How to Write a College Essay

This is an essay I wrote in my Composition Class back in June.


So you find yourself in a college class and the instructor has assigned a two to three page, double-spaced essay on a topic of your choice. First thing you do is panic. That is a good reaction because writing a college essay can be a traumatic experience.

If you are lucky, the instructor will give you a list of topics to choose from. If not, the choices are immeasurable and this will produce the next step: a minor anxiety attack. Look over the list to see if there is anything you have even a small inkling of any knowledge on that subject. This is where the prewriting starts. Take out a piece of paper and start writing those thoughts down as quickly as possible before they disappear in the deep recesses of your brain. This is called brainstorming. There are other techniques to get those creative juices flowing such as freewriting: writing without stopping; and clustering: relating ideas on a piece of paper by drawing lines to connect those rambling thoughts. Another step to prewriting involves creating an outline of how your paper will support the topic.

After you have picked the topic, the decision of which type of essay you are to write must be made. This is another dilemma. There are at least eight different main forms of essays: example, definition, comparison/contrast, argumentative, cause/effect, process analysis, narrative, and descriptive. But wait, one essay can actually contain elements of all of these. That means the combinations are...well, you do the math. At this point, hyperventilating is a real possibility.

You have decided your topic and type for the essay. The topic must be narrowed down so that the paper doesn't lose its purpose running down rabbit trails. This narrowing down is termed, "The Thesis". (This is said in a deep, ominous voice.) This step may escalate the anxiety and hyperventilating. Take the topic and start asking questions: who, how, why, where, when and what. Here is where you start involving anyone or anything that may possibly listen. Discuss this with your kids, coworkers, cats, dogs, TV characters, the ceiling. This questioning is supposed to help limit which path the topic is to take. The thesis statement needs to be an opinion not a factual statement.

The topic has been decided. The type has been determined. The thesis has been narrowed down. Here comes the main part of the essay. The thesis of the essay must be supported with evidence. The type of evidence depends on the essay. For example, an example essay must have, you guessed it, examples that back your thesis statement. An example of writing a college essay being a traumatic experience would be describing loss of sleep and getting sick over trying to write an argumentative essay. Or, maybe that would be considered a cause/effect essay? It could even be classified as a narrative or maybe a descriptive essay. It is very confusing.

Finding the supporting evidence, especially if this is an argumentative paper, is probably not too difficult. The difficult part comes when you have to document or cite where you find the evidence. How you cite that evidence is extremely critical. Now the full blown anxiety attack rears its ugly head because one wrong move and all of a sudden the horrible word, "plagiarism" creeps in and an automatic zero for all your hard work and loss of sleep is threatened. In addition, the paper must have the correct margins and spacing. All these rules can make even the best writer get a bad case of writer's block.

Okay. Take a deep breath. Just a couple more steps to go and your paper is complete. After the body of the essay has been written, write a short summary of the paper. This is the conclusion. Try not to make it as anticlimactic as this paper will probably be. The topic, outline, thesis, body, and conclusion have been completed. All that is left is to rewrite the whole paper. All of the work just done is part of a rough draft. Look back over the paper, supposedly a few hours or days later, or even have a friend look over it and critique it. Clean up any grammar errors. Tighten up wording. Of course, this particular paper is supposed to incorporate all of the above steps in two hours or less.

If you have made it this far, congratulations. you have survived the traumatic experience of writing a college essay.