Students find it challenging to write essays on any topic, especially when they have to fulfill multiple requirements. Not every student is proficient in writing skills to draft a good essay.
If you are a high school student and trying to write an essay with insufficient writing skills, you cannot get the expected outcomes. Here is a guide written by one of our qualified authors to help you in writing a good essay. Just follow the upcoming steps to write something that inspires your instructor.
Contents
6 Easy Steps to Write an Essay for High School Students
1: Research Comprehensively
Performing research is the most important task for writing a good essay as a student. You should do deep research as per the type of essay and the subject.
For example, if you are writing an essay on a Scientific Topic, no other platform can provide you with better data than Google Scholar. It is the biggest database that you can access for exploring papers related to your topic.
Let us show you how you can do this through an example.
First of all, you have to browse Google Scholar in your concerned browser. You will get a white screen with a search box and a few options are given below.
To access your topic’s related papers, you only need to put a keyword in the given box as we have done “Chromatography” in our case. By clicking on the search option, you will be able to see papers and reviews related to your essay topic that you can explore.
Similarly, if you have to write an essay like a Biography, you can explore Britannica.com. This platform can provide enough information to write your essay.
2: Create an Outline
This process can be done side by side with the research process. It is because you can create an outline for your essay while researching data on the concerned topic.
Many students stick with the simplest format to write essays i.e.
- Introduction
- Body Content
- Conclusion
There is no wonder that this outline can draft a good essay. But it can also be boring to write an essay in this format if you are unable to pick what to discuss in the specific parts of an essay.
So, we recommend you split the above outline (body content especially). It will help you in understanding what you can discuss in a particular section and how you can create a connection with the upcoming studies.
For example, you can improve the above outline like the below-mentioned outline.
- Introduction
- Body Content Part – 1 (Discuss previous information)
- Body Content Part – 2 (Create your idea/perspective)
- Body Content Part – 3 (Support your idea/perspective)
- Conclusion
The only thing that you should keep in mind while creating an outline is the type of essay. It is because you need to create an outline differently for multiple types of essays.
For your understanding, let us share the outlines of our two essays.
In the following image, you can see the outline for an essay written about “Pastoralists”. As per the demands of the type of essay, we have created an outline by sticking to the topic in every section.
Here, we have shared an image of the outline of an essay about the “Rise of Hitler” (A Biography). You can see how our authors have created a connection between Hitler and other events related to his life.
The difference between both outlines is because of the different types of essays. Like these examples, you can create an outline carefully for your essay before you start. The only thing that you should keep in mind is flow and relevancy to the topic.
3: Write First Draft
After creating an outline, it is time to get your couch and start writing your essay. Keep in mind that it will be your first draft as you have to compile the data you have collected.
While writing the first draft, you should include all stats, information, and details about the essay. It is because you have to edit it to extract a good final copy of your essay.
In this regard, the most important thing to consider is maintaining flow. You should keep all sections of your essays intact with each other.
The reason is you will find it pretty simple to edit the draft and convert it to a final copy. Moreover, the essay written with a proper flow is good in terms of readability, quality, and explanation of the topic.
Additionally, it is good to add related information in the first draft as it will help you in writing a compelling essay in the end.
4: Write a Summary or Abstract
For many students, it might be irritating to write a summary of the essay but it is compulsory for a good essay. No doubt, your instructor may haven’t asked you to do so. But it will be better to write a summary or abstract for a better preview.
While writing a summary, you should maintain a flow. It can’t be written randomly by connecting text related to different sections of your essay.
First of all, you should describe the problem statement or short introduction to your essay. After this, you need to share the results of some previous studies.
In the end, you need to conclude what your study has found after a series of experiments or comprehensive research.
To make the idea of how to write a summary of the essay, let us share an example.
Here is our essay’s summary related to the “Interview of Stephan Hawking at Cambridge”. You can see how nicely we have discussed the important points of the interview in a summary format here.
Like the above summary, you should also write a summary by combining important points and results. As making a connection and extracting important points is a hard task, you may be unable to write a good summary.
If you feel any difficulty to do so, you can use an online summarizing tool from a platform like Summarizingtool.net. This online utility will help you to generate a precise summary of your lengthy essays with less effort.
Let us show you how this tool can help you in writing a summary:
First of all, we have copied a text of 309 words from our essay about “Story Writing”. After text insertion, we have set the length of the summary to 50% of the given section.
The tool summarizes the content and generates its precise summary in less time. You can see that the tool has generated a summary of 143 words which is about 50% of the given text.
5: Cite References
As mentioned above, getting data from other sources like essays, papers, and books is compulsory to support your statement of an essay. It means that you can copy their stats or rephrase them nicely to add to your essay.
But you have to cite the sources properly in all cases when you are getting some data from others. Normally, two types of citations APA and MLA are used in educational documents.
So, you should cite all sources carefully in your essay by following any of these styles. For your understanding, we have explored Google Scholar to show the citation styles for both formats.
Here is the representation of both styles with little explanation.
In APA style, you have to write the last name of the author and then the Initial of the first name. Once you have written the names of all authors, you need to write the publication year and the book name as shown below.
Similarly, you can cite the source in MLA format. In this style, you have to write the last name and then the first name complete. After that, you have to write the name of the book or paper and then the year of publication. In this way, you can cite your source in MLA citation style.
6: Proofread & Revise
Till now, you have done the write-up of your essay from scratch to the final draft. Before you submit your essay, it is important to proofread and revise it carefully.
In this regard, it is not enough to perform a simple check for grammar mistakes, punctuation mistakes, and others. You have to perform a complete analysis of your essay during proofreading.
The most important task in this regard is checking the plagiarism of your essay before submitting it to the teachers. It is because your essay should be unique to offer quality results. In simple words, a good essay has no matches from other authors’ essays.
So, you should make sure that your written work is free from plagiarism. For this purpose, you can try out any of the below plagiarism checkers:
These tools will thoroughly check your content for plagiarism and help you in submitting a 100% unique and original essay to the teachers.
In addition to this task, you should also perform a few checks. Here is a checklist that can help you in this regard.
- Compare the stats and figures.
- Make sure all references are cited properly.
- Make sure you have added all important points in the abstract.
Final Words
The above guide involves instructions about all those points that you need to follow. These tips will help you in writing a good essay that can help you in standing above other students.
You only have to understand the tips and implement them in your write-up. It is better to have a plan to follow while you are writing an essay. With this, you will be able to manage your work with the time and know what has been done and what is about to come.