Academic transcription companies are a big support for students, helping them transcribe audio and video recordings of interviews for their research projects and essay writing assignments. One major challenge that many students face is how to organize their ideas and thoughts and put them down to produce a good essay. Here are some tips to write a good essay:
- Be a passionate writer: The first rule is to be a passionate writer. Take Fan Yusu, for example. When this poor 44-year-old migrant worker wrote a revealing essay about her hardships and posted it on a social media literary site, little did she know that it would attract 100.000 shares and more than 20,000 comments. According to the South China Morning Post Fan’s essay has “a quiet strength and dignity, along with occasional humour and resolve to pursue a better life”. One reader commented that the work is smoothly penned, very touching and free of sensation. Fan became China’s most sought-after writer overnight because she talked passionately about her family history and experiences – with a quiet strength and dignity, peppered with occasional humour and determination to pursue a better life.
- Think critically: Use your higher cognitive skills and think critically. You shouldn’t be reproducing other people’s ideas. Instead, you should prove that you can think critically about the matter at hand.
- Put your ideas down quickly: Create the first draft instantly. Don’t wait to edit, just create an outline of your essay as soon as you have gathered all your ideas together. If you don’t do this, you may lose the flow of ideas. You can fix the mistakes later.
- Organize your thoughts, ideas, and quotes: This is the first thing you should do before you begin to write. For instance, suppose you are writing an essay about children’s education and video game addiction. You can group your data under various heads such as
- Amount of video games children play (by age, gender, etc.)
- Issues linked to playing video games (fatigue, social isolation, etc.)
- Factors associated with video game addiction (performance in school, time spent on outdoor activities, etc.)
- Factors impacting academic performance (time allotted for studying, parent involvement, etc.)
Organizing your ideas and making an outline of your essay will give you control over them and help you integrate them into your work.
- Determine the sections: Divide your essay into the introduction, body and conclusion. The introduction should introduce the reader to the subject; the body should contain the main idea with examples, quotes and any other material to substantiate the subject of the essay; the conclusion is a short summary of your essay with maybe a provoking statement that will stimulate the reader to keep thinking on the topic.
- Proofread the draft and make corrections: You may need to make more than one draft and when the final one is complete, proofread your work. Look out for typos and grammatical mistakes. Go through the essay several times to see if there is any way you can improve it. You can even ask someone to proofread it for you. A person who hasn’t read it before will be able to spot mistakes more easily than you can.
Remember that honesty is the best policy even when you’re writing. Be sincere and honest – it will show through in your writing. Take a leaf out of Fan’s book. She wrote honestly about her experiences and the difficulties in her life over the last three decades – without self-pity – and that’s what touched readers.
Academic essay writing tasks often involves transcription of audio and video content into error-free readable text format. For that, you can always rely on an experienced digital transcription service provider. Such support can prove invaluable as you focus on writing an interesting essay.
