then? Writing the essay becomes a quite a difficult task.
Once, a student told me, “I want to write an essay about the Tea Party Movement.” I asked him if he knew what he was talking about. He said, “It’s about people who drank tea at a party.” Stifling a laugh, I told him he had to do research if he wanted to really write about the Tea Party Movement in the proper context.
To get the student started, I asked him to Google the topic. The results gave him a host of sources for the historical event. I encouraged him to read as much as he could about the topic and take note of different events that gave the movement a political cause. He ended up with 10 sheets of information about that movement. After he had decided that he only wanted to write about the foundation of the movement, I told him, “Then you don’t have to use all of that research to write the essay.” A good essayist knows how to decipher which of the information he or she has on hand is applicable to the research and which is disposable.
Most definitely! While the most common ways of discussing essays come from the personal standpoint or research, there is also the public point of view that can be used in writing an essay. When I write an essay from the public point of view, I make sure to use a survey type of information presentation. By using a survey form to collate information, the essay develops an informative and inclusive presentation. The inclusiveness is something that does not come easily with the other types of essay discussions. By using charts, figures, and other collected data, an essay can be a more educational tool for specific topics such as current events or market analysis.