It’s the minute every parent dreads: when your child sits there, glum-faced, considering an empty piece of paper before them. They have a rapidly-approaching deadline due to their essay, and nothing, but nothing you do as a parent seems to simply help them get any closer to completion. What can you do to simply help? The clear answer is: quite a lot.
Making a successful essay may be one of the very arduous elements of the schooling process, and yet, the need to write a composition is everywhere: from English literature, to economics, to physics, geography, classical studies, music, and history. To succeed, at high school and in tertiary study you have to master essay writing.
Getting students over this barrier was one of the reasons I put pen to paper four years ago and produced a book called Write That Essay! At that stage, I was a senior academic at Auckland University and a university examiner. For pretty much 20 years, in both course work and examinations, I’d counselled everyone from 17-year-old ‘newbies’ to 40-year-old career changers with their essay writing. Often, the difference between a student who might achieve a B-Grade and the A-Grade student was some well-placed advice and direction.
I then visited over 50 New Zealand High Schools and spoke with over 8000 kiwi kids about essay writing. These students reported the identical challenges as I’d previously encountered, and more. The result has been two books and a DVD that have helped kids achieve some of the potential that sits inside every one of us.
In this article I’m going to cope with some things you can do as a parent to simply help your child succeed at essay writing. Because writing great essays is well within every child’s grasp.
Strategies for essay writing success:
It’s a quarrel
Remember that an essay is a quarrel best essay writing service the task in a composition isn’t to create a tale or even to recount a plot. The teacher knows all this information. In a composition your child’s job is to present a compelling argument-using specific evidence-for the idea they are trying to make.
Write an idea: you’ll be pleased that you did
Get your child to create a brief list-plan of the topics that their essay needs to cover. Even a quick plan is preferable to no plan at all, and will start to supply the writer a sense that completing a composition on that topic is well inside their grasp.
If your child is a visible learner, move far from the desk and go to a neutral space. Grab a large sheet of blank A3 paper and some coloured pens, and brainstorm a mind map or sketch plan of what the essay should contain. Using pictures, lines, circles, and arrows will all help the visual learner grasp the task accessible and make them see what they have to do.
Getting Started
Challenging many kids (and adults) face writing essays gets started. The person sits there awaiting inspiration hitting them like a lightening bolt and it never happens. What can you as a parent do to simply help?
Encourage them with the thought that great essays are never written the first time over. Encourage them to view essay writing as a three-part process. The very first draft is just to have out the ideas and words in rough form. In the 2nd and third effort, they will add to their essay where there are blanks, clarify ideas, and give it a final polish. Realising that an essay isn’t said to be perfect the first time you write it, really helps some people.
Having enough to express
If your child continues to be stuck, find out if they have read up enough on the topic. Some inertia with writing may be because of lack of knowledge. They’ll find writing so much simpler when they spend another day or two reading more on the topic and gleaning some additional ideas.
Try employing a neutral sentence
Suggest starting the essay with a simple sentence: a sentence that merely states a fascinating fact on the topic being written about. Here’s one: ‘Mozart was certainly one of the most important Austrian composers of the eighteenth century.’ First sentences in essays don’t must be stellar – you simply need to start!
