Writing Your Essay

The following steps review how to get into the mind-set to write your essay on education. These steps are outlined in greater detail in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 in your book.

STEP 1: What type of essay are you assigned to write about education? Look over the question or your instructor’s prompt, and write it in your own words.

STEP 2: Which readings from this chapter do you think you will include? List them in your notes, including any quotations that you think you might use. (Don’t forget to include the author and page number when you write down the quotation so that you don’t have to find it again later.)

STEP 3: What ideas from class discussion or your own experience and observation would you like to include? Look over your notes, and add those thoughts to your brainstorming for this assignment.

STEP 4: Take a few more minutes to brainstorm in your favorite method: listing, freewriting, clustering, questioning, or group discussion.

STEP 5: Look back at the assignment prompt and write up a tentative thesis or main idea based on your work so far. Remember, one way to think of the thesis is as the answer to the question posed in the assignment prompt. Don’t worry that your thesis has to be perfect or set in stone right now. It’s a working thesis that you will probably revise as you make decisions about what you want to say.

STEP 6: Make a bullet-point outline for your essay. Remember to first put the ideas down and then reorganize them into a logical order.

STEP 7: Copy or type up the relevant quotations and examples under each appropriate bullet point.

STEP 8: Pat yourself on the back! You have a lot of material so far, don’t you?

STEP 9: Write the rough, rough draft, remembering that you’ll be revising it.

STEP 10: Reread the assignment sheet one more time, and then make big-picture revisions to your focus, content, and organization. Peer review may help.

STEP 11: Once you are generally satisfied that your work is focused, complete, and organized, edit for sentence-level issues. Remember to use the editing techniques of reading your work out loud, reading “backward,” and isolating your common errors. Refer to your Grammar Log frequently during this process. (To learn how to use the Grammar Log, see Chapter 24, p. 000. To download a copy of this log, go to bedfordstmartins.com/readwriteconnect and click on Charts.) Edit and print your paper again and again until you are satisfied with the way each sentence sounds.

STEP 12: Take a break.

STEP 13: Proofread your essay one or two more times to correct any minor errors and to make sure your document format is correct for this assignment.