| For many students writing essays can be a long, drawn out and painful process. However, it doesn't need to be like that - writing essays is a simple and straightforward process, provided that you understand the main steps in the process, then focus on one step at a time. Students who are trying to do two or more steps at the same time tend to sit at their desks for hour upon hour, staring into space, or sucking the end of their pen, not knowing what to write next. The feeling is often described by the student as a mental block.
To help you get a clear understanding of the writing skills we teach, here is an outline of the main stages in the writing process:
- The first step is to make sure that you understand the question being asked so that you know exactly what to write about. It's common for students to get poor marks for otherwise well written essays because they have not answered the question being asked.
- The next step is to do the appropriate research so you can assemble the information to be analysed.
- The third step is to plan the order in which you are going to present your ideas, so that when you move onto the writing stage, you can write your essay quickly and easily.
- The final stage in writing your essay is to edit what you have written, then rewrite it in a neat and legible form.
By matriculation level, students must be able to write high quality two-page essays in about half an hour. Obviously, this takes practice so, high school students need to master all the essay writing skills outlined above by about year 10.
We teach students how to write well written essays in a systematic and practical way, by relating the skills we teach to the work that is being done at school.
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