Is there anything more frustrating than getting an assignment that leaves you scratching your head in confusion, wondering how to approach it? We have all been there. In fact, no one becomes a great writer unless he or she tackles assignments that are challenging, frustrating, and new. However, while completing a particularly challenging assignment might make you a better writer, the process can create a tremendous amount of anxiety for the average student. Instead of focusing on completing your assignment, you might be wondering if you are approaching it correctly, what mistakes you are making, and what kind of impact it will have on your grades.
Take a deep breath, calm down, and let us help you. We have a number of essay writing tutorials aimed at helping students understand the challenges of various types of writing assignments. Most of our essay writing tutorials focus on past and present current events, reflecting the types of assignments students are likely to encounter in their own course work. Using these tutorials, students can improve their own writing.
Our tutorials come in multiple formats. We have some simple Q&A style formats that address the questions and issues that our customers experience most frequently. If you are having a particular writing challenge, such as how to write a lengthy essay, how to properly use a particular citation style, or how to tackle a specific type of essay, these tutorials can provide you with invaluable information and guidance. We also have tutorials that focus on example essays, providing annotations to some of our most popular example essays so that you can understand why a writer made specific choices when writing that assignment. Combined together, these essay writing tutorials can help you meet any challenges you face, make better grades, and become a better writer.
Writing on your choice of discursive essay topics gives you the rare opportunity to walk the fine line that separates a discursive essay from its close cousins—the argumentative or persuasive essay. While in certain lights, a discursive essay might resemble its relatives, the argumentative or persuasive essay, they are still very distinct. For example, an argumentative essay seeks to convince you of an argument, but a discursive essay seeks to examine the arguments on opposing sides of an issue—with marked detachment. A discursive essay forces you to look at an issue you might be very passionate about and to approach Continue Reading...
Introduction You know that “impartial friend” everyone has? The one who is super mature, fair and almost never takes sides when people they know are arguing? That friend is akin to a discursive essay. Discursive essays are marked by their impartiality, by the distance they take from issues or complex phenomena. The discursive essay inquisitively walks around such subjects, examining them closely, but objectively, seldom forming a concrete conclusion. The discursive essay is very similar to that impartial friend who is always happy to lend a listening ear, but does not become emotionally invested in a particular issue. Conversely, we Continue Reading...
Don’t just summarize the text, analyze it! How many times have you heard your teacher say that? Often when assigning an analytical essay of some sort, teachers will give a stern warning out against the dangers of just summarizing a novel, short story or article. This is because they want you to be able to demonstrate that you have more than a laundry list of the main points in your head—but can deconstruct and explore them in a meaningful manner. They want you to do more than just regurgitate the basics. However, this doesn’t mean that regurgitating or summarizing an Continue Reading...
Introduction An exemplification essay is the type of essay that teachers love to assign, because it sounds complex and it scares students. Okay, maybe (most) teachers don’t want to scare students, but they do like to test student knowledge and understanding. An exemplification essay is a perfect example of something that sounds complicated but actually isn’t at all. It just happens to be a type of essay that teachers don’t assign as often as other types (persuasive essay, descriptive essay, cause and effect essay, etc.) because this is a very, very specific type of writing assignment. An exemplification essay, Continue Reading...
When most people think of pop culture essay topics, their minds quickly gravitate to current television shows and music—and this is understandable. Pop culture centers on the aspects of entertainment, art, leisure, fashion, gaming and music that are popular right now or in recent history. But pop culture consumes so much more than that—pop culture also refers to the lifestyle of how people communicate, spend their leisure time, and relax. This even includes what kind of food they eat. For example, in the 1950s poodle skirts and bold A-line skirts were all the fashion, everyone was listening to Elvis Presley, Continue Reading...
While character analysis might sound like this sophisticated demand, this really isn’t the case. Writing a character analysis essay can actually be quite enjoyable. This is your moment to roll up your sleeves and play armchair psychologist. You get to assess a fictional personage and make a case about their strengths, weaknesses, secret desires, perversions, shortcomings, needs and issues. This gives you the power to play shrink and essentially give the reader the rundown regarding why this fictional person is so weird, intriguing, or infuriating. A character analysis should always be fun to write as it gives you the Continue Reading...
The coffee was bitter. Nick laughed. It made a good ending to the story. His mind was starting to work. He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough. He spilled the coffee out of the pot and shook the grounds loose into the fire. (Hemingway, Nick Adams Stories, 2009). Writing in third person can be found throughout the classics of English and American literature. Above is an excerpt written in the third person by the author who is perhaps a master at writing in the third person—Ernest Hemingway. Known for his simple, declarative sentences, Hemingway made an Continue Reading...
It is quite common for students to have misconceptions about transition words. Many students only have a few such words in their writing toolkit and think that small number is adequate. Knowing and using many different transition words is like having a large vocabulary—it enriches your work and makes it more dynamic to read. Transition words offer that finishing touch of refinement and fluidity to your essay. They make your work easier to follow, something that is crucial when you’re getting into a complex argument. More importantly, they indicate to your professor that your writing is at a higher Continue Reading...
Writing a counter argument is one of the most meaningful skills you can develop as a student. Such an assignment doesn’t just force you to become a better writer; it pushes you to become a better thinker as well. Developing a counter argument is a skill you really will use for the rest of your life. It is also one you should continuously hone. Having the ability to anticipate a counter argument to any point you craft will force your own arguments to be stronger. This will allow you to address any dissension in your own points readily and Continue Reading...
Paraphrasing is a skill and it is one used so frequently by students that often teachers will just assume that every student knows how to do it. This is a common mistake made by educators for an understandable reason: we all paraphrase several times a day in our daily speech. We paraphrase snippets from conversations, from morning shows, gossip blogs, from parents and friends. This is largely because we are a communicative society. We often have to convey something that was mentioned earlier by one party to another party and few of us tape record conversations so that we can Continue Reading...
