Essay writing General

[jgbs]

Hey everyone, I thought it may be a good idea to start a thread purely to discuss essay writing technique.

I always find my ideas being let down by my inability to structure them properly into an A+ essay, and it occurred to me I've never really paid much attention to essay technique.

So please, if you have any tips or general rules of thumb, share them here.

[zool3]

i need help too! for all i know is you must use metalanguage and never give definition unless you got nothing to write and you just need to fill in space and some how make it not sound like a definition

[Hutchoo]

0_o. You guys should read this stuff.

http://vce.atarnotes.com/forum/index.php/topic,36094.0.html

Pretty much everything you want is in here.

[Keine]

Generally, you'd want to follow TEEL and always relate your topic sentences, paragraphs, etc
back to the task and always address the question

How are you doing for your essay-based SACs?

[zool3]

so i got one period to write my essay (about 1 hour) any ideas for me to be able to finish it time? should i just write intro, 2 body and a conclusion? or just write the normal 3 body para instead of 2?

[Keine]

One hour is the suggested amount of time to write an essay in the end of year exam for English language, so try to write at least three body paragraphs in your essays. Having more than three body paragraphs is also fine and sometimes even recommended, just that the more you write, the more likely you are to lose marks

[Ghost!]

One hour is the suggested amount of time to write an essay in the end of year exam for English language, so try to write at least three body paragraphs in your essays. Having more than three body paragraphs is also fine and sometimes even recommended, just that the more you write, the more likely you are to lose marks

This is sound advice. Come the end of the year you need to be able to construct an essay with three paragraphs in an hour, you should probably begin working on that now. With that said if it's for a SAC then maybe speak to your teacher, if you can't write that much in one hour then there is no point attempting it, better off with a shorter COMPLETE essay then a longer INCOMPLETE essay.

Writing a whole essay in one period seems a little rough to me considering we just finished Unit 3, we get a whole double period session for the two essay SACs we've had so far this year.

How are you doing for your essay-based SACs?

I've been going okayyyy I guess :/ Out of fifty marks in the first essay SAC we had a score roughly 40, so I was pretty disappointed. We also had an essay SAC last week, and I'm feeling relatively confident about a full mark score! We had a practice a few days before and without referencing the text provided (what an idiot I am) or studying the night before, I scrapped a 32/50 with the teacher telling me if I had have referenced the text provided I could've easily added another 15 marks to my score. So, fingers crossed with a much more revised and textually referenced essay I can pull of a 50/50!

How about the rest of you guys, and you Keine?

[zool3]

ohh okay thanks for the idea.

[jackson1234]

Ghost, remember that our essays are out of 15 , not out of 40. So keep that in perspective

[Ghost!]

Ghost, remember that our essays are out of 15 , not out of 40. So keep that in perspective

Obviously in exams... not in practice SACs?

[jackson1234]

our sacs are out of 20. every school differs (obviously)

[zool3]

my school tries to model the exam.... Part A,B Analysis of text (60marks) Part C Essay (40 Marks)