Creating an Authoritative English Essay
Creating an authoritative essay can be a little tricky. There are a lot of things that you have to do right, such as conducting proper research and then presenting your arguments/findings in a convincing manner.
If you’re finding it hard to come up with such essays every time, don’t worry. There are a couple of tricks in the book that, if applied correctly, can make your every essay come out nice and authoritative.
In this post, that is what we’re going to be exploring. Mind you, there are a lot of tips for creating authoritative essays, and we can’t really go into every one of them. Rather than delivering every point at length, today I will be highlighting some key considerations that are essential for creating an authoritative English essay.
What You Need to Do Creating an Authoritative English Essay
Whether you’re writing for a class assignment, a professional publication, or for your own personal development, every authoritative English essay requires several key elements that you need to consider.
Here, we’re going to mention some of the main useful ones.
Let’s get started.
1. Be Careful About Your Research
Yep, dramatic…considering we’re talking about essay tips.
What Gordon Hinckley has said above is a pretty much-known fact. You can’t build a good building on a weak foundation. And when it comes to writing essays, your foundation is your research.
If your research is on point, your essay will automatically come out as authoritative and trustworthy.
To make sure your research becomes a reliable foundation for your essay, there are a couple of things that you need to do:
- First of all, you need to make sure you do your research from the right places
- Secondly, you need to make sure that you take information from said sources in the proper way (in other words, you have to ensure that you don’t directly copy-paste anything)
- And lastly, you need to make that you don’t breach any institutional guidelines regarding research while conducting it.
2. Specify and Follow a Structure
An authoritative essay is an organized essay. Rock-solid facts can appear flimsy if presented in disarray, while opinions can sound like rock-solid facts if presented in a structure.
When writing your essay, you need to create a structure comprising different headings. You should break your essay up into parts so that all the arguments and facts follow one another in proper chronological order.
Each argument or point in your essay would, in this way, lay the ground for the succeeding one, adding to the credibility of the latter. Not only do you have to break your essay up into sections, but you also have to ensure that each of them is correctly placed in the right sequence.
For example, here is an outline that could be made for an essay:
- Introduction (includes a thesis statement)
- Section 1 (Main argument, evidential facts, figures, thoughts, opinions, etc.)
- Section 2 (With the same constituents as Section 1)
- Section 3 (With the same constituents as the above sections)
- Analysis of existing evidence and flaws
- Conclusion
3. Always Substantiate Claims/Arguments with Evidence
When writing an essay, you should always present evidence when mentioning anything that…well, requires evidence.
While opinions can be featured in an essay in some capacity, the main pillar holding up the credibility of your arguments is the evidence you provide. You can’t form an argument or a strong case for your topic merely on opinion or speculation.
Take a very simple example for the above.
If an author is writing an essay on world population, they could be a lot better off saying:
According to Worldometers, the current population of the world is 8.03 billion.
…than saying:
I think that there are a lot of people in the world.
4. Always Find and Eradicate Errors
There are different types of errors and mistakes that you can make when writing your essay. While it is understandable that errors can be made even by the best of writers, leaving them uncorrected is not.
Errors scattered sporadically around your essay can make it look weak and unauthoritative. If you want to make it look the opposite, you have to take care of the errors.
- One of the most common and deadly errors that can occur in your writing includes grammatical and spelling mistakes. You can take the help of an online grammar checker to find out mistakes like these.
- Although not technically an error, plagiarism is also something that you have to keep an eye out for during the “cleansing” phase. Plagiarism can occur in your content, even if you don’t happen to have an express intention for it. You have to use an online plagiarism check to find if there is any in your content, and then you need to take the required steps to eradicate it.
- Missing or incorrect citations can also be an issue that you could need to resolve during the editing phase. But, to find them, you will need to separately check the citations as well as the cited parts.
One thing you will notice about the stuff we’ve listed above is that the second and third points are both related to plagiarism. While in the second point, we’ve talked about plagiarism in earnest, i.e., in its actual form, the third point is also related to it. Incorrect citations can lead to source-based plagiarism, which is just as harmful as the conventional normal type.
If you ever find yourself facing such a situation where you can’t leave out using a particular sentence or passage from an existing source and you also can’t cite it, you can try out paraphrasing.
Paraphrasing is the process using which a piece of content is altered in such a way that it looks different from its original source, but it has the same meaning and context. This is a useful technique that you can try out to borrow content from a source without worrying about plagiarism.
The good thing about paraphrasing is that you can do it in a couple of different ways as per the situation at hand. You can do it manually if the text happens to be somewhat intricate in meaning. Or, you can do it using a rephraser online if the text happens to be long and lengthy – and would take up a lot of time via the manual method.
Conclusion
The beauty of an essay is how authoritative it is, especially when it comes to expository, persuasive, and argumentative ones. You can follow the tips given above to give your essays an authoritative touch and have a good impact on the readers.
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