How to Impress the Audience with Your School Essay

When writing essays for academic courses, students have many things to take into consideration:

• Grades
• Improving writing skill
• Standing out

While improving one’s grades and working on one’s writing skills are fairly straightforward goals, standing apart from the crowd can be a bit more difficult. After all, instructors, committees, and teaching assistants read hundreds of essays, and they undoubtedly begin to run together. So what’s a student to do? Follow these helpful tips to impress your readers with your school essays:

1. Impress Them with a Great Topic

Students are either assigned a topic or get to choose one. Either way, they can still impress their audience. While a student may not be able to dictate the overall topic, bringing a fresh perspective to even the most familiar of topics is very impressive. A new way of looking at an old topic, in fact, is just as outstanding as a new original topic.

2. Impress Them with Research

Even if the essay topic doesn’t require a ton of research, finding some intriguing sources to add flavor to your essay can really go a long way toward making it unique. Bonus: by finding great sources to add, you can also take advantage of weaving in good quotes that fit with your theme.

3. Go in Depth

Along with choosing a new perspective for your topic, approach the topic as in-depth as you can. Detailed, in depth approaches mean your reader will almost certainly learn something new about the topic, and running across new information is always impressive in a student essay. After all, you’re already researching a bit to find interesting sources—kill two birds with one stone!

4. Make Every Word Count

Steer clear of being unnecessarily verbose, using clichés or trite phrases, and above all, make every single word of your essay count. Anything that doesn’t pack a punch should be cut. Many student essays are filled with fluff to meet page counts; if you avoid doing that, you’ll definitely impress your audience.

5. Proofread, Proofread, Proofread Some More

One thing that won’t impress your readers is the presence of spelling and grammar mistakes. An otherwise exceptional essay can lose major points because of a misplaced homonym, for example. Don’t rely on your computer, or even on your own eyes. Get a friend (or a few) to help you proofread.

Essay Sample

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