The Essays as Seen from Different Mindsets

The essay serves different purposes, and another way of analysing the essay and its purposes is to look at it from different mindsets. With this kind of enlightened appreciation, you may be able to strengthen the different aspects of your essay, including its quality.

Your professor looks at the essay as an evaluative tool of your progress. Your coursework is considered the core of your learning, and the essay is considered the core of your coursework. These are the reasons why you have to pay close attention to the objective and subjective elements of your essay. It has to be objective so your professors can see what you have learned from their discussions. It has to be subjective as well, so you can demonstrate your own critical thinking and reflect your own thoughts though your essay. This means that you have not just analysed the information given in the discussion, but applied and evaluated the information as well. This reflects a higher level of cognitive development.

Your essay must also serve as a communication tool. Using pertinent concepts of communication, you will realise that in creating a communication tool, you have to analyse the behaviour of your intended readers. You have to determine what they like and, more importantly, what they expect to read from your essays. Your professors are objectively committed in the thorough assessment of your learning; your readers want to acquire worthwhile, meaningful information from your essays. If you are able to meet these demands from your audience, your essay will have better quality.

A good essay conveys the information clearly and keeps its readers interested towards the end. To do this, you must be able to employ a more effective writing style. Keep track of grammar rules and other basic writing guidelines.

How to Detect Plagiarism on Your Own

Good writing needs good research and good research needs to be reflected through good referencing. No matter how good your essay is, it will still fail if your professors are able to detect that you are committing plagiarism.

Most of you may not know what grounds call for a plagiaristic act. Plagiarism is defined as the act of taking and using as one’s own the thoughts, writings, theories or inventions of another author or source. If you take any idea or passage from another writer and represent them as your own without giving due credit to the rightful person, you are already plagiarising. Unfortunately, not all of you are even aware that you are committing the act due to the following factors:

• You might not know how to reference properly.
• You might have written phrases and sentences that are exactly the same as some written outputs.
• You do not know how to detect plagiarism on your own.

There are several procedures you can employ if you wish to detect plagiarism on your own. These procedures will also train you to write your essay responsibly and ethically. You can start writing your essay using your own unique approach. The more original your essay is, the lesser it is suspected of plagiarism. This will also enhance your essay writing style in the future.

Do not forget to reference everything that you have taken from another source. If the text you have written is not your own, you have to give credit to its true source. You can also check if your entire essay has similar matches to other online material. You can use search engines and online plagiarism detectors to make sure that your essay has no textual similarities with any output. If your essay is found to have matches, you have to rephrase your sentences to avoid being labelled as a plagiarist by your professor.

Are Your Study Habits Helpful to the Completion of Your Essays?

It is a fact that your proper study habits can easily help you accomplish any coursework task you are assigned with. This is even more important if you are always handed with essay writing assignments from your professors. This is because your essay reflects what you have learnt from the different subject areas you are taking. If you do not have proper study habits, you may not have enough information to include in your essays, and that will badly reflect in your academic standing.

There are several indicators you can check if you want to make sure that you have proper study habits. Here are some of them:

• You have a definite time set aside for your daily study.
• You have a definite place to study for your essay content at home.
• You have a ready set of reference aids—dictionaries, almanacs, thesaurus, etc.—in the room you have selected for studying.
• You take notes for necessary details you can use in your essay.
• Your study time spans for more than an hour at a time.
• You create a list of questions you still want to address for further exploration.
• You have good room conditions—good lighting, ventilation, etc.—while you are studying for your essay.
• You try to study every night to always keep up with your essay writing assignments.
• You usually start studying a subject area that is easier for you to understand.
• You review and edit your essay writing assignments on a regular basis.
• You skim for important information when reading for your essay writing assignment.
• You take down possibly important notes during lectures to continually retain information which may be necessary for your essay writing assignment.
• You have a weekly schedule that organises your time for minor tasks included in your essay writing assignment.
• You have a customised approach for your studying and essay writing task.
• You listen attentively to class lectures to obtain as much pertinent information as possible.

Identifying Psychological Obstacles

The worst scenario that a student can encounter throughout his or her academic career is to lose focus from completing every coursework task due to psychological obstacles. These obstacles are harder to counteract since most of them are self-inflicted, or are otherwise taken for granted based on the mindset of the students. Either of these has a profound negative effect on the performance of the student, either from losing focus or losing interest in the essay writing task altogether—and this poses a huge risk to the student’s overall academic performance.

A corrective strategy of any sort cannot thus be implemented if the specific source of the concern has not been identified yet. As an additional guide to the students who consistently face the risk of losing focus and interest on the essay writing task, the following aspects have been identified as concrete psychological obstacles students have to avoid:

• Writer’s block. This occurs when the student is not able to continue writing further due to an overwhelming difficulty in content conceptualisation and inclusion. The situation can also happen when the student is not able to determine how to reconcile two apparently conflicting points to form a cohesive essay which may inevitably affect the smoothness of the paragraph transitions. This leads to disappointment which may discourage the student from completing the essay writing task.

• Redundancy of thought. This happens when the student just repeats the same thought in different sentences, or within the same paragraph, without adding any more helpful inputs that could expound the topic. This usually happens when the student did not have enough sufficient research data that could have helped in strengthening a certain thought or idea.

• Lack of synchronicity. This is experienced by students who are forced to work under certain conditions that do not coincide with their learning style, making them less productive and easily prone to distractions and frustrations.

The Interview as the Primary Source of the Essay

Doing the research has increasingly become one of the most important aspects of the essay writing assignment. This is because any written essay with research turns out to be better-rounded and more in-depth in content. Once the students master the techniques of research they will be able to produce more solid postulations in their presentation and analysis of facts since they have more credible information to rely on.

There are two different kinds of sources that students can use for their research to complete their essay assignments. Professors usually recommend that their students present both kinds of sources as part of the list of references since this makes the essay more objective. One kind of source is called the primary source. This is the kind of information the students collect themselves using certain data sampling and gathering tools. The other kind is called the secondary source, which the students can get from books and other publications. An example of a primary source is the interview.

The strengths of the interview include its timeliness and originality. Since the students collect the data themselves directly from an expert, they can elicit specific information that may take a longer time to look for in a book or journal. The responses they can get from their interviewees will also be more updated and concrete since the interview is conducted at a more recent date. What the students must remember in conducting an interview is to schedule an appointment with the expert weeks in advance to give sufficient time for preparation. To this end, the student should send the expert the brief of the essay topic as well as the potential set of enquiries so the interviewee is more prepared to give the information once the actual interview starts.

Checking for the Organisation of the Essay

One of the important aspects that spell the success of an essay composition is to make sure that all of its elements are in place and are completely met. Not only must the contents of the essay be solid and foolproof; the writing style and the organisation of these facts must also be properly realised. In composing the essay, the student must remember the need to structure unified paragraphs around the topic sentences. These paragraphs are to be arranged in a logically organised manner and with effectively written transitions.

The student can only make sure that these elements are duly covered in the essay if enough time is allocated to polish and edit the essay draught prior to submission. Revisions may be commenced after a brief but restive adjournment from the time the essay draught is written so that the essay can be viewed more objectively, which makes it easier for the student to point out certain errors. When revising or editing sentences and paragraphs in the essay, the student must look for sentences that only confuse the main thought presented in a paragraph and modify or delete these accordingly. The student may also rephrase the sentence or move it to another paragraph where it is more appropriate.

Structurally, the essay must start with a well defined introduction, which is followed by the body and the conclusion. The paragraphs that make up the body must present the points from the weakest to the strongest to have more impact. The paragraphs must have enough material to support the topic sentence which contains one of the supporting points of the essay. Every paragraph must contain more than two sentences to add more depth and gravity to the main sentence.