Response: Does the essay respond to the question with a clear, specific focus?
Argumentation: Does the essay use key details and show critical thinking?
Organization: Does the essay begin with a clear Statement and develop ideas logically leading to a clear conclusion?
Sources: Does the essay use Evidence to support, deepen, extend or qualify the Statement?
Style: Does the essay use appropriate compositional and grammatical conventions? …….” Bad writing “A Thematic Essay should focus on the theme. Every paragraph needs to be explicitly concerned with your thematic topic. This means that the evidence is secondary. So, the first and last sentence of any paragraph should include no direct reference to the literature: titles, authors or characters in the first or last sentence of any paragraph will be a deduction in your potential grade.
Never start an essay with anything approximating the sentence “I will write about …” Good writing is good conversation. If you’re talking to someone who prefaces everything with “I am going to say something now,” you’d get frustrated. Don’t announce what you’re going to do. Do it. This goes for naming your focus as well. If you’re going to offer a reaction or interpretation of another piece of writing, don’t waste a sentence saying “I’m reacting to the essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ by George Orwell.” Work that title into a specific statement of your reaction.
Never start a body paragraph with the word ‘Another.’ Body paragraphs are for piling up evidence in your argument, so they’re naturally repetitive. Don’t emphasize the repetitiveness. This becomes a slog to read. Let your ideas flow from one to the other. This goes for lists too: pinning body paragraphs into painfully obvious structures like “The first example is …; The second example is …; etc., is excruciating to read.
These same principles apply to the phrase “I think that,” or “I believe that.” Whatever follows those phrases can be assumed to be what you think or believe. Prefacing that declaration with a formal declaration of your declaration slows down your essay and tests the patience of your readers. I think that it would be best to eliminate any use of the phrase “I think that.”
Use rhetorical questions sparingly. Don’t you find it frustrating when what you’re reading repeatedly demands that you respond to something explicitly right then and there? Isn’t this especially aggravating when it happens several times in a row? Wouldn’t it be better to find them only very occasionally so that their effect isn’t diminished?
Avoid leaning on the quotation intro “[character X] states.” “States” is a very formal word that is used in court proceedings but very little in real life. I know it’s a word that everyone gets told in middle school is how you’re supposed to introduce in-text quotations, but it’s just godawful.
Use nouns and verbs. Adjectives and adverbs can swell out a word count, but often make your writing flabby and slow. Strong writing cuts to the point and moves on.
When it comes to essay writing, less is often more.
Typos are the equivalent of coughing in someone’s face: they just show a lack of consideration.
In an era of spelling and grammar apps, any mistakes with either will cost significant points.
Always reread your writing to judge the argument and scan for errors. Reading aloud can help TREMENDOUSLY with the latter.
Use public materials as evidence and quote directly from them to demonstrate your abstract ideas in a socially understandable form.
Assume an informed readership, but help them out. If you’re discussing a piece of writing, assume your readers have read it. You don’t need to recall everything about it. Just point out the crucial details necessary to the point you’re trying to make, gently reminding your readers rather than telling them stuff they already know.
Anything that could be readily pasted into a Wikipedia article should be immediately deleted. Your job is not to report elementary facts. If you’re writing an essay about Shakespeare’s Macbeth and you find yourself typing out “William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564,” please stop. An essay is an opinion. Your job is to offer that opinion, not facts only marginally related to that opinion. Good writing offers something absolutely original. Facts can be found on Wikipedia; the only place to find your interpretation of something is your essay. Lean into that selling point.
Consider these previous two points very carefully when starting a new paragraph. Every new paragraph is a gut-check for your reader to wonder “Do I really want to keep reading?” If your new paragraph begins with nothing new for your reader to learn, there’s no incentive to keep going. If you’re discussing a piece of writing in your essay that your reader has also read, just repeating something about it or summarizing the reading can be very monotonous and it telegraphs to your reader that nothing new should be expected.
Aside from a very specific kind of personal essay, never ‘think out loud in writing.’ A good piece of writing begins at the end of a thought process rather than recording that process as it develops. The Introduction to your essay is actually the Conclusion you’ve reached after thinking about and researching your topic. The Conclusion of your essay is just a restatement of the Introduction, reminding your readers of the point you’re making and demonstrating how everything you’ve been writing adds up to this one result.
Avoid starting a Concluding paragraph with any derivation of the phrase “In conclusion,” or “All in all.” Yes, a Conclusion is where you step back from the narrow specifics of the body paragraphs to incorporate them into your broader argument. Do that with the substance of your discussion rather than empty phrases like ‘In conclusion’ and ‘All in all.’ There is no instance where deleting those phrases doesn’t make the resulting piece of writing immediately and dramatically better.