Guide: types of essays in English and tips on writing them

Writing an essay is a common task faced by those who are learning English. Often, essays are used as homework, parts of tests, and, of course, as one of the tests for admission to educational institutions.

I found an interesting post that tells you which types of essays are used most often, and given tips on writing such texts. I present to you the adapted (and augmented) Russian-language version of this material.
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What is an essay in English

In English, an essay is one of the genres of written works, which resembles the usual “essay-reasoning” in the post-Soviet space. When writing such a text, the author’s task is often to convey his opinion and argue it; in other cases, to investigate a question in order to provide the reader with space for his own conclusions.

It leaves a definite imprint on the style of narration. Often, it is conducted in the first person singular, connecting words are widely used in the text, emotional vocabulary and metaphors are encountered.

There are quite a few essays of different types - various sources can be distinguished from a few basic, up to ten or more. Today we will focus on the basic types of essays.

Narrative Essays (Narrative Essays)

One of the most popular types of essay. When writing such a text, the author should tell a story based on real-life experience. Such stories are usually written in the format of the first person, and the story leads the reader to independent conclusions.

Descriptive Essays (Descriptive Essays)

In this case, the main goal is to draw a picture for the reader with the help of words. Usually the author describes situations, people or objects, laying a deeper meaning in simple descriptions. Typically, such texts affect the emotions of readers, the task is also to bring them to some conclusions based on what they read.

Analytical Essays (Expository Essays)

Texts of this type usually include an analysis of a particular topic, which is carried out with the help of facts, statistics, references to various studies and reports. That is, facts are more important here than emotions in descriptive essays. Therefore, even when presented in the first person, the author should avoid expressing his own opinion or expressing his emotions.

Persuasive Essays

As the name implies, the main task of an essay of this type is to convince the reader of something, using facts, logic, and descriptions of situations related to the topic. In such texts it is good to use expert opinions, practical examples, etc.

As stated above, there are significantly more types of English-language essays, but these are basic ones. Now let's move on to tips on writing texts of such types.

Step # 1: Formulate the idea

Writing at least a normal text is not as easy as it may seem, but without a clearly formulated idea, the task becomes practically impossible. Therefore, before you start writing, you need to clearly formulate the topic. For this you need to determine the pairs of the form "thesis argument."

Thesis is a complete thought that you want to convey to the reader. Usually in the text of the essay should include at least three theses. For example, you want to write an essay on “What is dangerous envy,” theses to it may look like this:

• an envious person becomes evil, it is difficult for him to rejoice at the successes of those around him, he does not want to help anyone;
• in today's world of gloss and Instagram, it will be difficult for such people to communicate with others, envy provokes isolation and contributes to loneliness;
• the envious person rejoices in the failures of others; he will not strive to counteract injustice.

The thesis may be one, common to the whole text. In support of each thesis, it is necessary to pick up arguments, that is, facts proving them and examples. Depending on the type of essay, this could be some kind of real-life situation, a quote, a reference to a study, etc.

Step # 2: Develop a basic structure

Simplicity is hard. Among other things, this means that to create a good essay you do not need to stuff it with a huge amount of facts, sections, beautiful literary techniques. One of the main secrets of success is a thoughtful structure.

When creating it, it is convenient to rely on the theses and arguments specified in the previous paragraph:

• introduction - this part refers to the main theses of the text;
• the main part - here are paragraphs with arguments, facts in support of the thesis, which are presented in a form suitable for an essay of a certain type.
• Conclusion - in this section you do not repeat the main idea again, but draw conclusions based on the arguments put forward.

3. Step # 3: use auxiliary tools if needed

When you need to write something right now, there may be a problem called “white sheet fear”. Even if the author knows what he needs to write about, it is the hardest thing to take the first step.

The reasons for the fear of a white sheet can be many: from ephemeral ones like “no mood”, to quite specific ones, like a paralyzing fear of getting a bad mark for homework or excessive perfectionism. Of course, the lack of practice also affects not the best way.

Experiments show that this problem can be solved by using text templates. The idea is simple - it is difficult for a person to write at least a sentence so that the page is no longer empty. If it already has some text in which you need to make changes - it is much easier to do it psychologically.

According to statistics from the blog service Ghost, the use of content templates can increase the speed of writing posts by 600%. And here are the templates for different types of English-language essays.

Step # 4: Subtract text

After you have won the fear of a white sheet and have written the text, it is important to re-read it a couple more times and correct mistakes. If you write it online, it is a good idea to use specialized tools for reading and checking grammar.

Such tools will help correct typos, get rid of grammatical errors and improve the style of the text. Comparisons of popular products in this area in terms of cost, user satisfaction, and other parameters are presented, for example, on this site .

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And what other recommendations for writing English-language essays should be applied in your opinion?