Writing Tips « Writers Workshop

Writing Tips « Writers Workshop Finally, ensure that all the points you wanted to explore are on paper and explained fully. Make things wordier in order to hit your word limit. You had every intention of getting your essay done before the deadline, but sometimes life can get in the way. Every day you write, you'll get beautiful stats that analyze the feelings, themes, and mindset of your words. For example, learn about how often you get distracted, and how fast you write. I've tried writing my 750 words a day on Livejournal, Wordpress, PBWorks, Tumblr, and all of these other sites designed around putting content online. I fear that I might accidentally forget to mark daily pages as private. This is writing, and it's online, but it's not blogging, or Twittering, or Facebook status updating. In the past, looking for a spare notebook was probably easier than looking for a computer. I don't know if my hands even work anymore with pen and paper for any task that takes longer than signing a check or credit card receipt. I've long been inspired by an idea I first learned about in The Artist's Way called morning pages. One context in which a paragraph can be as short as five characters is direct speech involving two or more speakers. Just written out my plan for my essay on the political implications of the Italian Renaissance- Really don't want to start but I have a plan now and feel more motivated. If you've been given a choice of essay questions, you should choose the one you have the most knowledge about, or have some strong opinions on. There are many reasons students find themselves in this pressurised situation . We're not here to judge, rather help you make the best of a tricky situation. However long you're taking, you should still check that your essay flows nicely. But, as we touched on earlier, not everyone can get their ideas written down and do it eloquently all in one go. If this is you, then take this time to refine what you've produced and make sure it gets full marks for written communication. We've allowed 3 hours and 45 minutes for editing your essay, which might sound a bit excessive â€" and, for some of you, it definitely will be. Pick out a single point in your argument that you feel hasn't been fully built upon, and head back to your research. There will almost certainly be an additional quote or two that you could throw in to make your point even clearer. Use the research you gathered earlier to support the key ideas you set out in your outline, but don't ramble for the sake of it. Try to be concise and have faith that the strength of your arguments will take you to around 2,500 words. While your essay plan should see you through, there's nothing to say that more ideas won't occur to you as you go along. Create a mini-outline in your introduction so you signpost exactly what it is you're planning to argue. It's about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way. The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day. And it's just weird having my private brain dumps out on various sites that are designed to be more social. I don't need to title my entries, or tag them, or enable comments, or any of that other stuff. As your intro is unlikely to need many quotes, it makes sense to get the ball rolling and feel a sense of achievement as soon as you've planned your essay and know where it's going. Once you've decided on your approach to answering the question, you should be able to form a pretty solid plan for the body of the essay. It can be helpful to come up with a quick answer in your head, as this gives you a general idea of what to write about and means you won't need to keep rereading the question. The very fact that they're short and worded in a very straightforward way means you're probably expected to construct a much more original and complex essay to respond to it. Don't worry too much about making it sound amazing at this point â€" just get stuck into introducing your argument and telling the reader how you'll support it. You can go back and make yourself sound smarter later on when you're at the editing stage. This way, when you sit down after lunch to tackle the main body of the essay, you'll have already knocked a couple of hundred words off the word count.