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Back to Basics - how do you write an essay (would love to hear ur personal ways)
Posted by
franki79
I know, I am probably going to get ridiculed for this, but here goes nothing. I know how to write an essay,,, the way I learned in school. Universal me three. The title is a general statement that will apply to most people, you give three paragraphs about it and the conlusion and I admit, the last essay I wrote was when I took, and failed my GED exam (bad at history and horrible at math), but I passed everything else and, out of a possible 1-4, received a 4 on the essay. Is this a die hard, rule or is it not that important, generally speaking. The reason i ask is bc I am having problems blogging, it's not a lack of ideas, it's not writers block,,, more like writers flood, I have so many ideas,, that when it starts coming out, I tend to ramble and I know that. So I actually discovered that one thing I can do is to write essay-style, it's just more structured to me. It's not so much that I ramble, well, yes I do, although at that time I think it is so important that the reader understand everything about a particular part and in my writing, my fingers take on a mind of it's own, I get swept up and carried off somewhere. Then when I go to self edit the piece, usually before that, just by proofreading it, I can tell that I didn't take the scenic route, I didn't veer off the path. I realize that I took several wrong turns and ended up somewhere completely different and I have confused and yes, lost the reader and in the inital editing of it, after I have printed it out if typed on a computer, I have to scratch off huge chunks, sometimes almost a page, if not an entire page in one chunk. Well, I do the cutting of this but it seems no matter how careful I am in my notes, where to start and to stop cutting, I under cut or over cut and then I try to correct that and I end up overcorrecting it. Before I reach the final edit, the scrutinizing, figuring out which words can be changed to better fit the work,,, I have all but given up. I mean to take a break from it, but by that time, I don't want to look at it. So it goes on the back burner until "I have the paitence", well time goes by and that back burner get turned off. AND FOR SOME REASON, THIS ONLY HAPPENS TO MY WORK, if I edit for somebody else, it doesn't happen. I have always seemed to do that in my writing and it is a bad, bad habit and one I must break, so I have to actually retrain my brain. As so I've heard many times, it takes 21 days to break a habit, I wonder if it takes 21 months,,, or years to break your thoughts of the samething. I am actually starting to wonder if I have Adult ADD/ADHD. But I doubt it, since this is accompanied with insomnia,,, like now,,, which I have mildly. It's not an ongoing or regularly ocurring thing. It usually lasts for two nights and three days, and I believe it was learned. But that is for a diffenent post I would love to hear your input on this. I'm just curious.
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Replies
  • franki79
    Huh, thanks for that link,,, it is helping a lot. I kind of forgot one important detail when writing essays,,, they can be writen more than technical, they can actually be interesting. Franki
  • franki79
    Well, I knew I wasn't alone. Sometimes, when I'm reading, something will hit me and I'll open up a second document and start working on a completely different idea. And I still write longhand, I have three nice notebooks, with hard covers, a small black journal but I don't write in these a lot, one I use to attempt to keep track of website I joined, email addresses I set up, the un's and pw's but the keyword there is ATTEMPT, usually I forget. The notebook I use 99.9% of the time is my three ring notebook with the picutre of the dragon I printed off the internet but it is always filled with paper and I cannot leave walmart without buying, or at least looking at pens. I have gotten very spoiled on gel pens, I have to see what the prices are like. Lately I stumbled on a brand called @ the office, the pens are nice to write with and they are cheap except the barrell on them are fatter than a regular pen since they hold 3x's the ink as one. Good luck to you to! Franki
  • Lanita Andrews
    franki, you just totally pegged me with the whole email-distration thing. I do the same thing, back-and-forth back-and-forth. I just roll with it. I usually ended coming across some great reading that way, and sometimes it even ends up giving me some ideas for writing. If I really am determined to get writing done without the distractions, I stck to my notebook. Hubby bought me a beautiful red leather notebook cover when I started writing again, and I carry it around with me everywhere. Good luck to you!
  • franki79
    One of my problems is I'm too overly crititcal of myself, esspecially my writing. I'm not a perfectionist, I don't believe in perfection being more than an unattainable goal, but if I'm going to share what I'm writing with everybody else, well, I just gotta relax. Of course it would help if our own weaknesses and short comings were not so prevailant to us. I started setting these goals back in Feb or March and I finally got the guts to looks into freelancing. I've always been very self concious about my writing,,,, always felt like I'm not any good or good enough, but been scared to take the chance. Back in Jan, I ended up really sick, I had to go in for emergency surgery, was in the icu, sedated hooked up to a venalator. Realized I needed to stop being afraid. I hate not facing my fears as is but I'm not getting any younger. But maybe I need to do that, I might try to do that tomorrow. See here is part of my problem, I just have two document programs, wordpad and notepad and there is no word counter, when I had my laptop with windows07, I used word count all the time. I don't have any spell check or thesaurus on here so I have to go on the internet and look up words. A problem for is of course distrations, like if I need to look something up, I got to three sites and get pretty much the same answers, that way I am as sure as I can be that I got the correct information and I find something else that is interesting, so I'll start reading it. Or I'll be in between ideas and I'll decide to check my mail, of course I always forget to log out of Yahoo so I get the little alert anytime I get mail. Of course, that is also easily solvable, my other mothers (my oldest friends mom) boyfriend has a laptop that will solve that prob, it has no internet access, nothing downloaded and she's pretty sure he'll give it to me, if it even works. But thank you, you did help.
  • Lanita Andrews
    for me, each essay comes along differently, depending on the topic, and what my intentions are with the essay. I tend to overwrite as well, but I think that is common for most writers, especially new ones. I don't really worry about it until I have a completed draft and begin editing. Much of the time I need to overwrite to get from point a to point b, and it is only in the editing that I'm able to figure out what to leave out. Plus, by overwriting, I find that at the end of the first draft, I actually have 2 or 3 essays in one, so I will usually cut and paste what I'm removing into a 'scrap' file for later use. I don't think that using the essay structure you're talking about is a bad way to begin, but I would think of that as more of a brainstorming excercise, just something to get you started. I've only recently (as in the last 2 months) started setting goals for my writing (what I want to write and where I want to send the completed pieces), and have found that when I am working on a particular essay, if I read similar work from other authors in between each editing fase, my editing is much more productive. I've actually learned alot about my writing (specifically my weaknesses) by doing this, but the trick for me is to read the same type of work that I am writing. For example, I am working on a piece I'd like to submit to "A Cup Of Comfort" and in between each editing fase, I read through some of the sample essays from their previous publications. In the process, I've learned a great deal about this particular publications preferences, but I've also learned that I tend to focus a little too much on 'discussion' and not enough on 'storytelling' for the type of essay writing I'm trying to do. Since coming to this conclusion, my essay has been transformed and I am far more confident in the piece. As for blog writing, I know there is a standard word count that isn't a hard and fast rule, but one that is generally accepted among bloggers (or so I've read). I can't remember what the word count is but if you google the question you could probably come up with the answer. Anyway, my point is if you try to adhere to a max word count, one that is considered appropriate for blogging, it might help you stay focused. For me, having a word count max is probably the single most useful tool for me to edit my work. I hope that helps.
  • franki79
    Yeah, I guess your right, of course I've had a deep fear about allowing others to read my writing,, my mom used to go in and read my stuff,,, which never made sense, since she always used to say that nobody could read my writting and she was right, but I wrote this story when I was 14 and yes, it was crap it had no real confict. She also ridiculed me aobut the title. "Life in the Fastlane", of course she made the connection, that it was an Eagles song. One band we both loved. But the story was my way of escaping into a perfect world. Never could figure out why she wasn't more concerned with writing about two girls who runaway from home. I've never taken my writing seriously,,, I mean I wrote a report in 2004 on breast cancer. I never even thought about being a freelance anything, mostly because this is the first time in life had constant access to a computer I was thinking about it and I am almost certian this arose shortly after i found out my mom near thnxgiving of last year (she actually died feb of 08) but my sister couldn't find me. I wrote some articles on hubpages, I can't be certain that is when it happened,,, I ended up in the hosptial 5 days, 4 of which in the ICU due to an absess, which is what kind of provoke this also. I was basically mere hrs away from my airway being cut off. Now don't get me wrong, I never stopped writing,,, but all I've written is fiction and those few articles. I'm sure I'll get better, I'll get the hang of it again. One thing I need to work on is not being so overly critical of my writing and so self concious about other reading it. Thank you for your reply, it was greatly appreicated. Let me know if I can return the favor
  • Ellen Appleby Keim
    First of all, it might be possible that you're putting too much work into a blog post. Sometimes I write essays for my blog, but I generally try to keep my posts fairly short and focused on one point. (Not that I'm always successful with that.) I guess you could say that posts are more like thoughts than fully developed essays. Secondly, the traditional structure for essays that you're using (introduction, three main points, conclusion) is somewhat outdated. You might want to try some techniques that writers who write what's called "creative nonfiction" use. Things like starting your essay with a description or an action, using dialogue, braiding your essay, using flashbacks, etc. Play around with your writing more. Have fun with it. The only other thing I would add is that you ask yourself as you write your post,"Am I sticking to the main point?" If you're not, cut the part that seems to be veering off into another direction and paste it into a new post. which you can work on later. I don't mean to sound like an expert, because I have the same problems. These are just a few thoughts I've had as I've worked on my own posts. Hope this helps.
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