English Teaching Essays

A word of warning: words you find in a thesaurus can’t always be used interchangeably; even words with similar meanings can differ subtly in a way that makes them inappropriate in certain contexts, so find examples of a word used correctly before you use a new word for the first time.

– Learn prefixes, suffixes and roots – it sounds boring, but this shortcut will help you learn a great many more words.

For many such students, each essay brings with it the challenge of making it that little bit better than the last one.

The problem is that when you write essays regularly, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut of repeating the same formula each time – particularly when you already receive good feedback from the teachers who read them.

Buy yourself a nice notepad and use it to collect new words and their meanings.

The act of writing down the definition will help you remember it, and you could include an example of how the word is used to increase your chances of memorising it for use in essays.Read the opinion pieces and dissect how the writer has supported their points with evidence, and again, be critical; note where they’ve left things out to try to persuade you to a particular opinion.Essays should be balanced, so you can learn from the best of these writers and pick up some techniques to help you shape a balanced piece.Your Elevator Pitch for your essay should sell the idea of it to a reader, leaving them wanting to read the essay in question.This is quite a tough exercise, as it forces you to be ruthlessly concise in your thinking and choice of words; but you can use this summary to help you write your introduction, and it’ll help you achieve clarity in what you’re trying to say.One way of ensuring that you can communicate clearly and to the point is through accurate and effective use of advanced vocabulary.A good essay writer should never rest on their laurels when it comes to vocabulary; it’s something you should be working on continually, as there are always new words to learn that could help convey a point more effectively.Only then can you start writing the structure for an essay that builds up to your overall conclusion.To condense what you’re trying to say into a short, snappy summary for you to work from, try making an ‘Elevator Pitch’ style summary of what you intend to write and why readers should be interested in it.It may help to have different sections for words on particular themes; you could have a general section, and then further parts of the notebook could be dedicated to words of use in history essays, science essays and so on.We’ve probably all had it hammered into us that we should write an essay plan before we start writing, but before you even do that, you need to know what the argument you’re going to make actually is.