Essay writing tests your knowledge of the language, as well as your logic, level of critical thinking, ability to generalize, argue, and express a point of view. Generating ideas, planning, and writing the essay are important skills that need to be specifically trained. Today, let’s talk about how to generate a cool idea for your essay.
Contents
1. Learn the procedures for choosing a topic in college or university
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First, we’ll deal with the topic selection process. There are three ways to choose an essay topic:
- Selecting the topic of the essay from a recommended list. Such a list can be published on the college or university site or offered to students during class.
- The student and the teacher develop the topic of the essay together.
- Independent student choice. The student generates an idea of interest and coordinates it with the teacher.
The simplest procedure is to select a topic from a prepared list. Firstly, the list is often available at the beginning of the academic term, and in this case, students have the opportunity to collect materials for the essay long before the deadline. Secondly, teachers offer well-developed ideas of essays that correspond to students’ level of knowledge. This means that problems with finding information and writing an essay, most likely, will not arise.
The remaining procedures are suitable only for the most diligent and talented students. In order to coordinate a topic with a teacher or propose your own, you must be well versed in the subject, or at least strive for excellence in learning. Excellent students can vouch for that: an essay may in the future become a good scientific article or a promising study.
2. Follow helpful tips when choosing a topic from the list
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- Checking the list of suggested topics as soon as possible. Remember that classmates “never sleep” and, perhaps, someone else is planning to write an essay on your topic.
- Choose a topic that suits your scientific interests. An essay can be good training for writing term papers and dissertations.
- Take a look at the library and the Google Scholar Preparation of the work will be delayed if there are only a few textbooks in the scientific library on the topic and several articles on the Google Scholar site.
- If you face some problems while choosing a topic, you can also ask for help on special writing services like buyessay.org – they will help you to come up with a good essay idea.
3. Use this checklist to assess the complexity of the idea
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Regardless of the selection procedure adopted by your university, check the relevant topics of essays using this checklist, setting one point for each affirmative answer.
- Is the topic of interest in modern science? Perhaps the key issues of the future essay have long been resolved?
- Novelty. Are there any prospects for further research on the topic?
- Does a query on a topic in Google Scholar show more than 30 relevant (published over the past couple of years) scientific publications, monographs, and dissertations?
- Optical distortion. Does the topic of the essay suggest that the author will resort to complex and rather abstract reasoning?
If the answers to all questions on the checklist are affirmative (4 points), the topic may require further development and consultation with the teacher. If the topic is poorly developed by a community of scientists (see paragraph 3), it is also worth considering the advisability of writing an essay on such a topic. The best option is a result of 2 to 3 points.
4. Reformulate the idea to reduce complexity
Source: Oxbridge Essays
Work on the essay should be interesting to the author, that is, to you. Teachers and professors understand this and, as a rule, offer their students to reformulate the topic before writing an essay. Take this opportunity to get better results.
You can reformulate the idea to narrow the problem field, in other words, to reduce the complexity of future work and save time. Let me give an example: to write a good essay on a topic that contains a specific problem in its title is much simpler than preparing a brilliant student paper that touches on fundamental insoluble problems of science.
It is possible that you are interested in complex and unresolved issues. In this case, do not forget that time is not on your side. An essay is not a scientific article; preparation should take five to seven working days. It may be worthwhile to leave a complicated topic for the future and write a comprehensive term paper on it or an article for a scientific journal.
5. Be creative
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The main thing is to understand that all people are creative, but these skills, like any other, require practice and self-development. If you do not train your brain, then you cannot be creative in essay writing. According to one of the methods, you need to come up with 100 ideas daily. It can be specific to your future essays, or it can be something like “100 things that I would improve in the world.” They need to be invented simply by quantity, without evaluating, but the more, the better. It is very important to train your ability. The more ideas you generate, the more often they will come up.
Original and non-standard ideas arise when you allow yourself to go beyond the scope of templates and build an idea on a combination of incongruous things. Creativity is always a combination of incongruous things.
Conclusion
Without a doubt, each person is unique and inimitable, and we are all different. And, of course, most of us have our own secrets on how to generate a cool idea for essay writing. But, if you don’t have secrets of your own, you can follow the steps described above. Most likely, you will find them really helpful.
