5 Necessary Elements of a Good Essay
Writing a good essay might sound simple, but it’s not. That’s because several elements must come together to form a high-quality essay and impact your audience.
But what are the elements required to form a perfect essay? If you are looking for the answer to this question, this blog post is for you.
Here, we’ll explain the 5 elements of essay writing essential to form a top-notch writing piece with the help of examples. This way, it will be easier to understand each part.
Thus, without any further delay, let’s delve into this discussion. Shall we?
An essay is one of the first academic tasks that introduces the world of academic writing to students. It familiarizes the students with the writing style used in academic writing.
But an essay can only familiarize the students with academic writing when it’s written well. And when writing a good essay, you must consider the following essential elements:
1. Research
Research is one of the most crucial elements in any writing form and essay writing is one of those forms. Therefore, research is the first essential element of an excellent essay.
Every essay needs a little background knowledge and a lot of up-to-date information on a topic. So, to get the required information, a writer must perform research. And to conduct the research, writers can use different sources, such as:
5 Necessary Elements of a Good Essay
- Articles or Blog posts.
- Books.
- Google Scholar.
Conducting research will prove handy in including expert opinions and analysis, adding examples, facts, or statistics, and providing supporting evidence for the thesis statement. So, the deeper you go into the research phase, the better material you can find for your essay. And better material will eventually help the readers understand the essay better.
Thus, research is the key to writing a well-informed, well-supported, and convincing essay.
2. Grammatical Correctness
Undoubtedly, an extensive research phase will help you find better material for your essay. But you can only shape that material into a high-quality essay if you have the necessary writing abilities. And writing grammatically correct content is one of those abilities.
Hence, the second necessary element to form a good essay is the grammatical correctness of the content.
Knowing basic grammar rules is enough to write grammatically correct content. So, learn to practically use grammar rules before writing something. Otherwise, you won’t be able to write good quality material.
However, once you know the correct way to implement grammar rules, you can also use the assistance of technology. This way, you can check whether you are correctly implementing the grammar rules on not. So, let’s understand this through an example.
First, we’ll take a sample of grammatically incorrect content for this example.
Sample Text: Me no good at write error free content. But the cat it was on the mat, it was a big cat. He was fat, but cute. I petted it, it was soft. It purred it was happy.
Then, we’ll run the grammatically incorrect content into an AI-based writing assistant. For this case, we have picked Grammarly because it is one of the top-rated writing assistant tools. So, let’s see how Grammarly provides suggestions for grammatical errors and even typos.
Here is the improved version of the ‘Sample Text’ with no grammatical errors:
Improved Version: Me not good at writing error-free content. But the cat was on the mat. It was a big cat. He was fat but cute. I petted it. It was soft. It purred. It was happy.
As you can see in the above picture, Grammarly has highlighted the mistakes in the content. So, that’s how you can perform grammar checking on your content and ensure a top-notch final product.
3. Simplified Content Nature and Overall Essay Structure
Besides grammatically correct content, another essential element that plays a vital role in the quality of an essay is its simplified content nature and overall structure. So, let’s discuss each one individually.
Structure
Every perfectly written essay follows the traditional essay structure that contains an introduction, multiple body paragraphs, and a strong conclusion.
Introduction
Besides the title, the introduction is the first thing readers will see in an essay. Therefore, it must be catchy. And you can write a catchy introduction by adding the ‘hook’ factor.
So, the introductory part of an essay should contain a hook with context. For instance, while adding context to the hook, you can focus on the following points:
- Briefly discuss some important academic debates/work related to your topic.
- Share some background information related to your topic.
Here are some examples of perfectly crafted essay introductions by ThoughtCo (Nordquist, 2011) :
Thus, try to keep the introduction as short as possible.
Body
While an introduction is one of the most important parts of an essay, the body holds 60-80% weightage. So, write the content for the body part according to the following points:
- Provide additional evidence to back up the previously presented thesis statement.
- Take assistance from evidence (examples, facts, and statistics) to support the discussed points.
But that’s not it, as it’s also essential to keep the readers engaged throughout the essay. So, read the ‘Simplified Content Nature’ section to learn how you can do that.
Conclusion
The conclusion of an essay should be strong. And to write a strong conclusion, you can discuss a summary of all the mentioned main points and reiterate the thesis statement. That’s because the conclusion aims to provide your insights and analysis on the topic.
Here is an example of a perfectly crafted essay conclusion(Morrison, 2016) :
Simplified Content Nature
An essay is among the lengthy forms of content. Therefore, it is essential to keep the readers engaged. And one of the ways to keep the readers engaged is to keep the wording of content simple and uncomplicated.
When it comes to keeping the content of an essay simple and uncomplexed, the general rule of thumb is to:
- Write short sentences in a professional tone.
- Divide long sections into different subheadings.
However, you can also use technology’s help. So, let’s see how technology can assist in writing uncomplexed yet engaging content through an example.
For this example, first, we’ll take a sample of highly complicated content.
Sample Content:The utilization of entangled particles in technologies such as quantum computing and quantum cryptography has sparked interest in the study and exploitation of entanglement in a practical capacity. However, the ramifications of this phenomenon on our understanding of causality and the nature of reality remain a topic of ongoing research and debate in the field of quantum mechanics.
Disclaimer: The above sample contains ‘58’ words.
Now, let’s run the ‘Sample Text’ into any modern technology-based paraphrasing tool. For this example, we have selected Editpad paraphrasing tool. But you can choose any tool that you like.
So, here is the result we’ve got in our case:
Improved Content: The potential applications of entangled particles in quantum computing and cryptography have caused much excitement in the scientific community. Nonetheless, the implications of this phenomenon on our understanding and the physical world still remain a matter of discussion among quantum physicists.
As you can see, the content looks more refined and easier to read now. So, you can use the same approach to simplify the nature of your essay’s content and make it more engaging.
4. Content Uniqueness
The fourth necessary element of a good essay is the uniqueness and originality of the content. Why? Let’s find out.
Undoubtedly, writing grammatically correct content is vital for producing high-quality material. But if the essay’s material is copied, creating grammatically correct content will be useless. Therefore, writing unique and original content should be the priority of every writer.
But how can someone ensure that the written content is 100% original and unique? The answer to this question lies in using a plagiarism detector. So, let’s prove this through an example.
First, we’ll take the following sample of some copied text:
[I have copied two paragraphs from the ‘What is Title Case’ heading present at the following link:
https://titlecaseconverter.com/]
Now, to check the originality of the sample text, we’ll perform a scan for plagiarism with the help of a plagiarism checker. For this example, we’ve picked the plagiarism detector by Check–Plagiarism. But you can select the tool of your choice.
So, let’s see how the selected tool finds the text originality issues in the ‘Sample Text.’
As you can see in the above picture, the plagiarism checker of Check-Plagiarism has detected a 100% plagiarism ratio in the entered text. That’s because we have copied the entire content from the internet.
So, that’s how you can use any plagiarism checker to determine content originality issues.
5. Citation and References
As discussed earlier, writing 100% original and unique content is essential to producing a high-quality essay. But sometimes, it becomes necessary to include the wording from an existing source. So, if you are in such a situation, you can enclose that information in double quotes and cite its source.
Here is what the information enclosed in double quotes will look like:
5 Necessary Elements of a Good Essay
APA
Chicago
MLA
So, that’s how you can cite the sources in your essay and increase the credibility of your writing. But before selecting any citation style, ask your instructor or check the requirements of your essay.
5 Necessary Elements of a Good Essay
Conclusion
When it comes to writing top-notch essays, research plays a vital role because it assists in finding the material for the essay. However, the essay quality depends significantly on the writing style and the content uniqueness. Therefore, while writing an essay, you should also care about the content’s structure, grammatical correctness, text readability, and citation.
Thus, if you work on the aforementioned elements, you can create a cohesive and well-rounded essay that effectively conveys your ideas to the readers. But the above-discussed elements are just the tip of the iceberg. Therefore, if you want to learn the complete detail of writing a good essay with examples, then read the above discussion.
5 Necessary Elements of a Good Essay
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