Every essay has a prewriting process that differs from writer to writer. Your prewriting process keeps changing and perfecting as you write more and more essays. A personalized process makes the process easier for you while also helps you effectively plan for your essay. Some people, despite their best effort, can’t seem to get their writing process right. These may be beginner writers or writers who find it hard to write my essay and cope with advanced essays.
Some of these writers will take assistance to improve their essays. Whereas they can easily improve their prewriting process by taking advice from expert writers and reading online resources on their own. A prewriting process that comes from your own effort will be far better than any process that you can borrow from another writer or resource, as it will be tailored specifically to your need.
Understanding the prompt
The first task of your essay process should be understanding the essay prompt thoroughly. Beginners make the mistake of reading through the essay prompt and proceeding with what they understood form over the top reading.
Scrutinizing the essay is important especially for advanced essays, as these essays give you the essay prompt in parts. Each part usually indicates a different academic writing task and a subject. You should look for the task words in each part to know what the essay expects you to. Prompt tasking words such as to analyze, synthesize, classify, critically examine, all relate to different types of academic writing, such as analytical, descriptive, argumentative, critical, etc.
Understand the guidelines and look for a reading list
Make note of the guideline for the essay, which includes: the word limit, the referencing style, writing format specifics, and other information, such as a reading list to help with your research. Make sure that you skim through the reading material and the content if you don’t have the time to go through it or if the readings are long. An overview of the idea will do fine at the start.
Brainstorming the essay topic and prompt
Before moving onto the essay research you should brainstorm the idea for your prompt. For this, you can use one of the various techniques, or you can use them together. For essays that are due late and give you lots of time to plan, you can make use of journaling and use it with the more conventional mind mapping and listing.
Though the brainstorming should be expanded throughout the essay process, you should make sure to jot down your initial ideas before diving into further research.
Researching for the essay
Start your research with a specialized encyclopedia, which will provide you with the opportunity to gather in-depth background information about the subject that is not only authoritative but derived from academic sources.
You will then move onto scholarly papers and articles. Try to sift through the papers using the abstract, content pages, and indexes and separate the sources that are useful and which can directly contribute to your essay. You should start your research from the database and libraries that you are familiar with, to get into the rhythm and speed up your process. Once you gather the information, you can then move onto other databases to expand upon it. Make sure you keep track of references for the sources. Use reference management software especially when the essay involves a lot of borrowed information and ideas.
Writing an outline
Lastly, use the information that you collected through the research and the brainstorming session to produce an outline that will get you started on the writing process.