You must have written an essay in school or college. It's a common assignment that teachers give to test your knowledge about a topic and your research and writing skills. Essays are not only helpful in your academic life, but in your professional life as well. You may have to write a business proposal or a report on something. If you know how to write a basic essay, you can easily complete these writing jobs at work.

Types of essays

Before knowing the steps of writing an essay, you should understand the different types of essays that exist. The different types of essays include argumentative, narrative, descriptive, and expository essays. The goal of each essay is to inform or persuade the readers. Argumentative and expository essays are similar in a way that both these essays make clear points to convey specific information.

Narrative and descriptive essays, on the other hand, are more focused on creativity. In an argumentative essay, you will do research to come up with your own opinion regarding a subject. You must present evidence to support your judgment. In the case of an expository essay, you should gain in-depth knowledge about a subject to tell readers about it. In narrative essays, you write about your experience so you must use a compelling tone to encourage readers to read your writing. Descriptive essays are mostly about explaining sensory details.

Steps in writing an essay

Any essay follows three basic steps: planning, writing, and editing. Each of these stages has several sub-sections that you must include in your essay.

Planning

The planning stage starts with finding a good research topic. You can sit with your teacher, discuss with friends, or search online for a good essay topic. After you have decided on the topic, you should write an interesting title for your essay.

Next, you should develop a thesis statement. In this statement apart from mentioning your topic you will give reasons to support your idea. You must create an outline for your essay. This will keep you focused and help you to construct your ideas better. The right approach is the collect the main information about the topic and then explain your thesis statement in detail with supporting information.

Writing

Start your essay with an interesting sentence. This will hook the readers to your essay and they will want to read the rest of your essay. It must be a startling or powerful statement, like a surprising statistic, an anecdote, or a fact. Then use some background information followed by your thesis statement. The background information may include the preconditions of an invention, the effects of an event, and others.

After the thesis statement, you need to form the body paragraphs to present your central arguments that are mentioned in the thesis statement. Commonly, the school-level essays have three paragraphs and the more advanced-level essays have a 5-paragraph body.

Each of your paragraphs must start with a topic sentence stating what the paragraph is about. Then you must provide supporting information about the topic sentences, mentioning sources of your information where appropriate. Next, analyze the information you have written in the paragraph. You must give your opinions at this stage. Provide a smooth transition to the next paragraph.

In your conclusion, you should give a summary of all the information you have mentioned and the analysis you have done. You need to restate your thesis statement so that the reader understands that you are in line with the topic. Mention the impact of your essay and the larger implications it may have. You can leave a question at the end to keep the reader thinking further about the topic.

Editing

After completing your essay must spend time reviewing and edit the essay. You may include new information or get rid of unnecessary information. It is important to check the grammar, spelling, and structure of your sentences. You will find various editing tools online like 'Grammarly' to help you edit the essay. Proofread your essay word-by-word to make it look professional. Read the essay guidelines thoroughly to make sure that you have written your essay in the desired format.

When writing an essay you will need to do a lot of research online and offline. You must be careful to mention the sources whenever you quote someone else's work. Be careful not to have any plagiarism issues with your essay. You will find plagiarism tools like 'Grammarly', 'Small SEO tools', 'Copyscape', and others to check your essay for plagiarism. Also, different AI tools are available today that can write the entire essay in a few seconds. Most academic or professional organizations will discourage you from using any AI tool for writing essays. So, check out the essay writing guidelines to ensure that you don't violate any rules.