If you have been trying to learn how to write 5 paragraph essays, you will find that this article gives you a quick and easy breakdown of what is needed for each paragraph. If you follow this approach your essay will be well structured and satisfy the requirements of how to write 5 paragraph essays. The article also gives you access to further essay writing tools that will refine your skills in how to write 5 paragraph essays.
1. How to Write 5 Paragraph Essays - The Introduction
In learning how to write 5 paragraph essays, bear in mind that the first paragraph should clearly explain what the subject of the essay is. The introduction also needs to introduce what your main points will be.
There should have at least three of these main points - one for each of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th paragraphs, which together will form the central 'core' of your essay.
The introduction also needs to generate sufficient interest to entice the reader into the main body of the essay.
When learning how to write 5 paragraph essays, remember to avoid long drawn-out paragraphs. This makes for tedious reading, and quickly loses the reader's attention.
2. The 2nd Paragraph - Developing Your Main Idea
When working out how to write a 5 paragraph essay, remember that the second paragraph has to include information and a discussion about the most important aspect of the essay. If the essay is a commentary on a piece of written work, then you should explain how you have interpreted the main idea in that written work.
The reader's interest in the subject must be further enhanced by discussing several interesting aspects related to the main idea. For example, if your essay topic is about the history of your city, your main idea could be that the first settlement of that area was due to a nearby goldmine. Related ideas could be that the city thrived because the gold resources were extensive and easily mined
Once you have dealt with the main idea of your 5 paragraph essay, it is time to write about the next most important aspect of your essay topic.
3. The 3rd Paragraph - Developing Your Second Idea
This paragraph should draw the reader through from paragraph 2 into the second most important aspect of the subject.
In the example given above, the second most important idea could be that the city's location was also due to the transport opportunities that the nearby river offered. You can discuss how this relates to the main idea, perhaps because of the ease through which the gold could be transported away from that area.
The general aim of the 3rd paragraph is to enrich and expand upon the main point discussed in paragraph 2.
4. The 4th Paragraph - Developing Your Third Idea
This paragraph will cover the relatively minor aspects of the essay topic, including why they are less important than what you have written about in paragraphs 2 and 3.
However, these points of your 5 paragraph essay should still be interesting and of value to the reader and should also support the ideas presented in the preceding paraqraphs.
5. How to Write a 5 Paragraph Essay - The Conclusion
An essential part of learning how to write 5 paragraph essays is to understand the vital importance of the final paragraph. This is where you must briefly reiterate and summarise the main points raised in the preceding paragraphs.
Make sure that your final paragraph leaves the reader in no doubt as to what your research conclusions are. For example, say you are comparing the opinions of several different authors and you have concluded that one author's opinion is more valid than the others. Your final paragraph should clearly state who that author is and why their opinion is 'best' in your eyes. By bringing together in a succinct way the information contained in the body of the essay, you will ensure that the interest of the reader is maintained until the last paragraph.
In this article you have seen the five steps necessary to creating a great 5 paragraph essay. Take the process of learning how to write 5 paragraph essays one step at a time and you will be guaranteed of success!
However experienced a writer you are, you need certain techniques and methods you can use to write at your best.
And however spontaneously and freely you write, you're able to do this because of certain "rules" and systems you have in place. Even if you don't realise it.
Theses rules can be as simple and general as: "A sentence is made up of a collection of words in a logical sequence, a paragraph is a number of sentences and a chapter of a novel is a number of paragraphs following on from one another."
Or, your rules can be as precise as: "My haikus must be 3 lines long, made up of 5, 7 then 5 syllables and must contain one simple image."
Each set of rules you have enable you to write within a certain template, without having to go back to relearning language from the basics of your alphabet upwards.
Despite any preconceptions you might have about these kind of guidelines being limiting, they actually help you be more creative with your writing. And you simply wouldn't be able to write without them.
Think of them as tools in your writer's toolbox. If you have no tools, you can't make anything, but with a simple toolkit you can craft wonderful works of writing that would be impossible otherwise.
Among the best tools you can use for your writing are creative writing prompts or exercises.
A writing prompt is just a few words or an idea that gives you that initial spark of inspiration for your creative writing to set off from. Writing exercises can be wide and varied, but essentially they all give you taste of writing in new ways and trying different techniques you may not have come across before.
For any writer looking to continue to develop their writing, and unleash their full writing potential, writing prompts and exercises are both valuable tools to have in your writer's toolkit.
The bonus with prompts and exercises is that the more you use them, and the wider the variety you use, the more easy it becomes to write creatively and freely.
You also start to develop your own versions of exercises and prompts you've found effective, tweaking them to make them even more useful and powerful for you.
You also become more natural and instinctive in your writing. You might think that having too many tools, you'd be overwhelmed with which to use each time you want to write. But this doesn't happen, as the more you practice, the more you instinctively just use the technique that works for that piece of writing.
If you haven't tried creative writing prompts or exercises before, you're missing out on a great way to enhance your creative writing.
If you are a university, college or high school student, you have probably benefited at some point in your life from having a coach - either as a member of a sports team, or as a participant in an individual sport.
No one questions the value of coaching in the world of sports, whether it is at the peewee level, or in the professional ranks. Athletic skills are developed and refined through coaching.
But what about writing skills? How are writing skills developed and refined?
If you are a student at the university, college or high school level, you may be asking yourself the same question.
How do you develop essay writing skills?
Just as with athletic skills, having an Essay Writing Coach can accelerate your development.
Here are three key ways in which an Essay Writing Coach can help you write good essays:
1) 1) Choosing an Essay Topic
Choosing an interesting, original and manageable essay topic is one of the most crucial steps in writing a successful essay. Choosing a topic that is either too broad to be covered within the parameters of your essay, or too narrow, resulting in the need to "pad" your content to achieve the required length, will doom your essay project before you have even begun. Your essay topic should not only be of interest to a reader (and your teacher or instructor) but also sufficiently focused to allow you to cover the topic adequately. An Essay Writing Coach can help you refine your essay topic so that it can be managed effectively.
2) Structuring Your Essay
One of the reasons that teachers and instructors continue to assign essays is to challenge students to think their way through a sustained presentation or argument in a logical way. Learning how to "structure" an essay is one of the most important skills that you can acquire, and also one of the most difficult. If you get your structure right, your essay will almost write itself, whereas if you get it wrong, you are almost certain to struggle. Before you begin to "write" your essay, your Essay Writing Coach can help you create a structure for your essay, which is very much like having a road map before you embark upon a journey. Knowing your destination before you begin is one of the best ways to ensure that you will arrive there.
3) Voice
Many students who don't have trouble expressing themselves aloud, freeze when it comes to writing an essay, and, as a result, their writing appears tentative and unnatural. The ability to write in a natural, confident "voice" is one of the most important skills that you can develop as a student, and one which will pay huge dividends throughout your academic career and beyond. A good Essay Writing Coach can help you develop a comfortable, consistent and natural writing style or "voice", which can be applied to any topic or subject matter. Just as in life, a confident writing style can go a long way towards achieving success.
Having an Essay Writing Coach can help you develop and refine your writing skills, which will be of enormous value, regardless of your chosen career path.
IF YOU want to become an essay writing expert, you must learn how to accept rejections.
Who says that seeing your teacher grade your essay with "D" is totally a bad thing? It may sound silly, but if you always get negative comments about the essays you write, you are on your way to becoming an essay writing whiz!
But there are ways to switch this negativity into positive things.
Take a break from your essay writing routines first. If the human body gets exhausted after doing strenuous physical activities, the human mind is not exempted. Writing essays is an arduous task, so it's important to take a break once in a while to "recharge batteries:" Take a walk in the woods, fill your lungs with fresh air, binge with your favorite food, talk to your family or friends, and so on.
Ask yourself some questions. Your teacher is just grading all outputs of the essay writing tasks that he or she assigns to you. So do not blame him or her if your recently-submitted essay didn't pass his or her standards. Ask yourself, "Did I really do my assignment well?," "What went wrong with my work?," etc.
Improve on the worst. If your essays are always getting rejected or your writing style doesn't make the grade, think of the worst thing that would happen: You'll get lower grades in school. Try to improve on the worst by listing possible solutions-such as "I will read a lot," "I will strive harder," "I will seek the help of an essay writing service," etc.-and then pick out the best possible solution.
Try to laugh at your essay writing mistakes. Remember that nobody's perfect, so admit the hurtful truth that you write crap, but that's only for the meantime. Laughing at your mistakes means that you can bravely recognize one of your weaknesses. But you can also be up for the challenge of doing things better. Humor is a wonderful weapon that any writer can use to his or her benefit.
"Next essay please!" The only way to flee from rejection is to do other things which are of value to you. This may have something to do with improving yourself, such as reading more books, picking up on the styles of other great writers or writing about things that you like.
"Trade" your essays. The essay writing preference of your professor is different from the taste of let's say an editor of a daily or glossy. Your essay might be horrible in the eyes of your teacher, but it might be a handsome piece of writing to others. Cliché as it may seem, but there's an opportunity for every difficulty.
Move on! Past is past. If your professor thumped the essays you recently wrote, do not dare to ask him or her why your essay didn't pass his or her standards. "Knowing the truth" behind your recently rejected work will not help.
Above all, believe in the truism that brilliant ideas surface from rejections: Instead of crying over torn-out or thrown-out essay that you previously submitted in school, take rebuffs as a wake-up call, a driving force that will get you going!
Every writer must write and write daily. To write is the writer's main job. Though this goal can sometimes be a hard to achieve since most writers normally hold a day job unrelated to their creative writing life and aspirations. And the hassle and bustle of the everyday workday can sometime be so overwhelming that being creative at the end of it is just too much to hope for. And this is where creative writing prompts come in. They help stir the creativeness and allow the writer to just concentrate on the writing.
One of the most common forms of prompts for writers is being given a set of random words that should be used in a story from which a story must spring. The second common form of writing prompts is being given a random sentence, which can either become a part of the story somehow or it can be the so-called story starter sentence. In other words, it can either be a first sentence or a sentence that must become a part of a story somehow. And the third most common form of writing prompts are picture prompts, where a story is inspired by a photo or picture of a person, a scene, an object, etc.
Every writer should spend a part of each day writing. Even if just for a little bit. Like writing for 15 minutes or writing something small like 500 words, but it should be done and creative writing prompts are, by far, the best way to achieve this goal. Because the old saying, "Practice makes perfect" holds true for writers as well.
Once you have the basics down, its time to focus on polishing your writing. Neglecting the smaller details, can make one's writing seem amateurish. One important thing to watch out for is redundancy. You'll see it all the time in newspapers and student essays, especially when using quotes.
Example:
The chair of the fundraising committee says she's excited about next week's event."I'm super excited about next week's event," said Stacey Stoked.
The sentence introducing the quote should have something to say about what's in the quote, but shouldn't just be a paraphrase.
Example:
The chair of the fundraising committee says she's excited about next week's event."Everything is going to be fantastic - the music, the dancing the comedy act. I can't wait," said Stacey Stoked.
Redundancy often shows up when similar words with the same meaning show up in the same sentence.
Example:
This cleaning feature allows the mechanic to reuse the filter again.
Sometimes, as in a list, a writer will deliberately reuse words with similar meaning for emphasis.
Example:
The criminal was callous, cold-hearted and unfeeling.
However, you have to a pretty good writer to avoid the pitfalls of this technique. The reader might assume you don't have much else to say on the subject, that you're being hyperbolic or that you just haven't figured out that the words you are using all mean the same thing.
One final problem, which is surprisingly common despite how easily it can be spotted, is using the exact same word over and over in a paragraph.
Example:
The burglar quietly entered the house through the back door. He quietly crept up the stairs. He quietly opened the door to the room where the man was sleeping.
You get the picture. Most instances aren't that obvious, but you can clear up repetition by giving your writing a quick read over.
Although many people would suggest reading your work aloud, this is rarely practical. Pronounce each word in your head as you read your final draft. You'll catch the errors you miss by scanning.
Pay particular attention to the quotes and paraphrases of your interview subjects. Avoid using repetition simply to pad a weak story. If your story doesn't quite reach the minimum word count, check your notes. Perhaps there was another angle you could have explored. Maybe there's another issue you avoided raising due to the complexity, but could be worth a second look. Or, it's possible that there just isn't enough meat in this story for the reader.
While most writers have competent editors to help them revise their work, in this era of internet self-publishing, it pays to develop the skills to become your own editor.
It's easy for us as writers to get into a rut with our writing. Even if we're still writing fairly prolifically, sometimes it feels like we've become some kind of factory line conveyor belt, churning out near identical copies of the same pieces of writing.
Now because you're a highly creative and imaginative person and not a factory robot, you need more stimulation, more variation. Volume is not enough, it's also important to have the variety.
Also, as someone creative, you're keen to continually evolve and feel you're developing and moving forward. If you think you're destined to be simply rewriting the same poems, stories, songs or novels for the rest of your life, that's hardly an exciting incentive to continue, is it?
Creative writing prompts are a great tool to help you explore your creative writing potential.
In fact more than that, by using writing prompts regularly, you can explode your writing potential in all directions, many of which you never even considered trying before.
A creative writing prompt is simply a short phrase or idea that gives you a starting point for a new adventure in your writing.
Once you're off and running, the rest is up to you. The prompts provides you with that initial direction and little burst of energy to get going. Where you take it after that is completely up to you.
Without the kind of starting point a writing prompt provides, you could be sitting at a blank page for the rest of your life.
And I'm sure you know how painful and unpleasant an experience this kind of writer's block can be.
Some people have avoided using writing prompts because they don't want any help with their writing. They feel they should be creating every single part of the writing, every tiny fragment of idea, every word and syllable. Maybe this is a concern you've had too?
Creative writing prompts aren't the "cheat" that you might think they are. They're not giving you a finished piece of work served up on a platter. The creativity and the imagination comes from you.
For example, say a creative writing prompt says simply: "What passion means to me - ". Everything after those 5 words comes from your own creative mind. You may start writing about your passion for horses and end up with the outline for a new novel about a young girl's journey from riding horses bareback on her parents' farm to winning gold in a showjumping championship.
You might write about the passionate romantic memories you have from your teens, and realise that there are certain things you'd forgotten than you want to rediscover with your current partner.
Or you might write about writing itself, what it gives you that nothing else can, how it makes you feel.
Wherever you take it, it's your ideas, your memories, your creative talent and imagination that's producing the words.
Run with it, have fun and enjoy where it leads.
Start using creative writing prompts today, and you'll see too how a few words or a snatch of an idea can explode YOUR creative writing potential too...
I've been writing a lot this year, mostly for my full time day job. Time management is essential to produce high quality content in a timely manner. Therefore a time management process is equally essential. I just finished a training manual with 17 chapters and some 39 thousand words. This project took two weeks to finish besides other projects and responsibilities. It dawned on me that the method I use to write manuals may be just what some of you need to write your articles more quickly. You can use any word processing, or slide deck program to organize your process.
I call this process my outline to output work flow. This is a 5 step process that can be used as a template to use over and over again. If you are publishing online and want to rank your article with search engines, make sure to target specific key words that readers are looking for.
The process goes like this:
I hope you have found this article helpful. I'm sure if you follow these simple tips your writing productivity will improve. Always partner with a quality article publisher like EzineArticles.
After you try these tips let our readers know how they worked. Come back and leave a comment with your suggestions for improvements.
Content drives the Internet, and consumers are constantly looking for information that solves a problem. The trust, credibility, and authority that content marketing creates knocks down sales resistance to the benefits of a particular product or service.
High quality content must fundamentally change a customer's direction, it does that by teaching and motivating the customer in specific ways.
So what kind of content does it take to change the customer's direction? Anything that is written and distributed for the purpose of attracting, acquiring, and/or engaging customers are considered part of content marketing.
Not every business is in the publishing business, but businesses that don't create content for marketing purposes are missing out on major opportunities.
Building Trust
Marketing is about building trust, and engaging with your customers. Anything that is written and distributed for the purpose of attracting, acquiring, and/or engaging customers are considered part of content marketing.
Storytelling is something we all do in our personal lives. It's a short leap to helping your company tell its story as part of your content marketing. The skill in writing comes from being able to tell a story well and writing in a tone and voice that resonates with the reader.
We create content to educate our customers or prospects about ways they can solve their problems and address challenges they face.
Quality comes from understanding that creating content isn't the same as PR, and it certainly isn't advertising. Seems like an obvious point, but wade through the deepening thicket of content programs and you get mixed results.
Content Marketing is Not Selling
Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling.
I am a terrible salesman but I am a fairly good writer. I can describe a product and its benefits very accurately and if there is someone out there looking for that particular product I am confident they will find my content beneficial.
I don't go looking for customers exactly but I do present products in areas where those who are or maybe looking for a certain product hangs out. This maybe a social media site or a blog. So how do you know if your products is desired, if you are on a dog site you will not likely be promoting Kitty litter.
Many people think they need to be good writers or salesman to market content. If you can tell a story and relate benefits of a certain product or service that is basically all that is required.
There is money to be made with content marketing through article marketing. You don't have to be a prize winning author to receive a share of that income.
There are six steps to writing an academic essay. If you follow each of these steps correctly, you will find that you can write university essays that will earn you a distinction (or high distinction) every time. It is simply a matter of understanding what steps to follow, and then completing each of them thoroughly.
This article provides an outline and brief description of each of these steps. It is an introduction to a series of articles that will examine each step in more depth. Reading just this article alone will provide you with assistance in learning how to plan, research and write your essays. However, reading all the articles in the series will allow you to gain a more sophisticated insight into essay writing, and to improve your grades even further.
These are the six steps you need to follow to write high quality university essays:
1. Analyse the Question
There are generally two types of essays: argumentative essays and explanatory essays. In an argumentative essay, you are expected to put forward an academic argument in answer to the essay question and support your argument with academic sources (references). In an explanatory essay, you are expected to explain or describe a process or topic in answer to an essay question and support your argument with academic sources (references). Regardless of the type of essay you are writing, it is very important that you understand what is being asked of you before you begin your research and writing your essay.
You must be sure that you understand all parts of the question and what it is asking you to do. You must be able to recognise the 'task words' in the question, which tell you what you have to do (for example, 'discuss', 'compare', 'analyse' or 'argue') and the 'key words' in the question, which tell you what you are being asked to write about (for example, Critical Thinking, or the roles of registered nurses). (More information on this step will be provided in the article 'How to Write Distinction Essays Every Time: Step 1. Analyse the Question.')
2. Draft the Essay Plan
You must write the first draft of your essay plan before you start your research. This will give your research direction and ultimately make it easier for you to write your essay. Having a plan will let you know what you need to research and how much research you need on each topic or subject that you will be writing about.
You will base this first draft of your essay plan on your essay question, and your current knowledge of your subject. It will not happen very often that you are asked to write an essay on a topic you know nothing about, since you will already be studying the subject and will normally have had one or more lectures or tutorials on the topic.
It is acceptable if your essay plan is rough or vague at this point, or if you do not have a great deal of detail. You will develop your essay plan (expanding it and including more detail) and possibly even change it as you go through the research process.
3. Conduct the Research
Part One: Organising your Research using a Research Document
Your research should be organised so that the transition from doing your research to writing your essay is simple. The best way to do this is to organise your research so that it matches the organisation of the essay. In Step 2 of writing an academic essay, you would have written a rough essay plan before you began your research. This essay plan is the guide you need to use to organise your research.
Copy and paste this essay plan into a Word document. All your research for this essay will be recorded in this one document. Use each of the dot points from your essay plan (topics you are planning to discuss) as a heading in your research document. When you do your research, you will organise it in the order that the information will appear in your essay. Doing this means you will be organising your research by theme or topic, not by source.
Part Two: Research Skills and Academic Sources
Being able to tell the difference between an academic source and a non-academic source, knowing where to find academic sources and deciding what sources are relevant to your research are important skills that you will develop during your tertiary studies.
The first place you should go is the library, even if this means ordering in books from other libraries. For academics to have their books (and journal articles) published, they must go through a process called peer-reviewing. During this process, one or more other academics who are experts in the field will read and assess a book or article to decide if it is of publishable standard. This is why your research will be of the highest quality if you use books, monographs, textbooks and journal articles written by academics for your research, because the work had to meet academic standards. There is no such process for publishing on the internet; anyone can write whatever they like on any subject.
Your second stop after books, monographs and textbooks will be journal articles. Some of these will only be available in hardcopy from the library, but many will be available in their full-text versions through online electronic databases, such as JStore, ProQuest and Ingenta.
4. Finalise the Essay Plan
In Step 2, you would have drafted a rough essay plan before you began your research. During the research process (in Step 3), you would have developed this plan further as you learned more information on your topic. Once you have completed your research, and before you begin writing your first draft, you need to re-think your essay plan and write a final version based on what you discovered during your research. Your final essay plan will contain more detail than your first draft and be a very specific guide to how to write your essay. Once you have completed the final draft of your essay plan, you are ready to begin writing the first draft of your essay.
5. Write the First Draft of the Essay
Now that you have completed your research in an organised way and have written a final draft of your essay plan, writing the first draft of your essay will be easier than it ever has been. All of the following decisions about your essay have already been made:
* What your answer to the essay question is
* What main points you will discuss in order to back up your argument
* The order in which to discuss your main points
* How long to spend discussing each main point
* What information each paragraph will contain (i.e. what information you will use to discuss each of your main points)
* What references you will use to back up your argument
Thus, there is no reason for you to feel lost or stare at your computer screen not knowing what to write. If you do get stuck for any reason, the best thing to do is to just keep writing. You can always improve something once you have written something down. If you have not written anything, not much can be done until you do.
6. Professional Academic Editing
Once you have completed writing your essay, it is vital that you have it professionally edited by an academic editor. You have just spent a significant amount of time doing the best possible job on your essay or assignment, doing your research and writing up your results. After all this effort, it is critical that your work is presented in the best possible way. Using a professional academic editor will ensure that your work is polished, well written, and presented correctly.
If English is your second language, having your essay or assignment professionally edited is even more important. You do not want mistakes in your writing to confuse your markers or distract them from the important arguments you are making. This could lead to you receiving a grade lower than the grade you really deserve.
