Demystifying the Short Essay: A Comprehensive Guide
When you hear about being assigned a short essay to write, you might be happy because lots of students believe short essays are much easier to complete than usual essays. Unfortunately, you shouldn’t hurry to get that excited because this type of assignment might cause much more problems than more lengthy papers.
The truth is you must include all information provided in a normal essay in a paper writing 200-500 words in length without losing the main idea of it. Doing it isn’t easy and often very difficult. Before you even start to figure out how to create a great short essay on your own, check the guide below and see some must-know tips that should help you cope with this confusing assignment.
What a Short Essay Is
A short essay isn’t different from other writing assignments and doesn’t require any specific approach. The only difference from other types of essays is that you should write it within 200-500 words. This is not much to deliver top-quality content, so you should do your best to include all your thoughts into this amount of words.
A short essay’s volume would vary from two to five paragraphs, while a usual essay includes at least five paragraphs. The main problem is to structure those few hundreds of words properly and not confuse your reader. Find out how to do it right now!
What to Include in Your Short Essay
If you work on a standard short essay, it will have five paragraphs and include such parts as:
- Introduction;
- Thesis statement;
- Body paragraphs;
- Conclusion.
Like you can see, short essays have a very standard structure. However, you should take into account a couple of peculiarities, so let’s look at them right now.
Short Essay Introduction
Even if it is a short essay writing, the introduction is your everything. You must make a great impression and persuade your reader that the writing is worthy of his or her attention. A hook sentence will help you do that.
Of course, you want to make your essay longer but avoid making your introduction with more than five sentences, though. Thus, you must be as precise and accurate as possible. Cover the urgency of the issue under discussion with a great thesis statement.
Thesis Statement
Of course, a thesis isn’t a separate part of your essay. It should be included in the introduction. It would be better to make it the last sentence of your introduction. Your thesis statement must cover the most important issue and provide a claim to prove.
For that reason, it is necessary to avoid very broad topics and pick very specific ones. If yours is too broad, though, select one specific issue and focus your thesis on it. The peculiarities of the thesis statement are as follows:
- debatable;
- motivating the readers to counter argument it;
- clear enough, so the reader would understand the core idea of the paper from it only.
Body Paragraphs
As a rule, professors require a short essay writing to contain five standard paragraphs. Thus, you should devote three of them to your main body. In this part, you provide core ideas and support them with evidence.
The most important thing is to provide your arguments and supporting evidence, and facts in descending order. For example, the strongest ones must be provided first while the least important ones have to be the last ones. Don’t forget to include quotations when necessary.
It will give you some extra points. Moreover, it makes the overall structure of your short essay writing more logical and smooth.
Short Essay Conclusion
This is the final paragraph of your essay writing. Paraphrase your main argument and don’t include any new information in this part. Summarize the work you have already done. If you raised the question in your introduction, now reply to it.
This part shouldn’t be less eye-catching than the introduction. However, the introduction attracts the reader’s attention, and the conclusion convinces the readers that they didn’t waste their time reading the papers.
How to Write a Short Essay
Before you start working on your small piece of paper called a short essay, you should know that picking a topic is really a big deal. This is one of the most important steps in the writing process, so make sure to devote enough time to it.
As it was mentioned above, the topic must be really interesting, catchy, and very narrow. Otherwise, you will hardly write something valuable. Below, you will find some more tips on how to write your short essay and make a good impression on your professor.
Understand the Prompt
Before you start your first paragraph, you should understand what the prompt requires from you. Without it, an effective argument is impossible. Your essay writing must respond to the prompt if you want to get a good grade, so make sure to understand it well first.
There Is Just One Arguable Point
This is a short essay, so you have no time and space to cover many core topics. It means that you should pick just one core issue to cover and provide arguments for or against it. If you don’t do this and pick several issues to discuss, you risk writing a very large writing instead.
Pick Only Credible Online Sources
You are a modern student, and most of your sources will be online. Pick at least one or two credible sources for your research. There is no need to pick more sources for your short essay because, once again, you don’t have any time or space for it, especially if you write an in-class essay.
An Outline Is Crucial
Creating at least a short outline is a must. Before you start working on your introduction and thesis statement, craft a draft for your short writing. It will help you come up with the best ideas and not lose any of them. After the outline is ready, you can eliminate all the unnecessary ones and leave only the most valuable thoughts.
It is recommended to:
- Enumerate your paragraphs 1, 2, 3…;
- Mention all secondary sources to use, if any.
The outline helps you organize your writing properly and make it as smooth and logical as possible.
Work on Your Thesis Statement First
A thesis statement is to be created before starting an introduction. This way, you will be able to build your introduction around it. Of course, a thesis must be strong and catchy. There are a couple of things to remember because a thesis statement doesn’t have to be:
- too obvious;
- too weak;
- too uncertain.
For example, here is a weak thesis: “Vaccination must be obligatory to children.”
Instead, you should write, “Lots of children cannot be vaccinated due to the epidemic, so it is necessary to require all healthy children to be vaccinated for herd immunity.”
Don’t Forget to Explain the Topic
Your reader must get an understanding of the topic, and the best thing to explain it is to do it right in the introduction. The reader must understand what you are going to write about from the very beginning, so sharpen and clarify your argument well.
The Introduction and Conclusion Are the Shortest Paragraphs
Remember that the main body must be the lengthiest paragraph, while both the introduction and conclusion cannot exceed 75 words each. The briefer they are, the better.
Include about six or seven sentences in your introduction and just three or four paragraphs in your conclusion. Don’t write more because it won’t be a short essay anymore.
Catchy Short Essay Topics
If you have no idea what you can write about, and your professor didn’t assign you a specific topic, check the following list and make sure to come up with some brilliant ideas for your short essay.
- Online school vs. in-class education.
- The efficiency of wearing face masks outdoors.
- The impact of romantic movies on real relationships.
- Plastic surgeries for improving self-images of women.
- Barbie doll and its role in the girl’s body image.
- Does new coverage affect the order in society?
- Eating habits and their impact on our mental health.
- The pros and cons of virtual reality.
- Video games should be banned for kids.
- Android vs. iOS.
Bottom Line
If you are one of those students who believe short essays are much easier to write than usual papers, don’t hurry to calm down and realize that it is as difficult as any other paper writing and, for many, even more complicated. You just should not procrastinate and wait until the very last day to start writing.
Stick to the above-mentioned tips, and you will manage to write a good short essay. Devote special attention to each of the writing steps as well as research on the topic.
We hope now you have a better idea of how to write a short essay. You can read our other article on how to write 1000 word essay which we find very informative.
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