Writing Gooder

Back when I was in high-school, a couple of people on the school newspaper went around the school asking people how they wrote an essay.  Needless to say, the subject matter of the piece was excessively boring and didn’t make the final cut.  But, I still think it’s an interesting question.

How do you write an essay?  I remember answering that question by saying, “I write an essay by starting with the conclusion, then write backwards from there.”  Back then, I found it easier to start out with the conclusion I was trying to make, then write the introduction last.  Of course, I always had to go back and rewrite the conclusion, but I think you pretty much have to do that no matter how you write the essay.

Nowadays, I go through several drafts when writing an essay, so I just start at the beginning.  In my first draft, I don’t really pay much attention to what I’m writing and usually knock it out in a few hours.  The final draft, though, will usually take me a week.  This is for law school though.  In college, my first draft was usually my only draft, and my technique for writing an essay was to wait until the night before, have lots of coffee on hand, and finish it with only minutes to spare.

So, how do you write an essay?

By complete accident, I found a very nice way to rewrite essays!

I was writing the rough draft to my essay for Lit. class in my school computer lab, and I couldn’t get it to save to computer so I could email myself, I could only print it. Because of that, I had to rewrite my whole essay today. I thought this would be horrible. Rewrite the whole thing…? It actually turned out to be the best thing for me. I had to look at what I had written, and make it better. I was forced to forget what I had written, and write new, better, amazing sentences. My second draft was 1,000 times better than an edited version of the first draft could have been.

I suggest you try this technique out.  I’ve never done it before, and I’m not sure how it would work for fiction (it’s probably been suggested before?) but it forced me to improve my work, and read everything I had written. In the end, I have an amazing essay!

This is the first part of a multi-part series on essay writing.

Your typical essay is split into three distinct sections: the introduction, the body, and the conclusion. For this post, I’m just going to concentrate on writing that introductory paragraph.

So first, what’s the purpose of an introduction? With an introduction, you are trying to grab your reader and get them interested in what you are writing about. Not only that, but you also want to tell the reader exactly what to expect in the rest of the essay. So lets say our essay is going to be about the history of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. (so chosen because I use to lead tours there and already know a lot about it).

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