Once your topic sentences and hypothesis are completed, you can begin writing your essay, beginning with your first draft. (You should never hand in a first draft as your final piece, because as a general rule of thumb, they are not your best work!) 

Essays are structured pieces of persuasive writing containing an argument, which is supported by evidence. Great essays take time to write, review and refine. Therefore, waiting until the night before to write it is never going to get you good marks.  Every essay must always be a piece of argumentative writing. Do not simply tell a story! 

 To produce excellent essays, you need to understand the different elements of an essay structure. 

Following your overall plan, write a rough draft as quickly as you can, concentrating on the developing your answer. Stick to the point and support your ideas with reasons and evidence, as well as including specific examples and details. Demonstrate that you have been thinking for yourself, not just copying other people’s ideas. 

Essays have word limits and you are supposed to keep to them. If it is too long, then you have not demonstrated the ability to organise succinctly your thoughts. If your essay is too short, you have probably not read enough on the topic or understood it sufficiently. Your mark may be affected for exceeding the word limit or not writing enough. 

The draft that you submit to your teacher should be as good as a final version of your essay. If parts are missing or incomplete, it is very difficult for your teacher to give you precise feedback on how to achieve your best possible results. 

How to write essay paragraphs

In text referencing

Whenever you use a direct or indirect quote in a sentence, you need to indicate what source the information came from. You do this with in-text referencing.

The APA System’s in-text referencing requires three elements, each separated by a comma:

• the creator's surname

• the year of publication/creation

• the page number in the source (if there is one)

Rules About In-text Referencing

• Appears at the end of the sentence where a direct or an indirect quote has been used, just before the full-stop

• Must be placed in circular brackets “( )”.

• If you state the creator’s surname in the sentence, it can be left out of the in-text reference.

• The three elements (surname, year, page) must match the bibliographical reference for the source as it appears in your bibliography.

• If there is not a page number in your source (like on many webpages), simply place "n.p." instead of the number (which is an abbreviation for "no page").

• If you use multiple quotes from the same source in the same sentence, the in-text only needs to appear once.

• If you use multiple direct quotes from different sources in the same sentence, the in-text references for each source need to appear after each direct quote.

Referencing Ancient Sources

When studying Ancient History, in-text referencing ancient authors is slightly different.

Rather than the rules set out above, all you need to provide in the brackets are:

• the author's name

• the name of their work

• the book number in Roman numerals

• the paragraph number in normal numerals.

For example:

Herodotus reports that the Persians were ill prepared for the battle ahead (Herodotus, Histories, VII.24).

Referencing Appendices

If you are providing evidence from a source that is not written, you need to provide an image of the source for the reader to see. The easiest way to do this is to use appendices. In the text of your essay, simply state the appendix number that the image can be found in.

For example:

The tomb itself was decorated in an opulent fashion in order to display his political influence, even after Akhenaten's death  (Appendix 2).

Use online tools to check your writing.