If you have just begun to study English literature at university or college, the prospect of writing your first essay will be overwhelming. Teachers or professors likely offer a little help in the way of assistance in writing and planning the structure of an essay.
Because teachers assume that students already know how to write an Essay on English literature. But some students don’t know how to write it, so they try to copy their fellows or take the help of a search engine. Using others’ content is quite good for saving time, but it will make a bad impact on your career.
But you don’t have to worry anymore about writing an essay. This post will help you in writing an essay about English literature.
Don’t miss any part. Let’s get started.
How to Compose an Essay About English Literature?
Table of Contents
In writing an essay, a student can face
many problems, but with the right guidelines and instructions, it will be an easy task.
So, composing an essay consists of three phases, which are:
- Research Phase
- Writing Phase
- Editing Phase
In these phases, there are further steps that you have to follow, and each step plays an important role in the essay. So, let’s explore these phases and talk about their steps.
1. Research Phase
In composing an essay on English literature, your teachers will assign you a topic on which you have to write an essay.
The first thing that you have to do is research your topic. Researching the topic properly can help you to gather more information and data related to your essay topic.
Gathering the data will help you to create new ideas and also help to write an engaging essay.
But how to do proper research? Where to find relevant data on the essay topic?
If these types of questions are coming to your mind, here is the answer to each question. Some examples of essay topics are “Is technology makes us more alone” or “Is online learning good as compared to face-to-face learning.”
So, for creating an outline for your essay topic, there is a need to do research. For this, you have to follow the below steps that can help you to do proper research on your essay topic.
Choose the Authoritative Sources for Research
If you are looking to collect information on your essay topic, then there are two options; one is going to the library and reading books, magazines, and relevant documents. Another one is gathering information by using online sources like webpages, encyclopedias, blogs, and educational sites.
It is an easy and reliable way to gather information from the internet. Because this is a digital era and everything is available online.
Also Read:
- How to Check Plagiarism of Essay Using Free Tool
- How to Research and Write English Literature Thesis
For essay, you have to gather the information from authoritative sources like educational websites or other popular websites.
Keep Track of the Sources
If you have chosen to do research by using online sources, then there are many issues that you can face. One of the important issues is plagiarism.
In simple words, when we copy someone else text and use it as their own in our academic paper or other writing, it is called plagiarism. To avoid plagiarism in your essay, you need to keep track of your sources so that you can cite them properly.
A citation is a type of reference. In the citation, you tell your reader or teacher that the certain material in your paper came from another source.
Citation can help you to avoid plagiarism, and also, if readers want to read more about the information, then they can open the given source that you provided.
There are many styles of citation, but three of them are mostly used in every aspect of writing.
You have to place the citations at the end of the sentence or information that you have taken from other sources.
If you have taken the information from a physical book, then you have to follow the citation structure as given below.
But on the other hand, if you have taken the information from an online site, then you can cite them in the following structure.
So, this is how you can cite the website or any physical book or paper in your essay.
Now, let’s move to the next phase, which is writing.
2. Writing Phase
After completing your research on the essay topic, you have to start writing. But in writing, there are some steps that you have to follow.
Everyone wants an engaging essay within no time. Writing take some time because we have to follow some guidelines like; how to start, how to write the body, and where to end it.
Along with this, we need to write it in multiple headings and make the writing simple. It sounds boring, but when you start writing, you will enjoy it.
So, to make your essay writing interesting, you have to follow these steps, which are:
Start with an Engaging Introduction
A solid beginning summarizes your whole response in a few sentences. Include a brief summary of the text’s main points, as well as a brief summary of your points.
A typical structure for an introduction is, to begin with, a general statement about the text, and author, using this to lead into your thesis statement. You have to give them an idea about what we will going to talk about in our essay. This is called signposting.
It will be more elaborate in lengthy essays, but in a short one, it should not be more than two or three sentences.
Some students write the introduction part later in the writing process, but it’s not a good idea. Because you have to give them an idea of your overall writing.
One thing more, you have to write the essay introduction in a way that can engage your readers to learn and explore more about your topic.
Write the Main Body
The body of an essay is everything between the introduction and conclusion. The body of the essay is also further divided into headings, subheadings, and important points.
If you’re assigned to write an argumentative essay, then you have to write all the information, data, and pieces of evidence in separate headings.
In writing the body of the essay, you should avoid chunky phrases like “in this essay” or “after reading this essay.”
Break the Content
As discussed, in writing the main body of a literature essay, you need to break the content into further pieces like headings and subheadings.
By breaking the essay content into short pieces, your essay will look more engaging. Likewise, it will be easy to understand because there are no walls of text present in your essay. It will also improve the readability of the text.
Keep Your Writing Simple
In writing, you have to use easy and common words instead of using complicated or difficult words. Using complicated words not only makes the readability of the essay challenging but also confuses the readers.
As you can see in the below image, we have changed the complicated words with their easy synonyms that every reader can understand.
|
Complicated Words |
Easy Synonyms |
| Mischievous | Bad |
| Abnegation | Rejection |
| Enormity | Blackness |
| Colonel | Captain |
| Anemone | Windflower |
So, this is how you can use synonyms instead of difficult words to make your literature essay easy.
Finish with Conclusion
The conclusion is really an important part of an essay. It shouldn’t introduce a new quotation or argument in the essay. Instead, it is all about giving a summary of the whole essay.
A good way to approach this is to briefly summarize your key arguments and then stress the conclusion they’ve led you to. Also, highlight the new perspectives your essay provides on the text. The conclusion of an essay should consist of 3 to 4 lines maximum.
After writing the conclusion, you have completed your writing phase. Now let’s move to the editing phase and discuss it.
3. Editing Phase
In writing an essay, you have to keep one thing in your mind and that is, always edit and check your essay after completing the writing process. The reason is, if you were doing writing and editing together, then it would take too much time.
So, after writing, you have to check for two things, which are:
Find &Eliminate Plagiarism
As we have discussed earlier plagiarism, here, we will show you how you can check and remove plagiarism from your essay.
The first step is; you have to check the duplication by using an online plagiarism-checking tool. There are countless tools available on the internet that can help you to check duplicated text in your essay.
You just have to copy/ paste your text or upload the essay file in the tool and click on the submit button. After that, it will start checking for plagiarism in your content and highlight the duplicated text in your essay.
So, after checking the plagiarism, now it’s time to remove it. This is also an essay step that will save you time.To eliminate plagiarism from your content, you have to rephrase your content.
There are two ways that can help you to rephrase your text, one is to rephrase online, and the second is to rephrase the essay manually.
In manual rephrasing, you have to brainstorm and make some changes on your own in essay. But if you are willing to rephrase online, you can surely save your time and efforts as well.
An online rephrasing tool uses AI technology that rephrases the given text into different words without altering the original meaning.
Check Grammar & Spelling Errors
As a student, we all face some mistakes like grammar and spelling while writing, and we don’t pay any attention to these errors,but these mistakes in essays can cause many issues such as, your professor can give you an F grade, and all your efforts will be wasted.
For this, you have to check the grammar mistakes and plagiarism after writing your essay.
The reason to check the grammar mistakes after removing the plagiarism is that when we remove the plagiarism by rephrasing, we make some changes in our essay text.
Wrapping Up
So, this post was all about how to write an essay about English literature, and we discussed three phases. In each phase, there are some important steps that you have to follow; like in the research phase, you have to do proper research and use every important information in your essay.
Whereas in the writing phase, you have to write a catchy introduction that reflects the theme of your essay. After that, you have to write the main body of the essay in which you don’t have to use difficult and complicated type words.
You have to make your content readable so that everyone can understand it easily.
In the last phase, which is about editing, you have to check the plagiarism and make sure to remove it. If you don’t do it, then it can cause many issues. You can remove the duplication in an essay by rephrasing your content online or manually, and don’t forget to correct your grammar errors.
We hope that this post will help you in writing an essay.
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