How students can cope with a long essay per one day

Every student, sooner or later, faces the task of writing an essay in a short period. Writing a good paper in one day is quite achievable if you approach the task responsibly and don't procrastinate. The main secret of writing an essay in a day is to follow a plan and a clear structure of the work process. We have prepared a step-by-step guide for working on an essay on a tight deadline and recommendations on how to cope with this assignment without stress. 

 

Why do we write essays?

In most cases, students write essays only because their professors require them to do so. Consequently, students assume that essays are needed primarily to demonstrate their own knowledge. The paper's importance is that it allows the writer to create a meaningful, coherent, and in-depth set of ideas and develop their writing skills. 

 

Tune in to work 

You should be prepared for your writing to take anywhere from 90 minutes to three hours. Your brain will go on strike when you sit down to work. It's full of other thoughts, each one fighting for your attention. You'll want to check social media, eat, clean your room, or call a friend. If you resist these temptations for fifteen minutes, you will find that the noise in your head is noticeably less, and you can concentrate on the task of writing your essay. Allow yourself a break after a period of concentrated work. Three productive hours of work are much better than ten unproductive hours of self-delusion, even if you spent those ten hours in the library.

 

How to cope with a long essay in one day?

In order to cope with the work as quickly as possible, you should clearly understand the task and the stages of its implementation. The process of writing an essay consists of several stages:

• problem posing;
• researching and reasoning;
• planning;
• writing;
• proofreading; 
• improving what you've written. 

The quality of any essay depends on three interrelated components:

• the source material that you are going to use (notes of the literature you have read, lectures, recordings of the results of discussions, your own thoughts, and accumulated experience on the problem)
• the quality of the processing of the available source material (its organization, argumentation, and reasoning);
• argumentation (how accurately it correlates with the problems raised in your essay).

Selecting the literature for the study and gathering material is an important stage. For each specific topic, you should first read two or three key articles or book chapters. Depending on the topic, it is important to include one or two case studies with opposing points of view in your reading list. Effective use of case studies and data will help you avoid the typical mistake of overgeneralizing material in your essay.

 

Getting ready to write an essay

Usually, the questions and challenges posed to you in the process of writing an essay require analytical answers, i.e., finding an explanation: why something happens and how it happens (processes, mechanisms), and the answer requires more than a simple description of facts or a generalization of what others have said. Naturally, the facts, along with the available points of view on the problem, are crucial. Nevertheless, all of this is only part of the background material you use to answer the question, but it is not the answer to the question itself.

When you choose a question on a topic, make sure you read carefully and understand it correctly before you plan your answer, as it can be interpreted in many different ways.

Based on your decision about how you will answer the question, you should make a plan/structure for your answer. The design of a written paper usually consists of the following components:

• introduction — the essence and justification for the choice of the topic and stating your thesis;
• development of the topic — a reasoned disclosure of the matter on the basis of the collected material (ideas, models, and data);
• conclusion — generalizations and reasoned conclusions on the topic, indicating the scope of its application, etc.

 

Compiling a plan

Now you need to create the structure of your work. This is the hardest part of writing an essay, and it cannot be neglected. The design of the essay is like a skeleton for the body and creates the foundation. When you create an outline, you write out the main points that you will reveal in your paper. A thousand-word essay requires a ten-sentence outline. If the piece is longer than a thousand words, make subparagraphs to each sentence in the plan.

 

Writing an essay

You will now have to write ten to fifteen sentences for each paragraph of the plan. Sometimes it makes sense to add subparagraphs to the plan, thus editing both the outline itself and the content of each paragraph. Other than that, use your notes. Don't worry too much about text quality, sentence structure, and grammar. You will deal with these issues in the second important stage of your work on the text, in the process of editing. Writing an essay should be seen as a two-step process. The first big stage is working on the first draft, which can be written quickly and sloppily. For the first version of the essay, you can basically use your notes and create a draft based on them. If you get stuck on any of the structure points, just move on to the next point. You can always go back. 

Try to keep your paragraphs to ten sentences or one hundred words.

A paragraph should represent one thought expressed in several sentences. If you can't come up with 100 words that express your thought, it's probably not a good thought, or it means you need to think about it some more. If your paragraph is 300 words or more, it probably contains more than one idea, which means you need to split it up.

 

Editing

The second important stage is editing. Writing and editing are different functions and should be perceived accordingly because these functions have different natures and purposes. The purpose of writing is to write. The purpose of editing is to cut and concise. If you try to do both at the same time, editing will interfere with writing. Combining these two actions leads to frustration, not faster and better results. 

Read each sentence aloud and listen to how it sounds. If the sentence seems strange to you, try to reword it. 

When writing a draft, your main goal is to develop an argument, polish your main thoughts, and arrange them in a strict sequence, accompanied by illustrative material or supporting data, etc. 

 

References

If you say something in your work that is considered fact, or at least a valid opinion, that you got from a source, cite that origin. Otherwise, you may be accused of plagiarism, which is essentially theft. 

 

Final Proofreading 

If you've gotten to this point, you've done a great job. Your work on the essay can truly be considered complete when there is nothing to improve in the text during the editing process. Check that you have cited the materials correctly, that there are no grammatical and lexical errors, and that all of your arguments fit the thesis statement. 

As you can see, even if you are limited in time, it is possible to write even a long essay in just three hours if you structure and plan your work correctly. However, if you realize that you can't cope with the task alone, you should always ask for assignment help from your instructor or address the special writing services.