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Essay Writing in 10 Words
Article · August 2014
DOI: 10.13140/2.1.1785.0240
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Peter Samuels
Birmingham City University
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Essay Writing in 10 Words
1. Brief
Take time to fully understand the brief you have been given. Read it several times and put it
into your own words before starting. Ensure your essay states the brief in your introduction,
addresses it in your main body and answers it in your conclusion. This will enable your reader to
know exactly what your essay is about, how you have addressed it and what you have concluded
on this subject.
If your brief has several parts to it, divide your word count between them according to their relative
importance and structure your main body so that you address each part in turn.
2. Evidence
Collect evidence on your subject. Every claim you make in your essay should be backed up
by evidence. Never air your beliefs or opinions without evidence unless specifically asked
to in your brief. Ensure the quality and relevance of your evidence is as high as possible.
Organise your evidence conceptually (e.g. use a mind map). Collect about twice as much
evidence as you are planning to use.
Prioritise the importance of your evidence, e.g. the top 10%, the next 40%, and the other 50%.
Spend about the same number of words discussing the top 10% as the next 40% but don’t refer to
the other 50%. Where possible, cite your top 10% in more depth in one place rather than using
several short citations so that your reader can clearly see you are prioritising this evidence.
Avoid regurgitating evidence by evaluating it: don’t ignore conflicting evidence and come to a
personal view based on the evidence with an appropriate degree of confidence for each area you
cover.
3. Paragraph
Write your essay in paragraphs. Separate each paragraph with a blank line. The average
paragraph length should be about 125 words and 4 or more sentences. Paragraphs are the basic
building blocks of essays. If you can write good paragraphs you are more than half way to
becoming a good essay writer. Short paragraphs indicate ideas which are not fully developed.
4. Topic
Each of your paragraphs should introduce, develop and conclude a single topic. Your reader
should clearly be able to understand what each paragraph is about by reading the first one or two
sentences. If not, then divide your paragraphs up to avoid rambling. Successive paragraph
topics should flow in a logical sequence.
5. Point
Each paragraph should make one main point (claim backed up by evidence). When introducing
and describing evidence your points should generally come at the beginning of your paragraphs
but when discussing ideas in more depth they should generally come at the end. Your points are
very important as they are the essence of what you are trying to say to your reader.
6. Introduction
Start your essay with an introduction. Use about 10% of your word count. Your introduction should
contain three stages:

Territory – establish the wider context of your essay subject by making some simple,
generally accepted observations which a non-specialist reader can understand. For longer
essays, then start to focus towards the essay subject.

Niche – explain what your essay is about and why it is important/interesting

Occupy – explain how you are going to address the subject of your essay in your main
body (this stage also signals to your reader that your introduction is ending and your main
body is about to start). This is saying what you are going to say.
7. Body
Your main body should contain about 80% of your word count. For essays over about 1,000 words,
divide your main body into themes. Your choice of themes should clear relate to your brief.
Introduce your themes at the end of your introduction (in the occupy stage). Each of your themes
should contain about 3 to 8 paragraphs. Longer essays can also have sub themes.
The first paragraph of each theme should introduce it whilst the last paragraph should conclude it.
Your writing style within each theme should become progressively more critical (see below) as
you discuss your ideas with progressively more depth.
8. Conclusion
Your conclusion should use about 10% of your word count. It should clearly answer your essay
brief, based on the conclusions you reached in each of the themes of your main body or the points
you made in each of the paragraphs. It should contain two stages:

Summarise your points and conclusions from your main body. Do not introduce any new
evidence here. This is saying what you have said.

Build on your summary, e.g. by discussing its relevance/generalisability to the wider
context you began with in your introduction (in the territory stage) or reflect upon the
contribution you have made to this area of knowledge so that your reader can evaluate its
importance objectively.
9. Plan
Before writing your essay, plan its themes, the number of paragraphs and the points you are going
to make.
For example a 2,500 word essay might contain 20 paragraphs in total, each of about 125 words:

3 shorter paragraphs in the introduction

3 themes in the main body, each containing about 5 paragraphs

2 longer paragraphs in the conclusion
Plan your argument in detail by imagining you are giving a slide presentation to a small
group of fellow students on your course. It should have:

A slide for your introduction with a bullet point for the main point of each paragraph

A slide for each theme of your main body with a bullet point for each paragraph

A slide for your conclusion with a bullet point for each paragraph
Make sure the points on your slides flow in a logical order. Planning your paragraph points
avoids writing too much in your first draft then not knowing what to cut out, making your writing
process more efficient.
10. Critical
Most essays require critical analysis for a good mark. This is where you analyse and evaluate
your ideas in more depth. The best place for this is towards the end of each theme of your
main body and in the second (build) stage of your conclusion. Critical analysis is not about
being negative or judgmental: it is about analysing and evaluating evidence using objective
measures.
One way to think about it is the kind of questions you are answering: in critical analysis these are
how, why, what if, and what next, in descriptive writing these are who, what, when and where.
In critical writing your paragraph points are normally more specific than your paragraph topics and
should come at the end of each paragraph. In descriptive writing, your paragraph points are
normally the same as your paragraph topics and should come at the start of each paragraph.
© Peter Samuels, 2014
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