You can be an expert when it comes to writing essays. However, essay writing competitions are different.

It would be best if you had expertise in writing as well as quick thinking. Unique styles and ideas give you an edge in the competitive environment.

Therefore, the question arises, how do you prepare yourself for this challenge?

This article will discuss the steps and tips that will help you win an essay writing competition.

Prepare To Win

Given below are some of the best tips that will help you craft a winning piece for your essay writing competition—

1. Know The Rules

Knowing and understanding the rules is the most important step that marks the beginning of your chances to win the competition.

Overlooking even the smallest details in the rule book can dim your winning propensity. Here are some of the most important aspects that you should pay attention to when going through the rules:

• The dates, both starting and ending.
• Word limit and character count for title and subtitles (if any).
• The themes you’re allowed.
• Understanding the selection criteria of the jury.
• The branding style of the sponsor company.
• The special requirements demanded by the competition organizers.

You can keep the rules written in your own words or print them out for later use. Go through them multiple times. Take time to understand and pick the theme.

Keep the rules handy when penning down your essay, and follow them word for word.

2. Read Plenty

Reading is extremely crucial when you’re preparing yourself to write an essay. A few days before your competition, it is important to cut your general reading bulk and concentrate more on the type of essay you’re planning (or asked) to write for the competition.

The more you read, the better you explore and get deeper into the themes. Reading opens up a sea of ideas and unique thoughts in your mind that can be used to make your essay stand out in a competition.

Read published essays and materials written on the themes you’re covering. Ask your teachers and professors to share pieces to help you get new ideas.

If you’re unaware of the themes or topics before the competition, review the previous themes the organizers covered. Make a guess and read various essays before writing for the competition.

Additionally, you can explore the essays provided by essay writing services like Fresh Essays. These services help you get essays, following every rule and written by subject experts that fit your criteria and give you a rich source for reading and preparing before a competition.

3. Practice The Beginning

A lot matters in how you begin your essay. This is where you have the first chance to grab the readers’ attention and create an impression that remains all the while they read your essay.

Given below are some tips to help you make an impressive beginning for the essay:

• Hook your readers with a fact that summarizes your essay and its theme.
• Balance the information and creative delivery in your introduction.
• Begin your essay with some background history.
• Use statistical data in your introduction.
• Begin with a question that creates inquisitiveness in the readers to find the answer.
• Start with a catchy quote.

These tips help you create the first and the most important impression on your essay and give your readers an idea about the quality of the rest of the essay.

4. Craft Creative Titles

A greater part of your essay’s success lies in the title you use. This is the first thing that the jury will notice, and it can even decide if you’re qualified to participate in the competition.

The essay title often comes with a number of restrictions when it comes to competition:

• Character limit restriction.
• No questions or exclamation marks.
• Word limit restriction.

However, you can still fit in a catchy title adhering to the rules and restrictions of the competition.

Remember, it is important to use certain keywords when you’re crafting the title. Your essay title must clearly indicate the theme and topic of your writing.

Keep it short and straightforward but choose unique and descriptive words to hook the jury right from the beginning.

5. Know The Structure You’ll Be Following

The structure of an essay acts like the skeleton on which your essay functions. Therefore, creating, understanding, and following a structure is important when writing an essay for a competition.

The structure also makes it easy to follow the word count rules and fit all your thoughts within a format. A structure often opens up innovative spaces in your mind as you know exactly how many words to write in each essay segment.

A proper essay structure prevents you from getting off-topic or unnecessary diversions. However, remember this structure will vary with the choice of theme and competition rules.

Being too rigid with the essay structure often restricts the quality of articles and makes it difficult to express yourself.

Therefore, follow a flexible structure that gives space to your creativity yet, provides a suitable form for your essay to win the competition.

6. Let Your Words Create Pictures

It is important to give life to your essay. If you’re writing a descriptive essay, it is important to use words that help readers visualize better.

Describe the little details by using the most fitting adjectives to paint the picture better.

For example, if you’re writing, “the shirt hung on the tree branch,” pen it down as “the deep blue shirt hung on the parched tree branch.”

This creates a vivid image that readers can connect to better and understand the essay as you want them to see it.

Using a lot of descriptive words facilitates your power over the essay. You can guide and manage the readers’ thoughts as they will see exactly what you want them to see.

Write To Impress

Whether or not you bag the prize, this creative exercise satisfies you and makes you more confident in your writing style and innovative thought process.

Therefore, give it your best whenever you’re participating in a competition. Put your efforts into making your essay stand out with your own innovative styles.

If you follow the steps mentioned above, you can even make this endeavor a winning plan for any essay writing competition.

Read More: Tips for Making It Through College With Ease

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“Argumentative essays are structures of arbitrary rules to the students,” says Alesha Hoover, a creative writer at Discursive Essay Writing Service. They do not understand the point—as an essay judge, you must constantly see dry essays filled with things you have heard a million times or meaningless phrases to satisfy the word count. They develop no academic skill except tenacity for the reader and writer. Their research is repetitive fact-listing (as is citing), the drafting stage is just following the rules of essay structure to a tee, and the writing is shuffling around words mindlessly until they form a coherent sentence. Because of this, argumentative essays can easily be pointless as well as discouraging to the students.

The only way to avoid this is through lateral thinking: understanding the sea of sources as the writings of individuals with their own biases, creating a mystery for you to solve. Every article has an angle—the information you are looking for is not important to them or they are ambiguous with details they take for granted. It feels like arguing with them. But if you can adjust your angle of thinking to understand theirs, that is when you soak up important information. There is no point in looking for a specific piece of information; the only useful information would be that challenges and intrigues you, helping you understand the subject in a new way.

As well as with lateral thinking, argumentative essays along with TOK essays must be sustained emotionally. Sources give conflicting, biased, ambiguous information, and it is impossible to create a perfectly logical conclusion from them. The researcher chooses what facts to highlight and how to interpret them according to emotions; when it is read, the essay is interpreted emotionally. There is no such thing as a purely argumentative essay. And if there was, it would explain facts that are true by definition, like a mathematics paper, and be entirely uninteresting. Think of the other essays you have read. Even the ones that look like argumentative essays are made up with many tiny details that do not perfectly follow from the evidence given in the paper. To see this in full, ask “How do you know that?” to every statement and see if they give complete answers.

Persuasive essays allow much more emotional and flexible thinking. Students can express themselves with strong words, understand the reader’s point of view, and forge a connection with them. They do not have to examine every idea they think of to make sure it comes directly from a fact online. They can create their own arguments that are blends of fact and emotion; it is like painting pictures instead of fitting model car pieces together. Through this, many more ideas can be expressed. Read this essay again and ask yourself, “would any of these arguments be allowed in a purely logical, argumentative essay?”

According to Courtney Miller, an essay editor at MLA Formatted Outline, “In fact, writing an essay is like storming a castle for the students. They want to convince the reader of something using whatever tactics possible, using a barrage of exaggerations, metaphors, memory tools, wordplay, and repetition to sink the idea into the reader’s head. They can ask questions to make the reader think they arrived at the conclusion themselves. They can give heart-breaking personal stories or interesting facts to hook and hold the reader’s attention. It is not a chore; it is an epic.

This creates a better education environment. Students are motivated to find evidence and create solid arguments in order to deliver a blow to the opposing opinion; they will learn more about logic by being self-motivated, not by being forced to do work they feel is pointless. That is the type of environment teachers strive to create. You know how much more enjoyable it is to mark a passionate and interesting essay. And the developed skills of empathy and persuasion will be useful to the students during family conflicts, workplace meetings, interviews, and many more; it will turn them into more caring and engaged people. By the end of class, teachers can feel fulfilled; they have given joy and knowledge to children and shaped them to be better people when they grow up and impact the world.

Persuasive essays encourage lateral and emotional thinking, while argumentative essays rarely do, which makes them discouraging and pointless and devoid of inspiration. Persuasive essays speak to everything meaningful in students’ lives and let them express it with exciting rhetoric. This creates an environment that teaches much more than argumentative essays could—an enjoyable one.

Read more: How Dr. Ross Blagg Hopes to Keep Growing in Medicine after COVID-19

The post Major Differences in Writing Persuasive vs. Argumentative Essays appeared first on littlelioness.

Read the description and reviews

First and foremost, you need to learn the very basics about the book. For example, what is it about? Who are the main characters? What genre is it? What is the plot? These and similar questions should help you dig deeper and learn the essential facts about the story you should have read. Fortunately, these days, finding answers to such questions is easier than ever before. All you need is Internet access and a computer or a smartphone.

Start by reading a book’s description and reviews online. These two usually have all the basic information you need for a start. Next, research some analysis or summaries of the plot. You need to have a proper idea of what is going on in the story. Of course, you can always ask for help from some of your friends or parents who might have read this book before. Overall, your goal now is to find out the main characters and events in the story, how it starts and ends.

Research its background

Sometimes the time, conditions, and author’s life matter almost as much as the plot of the book. Hence, it is important to learn more about when and how the book was written. Such information will help you better understand the essence and purpose of a book. Moreover, you may also use the specifics of the period or author’s personal life when discussing the book. For instance, the book you have for an essay can be based on the author’s real life. Hence, you definitely need to learn more about this person’s biography before starting writing. Perhaps, find what might have inspired an author to write what they did. Maybe even try to compare this book with others in the same time period or genre.

Draft the main points

Once you learn about the context and main ideas of the story, you may as well write the very first draft. See if you have collected enough evidence and information to write a whole essay. Find out where your weakest spots are and see what you can do about them. Overall, your first draft should be the foundation of your future paper. So it’s important to have everything you need for a good paper in that draft. Also, check if you have enough to meet the given paper instructions.

In the end, your draft is not an essay yet. So you can add there as much as you want, whether those are ideas, facts, citations, etc. The main trick here is to focus on the ideas, characters, and themes of the book that you have understood after your brief acquaintance. However, while you are working on your draft, it should get more organized, comprehensive, and structured. Thus, in the end, you should be able to turn your draft into the foundation of your essay.

Add extra sources

Whenever in doubt, go for extra research. Follow this rule rigorously, and you should be fine. When you feel like you don’t understand the characters’ motivation, main idea, plot changes, or else, you can begin the research again. Perhaps, seek additional sources to add more credentials to your paper. Look for academic articles that can either add to a literary analysis of the book you are writing about or to the issues discussed in a paper.

Overall, as a student, you should know how to find reliable sources and use them wisely. You can also read the awakening essay sample to learn more about the usage of references and in-text citations. Also, another good piece of advice is to use more quotations from the text. By doing so, you are forced to explain the citations rather than the whole book at once. Hence, by offering several citations, you can focus solely on analyzing them, which can help you extend the word count and actually look familiar with the topic of your writing.

Final thoughts

Sometimes, students simply don’t have enough time to read certain books. It’s understandable. We’ve all been there. However, you should fall into despair. There are ways to write essays on books you haven’t read. You just need to be efficient with your time and well-skilled in research. These are just a few tips you can use next time you have to write an essay. Good luck!

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