When it comes to writing an essay, you want to make sure it’s perfect. Here are 7 tips that you should follow to ensure your essay get’s top marks, every time. A lot of students dread writing essays, normally because they just don’t know how to write one that gets them top marks. It’s a common problem to worry about, but writing essays can actually be quite fun—and easy—if you know the best tips to follow during the writing process. Whether you’re writing your first-ever essay for school, or just need some tips to improve your grade, this article should help you to write like a pro. If, after reading this, you still feel like you need some extra help writing your essay you can also find someone who can write a completely original essay paper online for you. Here are the 7 top tips that every student should know for a perfect essay!

1. Discuss with your teacher

Once you’ve been given your essay assignment, it’s always best to ask your teacher if they’re happy to have a meeting to discuss your work. Although they won’t be able to give you any hints or tips to make the writing process easier, you can talk through the question together to make sure you understand what’s being asked of you. This discussion will make sure that you’re on the right track before you start writing, and will prevent you from wasting any time doing the work incorrectly.

2. Start with a plan

It may be tempting to start writing straight away to get the essay over and one with, but often if you take this approach, your essay will be misguided and not as professional as you’d want it to be. You should start with a plan to gather your thoughts, which you can do using a mind map or just a notes page on your laptop. When planning an essay, you should be thinking about the following points:

1. What are the key sections of my essay?
2. What research should I use to back up my argument?
3. What are the key points and arguments that I want to make?
4. What’s my initial response to the essay question? Do I agree or disagree?
5. What are the reasons I have for my response?
6. Could I find any answers to the essay question in the work I’ve done in class?

Now that you have all of your initial thoughts down, a lot of the heavy work needed to complete your essay is pretty much done! All that’s left for you to do is to organise these ideas and put them into an essay format.

3. Create a research document

An essay is more than just a chance to share your own opinion, you need to back it up with research and relevant statistics. Ideally, you want to have some sort of research to back up every point you make—this is what makes the difference between an average essay, and a great one. After you finished your plan, you should have a good idea of the research you need to support your arguments. As you start researching, open up a separate document and start keeping track of everything you find. Pro tip! If you have to include references in your essay, put these into your research document as you go so you don’t have to spend time finding them again later on. As you start writing your essay, you can keep referring back to your research document and add in the information and statistics as you go, rather than having to break up the writing flow to research.

4. Break down your essay into sections

Essays can be daunting, especially when you look at the word count required and it’s in the thousands. But, if you start breaking the essay down into sections, you’ll quickly realise that it can actually be very manageable. In general, you’ll find that most essays follow a similar structure, like this:

• Introduction
• Point 1 – an argument for
• Point 2 – an argument against
• Point 3 – an argument for
• Point 4 – an argument against
• Conclusion

Depending on your word count, you may need to add more points, but you get the idea. Any essay that gets perfect marks should always consider both sides to an argument, using research to back up points, and then come to a final conclusion at the end. To get top marks, you must present a balanced argument which means explaining points for and against. This will show your teacher that you fully understand the topic that you’re writing about.

5. Write first, edit second

One of the hardest parts of writing is getting into the right zone to actually write, so once you do find yourself in that zone you don’t want to do anything that could you pull out of it. A good pro tip is to just write down everything you want to say to start with, without worrying about spelling mistakes, grammar, or your sentences making sense. The hard part is getting all of your thoughts down onto paper, so worry about that first. Then you can go back in and edit your work to make it flow better and make sense.

6. Check your essay online

You’ve got all of your great ideas down on paper and you’ve backed everything up with high-quality research, but if your essay doesn’t read well you won’t be able to get the grade you want. To ensure your essay is absolutely perfect, we recommend using a range of essay-checking extensions and websites. You can start by using a browser extension like Grammarly, which will check your grammar and spelling as you write and give you recommendations on how to improve. You can also use Hemingway, a website that analyses your essay to give you a reading score, which tells you how easy it is to read. It will also pick up on any sentences that are hard to read, and highlight areas of your essay where you can make your writing clearer and bolder.

7. Get someone to read through your essay

The final tip we have to help you write essays like a pro is to ask a friend or family member to read through your essay once you’ve finished. Sometimes you spend so much time looking at your essay that it becomes hard to spot any small mistakes. Having someone to double-check your work with fresh eyes can be extremely useful to pick up on anything you might have missed. After reading these tips, we hope that you feel ready to tackle your next essay. Let us know in the comments if you think there are any important tips that we missed!