How to Write Interesting and Engaging Essays in 2022?

 

Essay writing is a task that students in schools, colleges, and universities have to do quite a lot. Depending on their major, a student may have to write 15+ essays in one year! That is a lot of essay writing.

These essays cannot be low-quality either, as they can significantly affect a student’s grade. Hence, students need to make their essays interesting and engaging so that they can pass all their courses nicely.

Making your essay unique can also be helpful for your teacher since it can help them break the monotony of checking bland and boring submissions. They can also grade it higher due to this.

So, let’s take a look at some tips to make your essays interesting.

Tips to Write Stimulating Essays

These are some tips that will help you in making your essay more stimulating and engaging to read.

1.     Take Some Time to Understand Your Topic

The first thing you need to do is to allocate some time for researching and understanding your topic. Typically, students don’t get the choice to write about anything they want. Teachers tend to assign a single topic to the entire class and all of them have to write the same essay.

Now, the topic may be interesting to some students and boring to others. The people who find the topic boring have a tendency to not put in enough effort and write a sub-par essay.

However, if they take the time to research it and understand what is being asked of them, they are able to write sufficiently well.

You should always take the time to research your topic, and understand its ins and outs before you start writing. That way, you will have a lot of material to fall back on and write an engaging essay.

2.     Create an Outline Before Writing

Outlines are really important, they let you plan out how you are going to write the essay. They also prevent you from rambling and going off-topic.

In a standard outline, a person writes down the headings in a specific order. They may also add notes detailing what they will discuss in each heading. Typically, outlines are not very long, and they are only used as a reference when writing.

An outline helps the writer to keep their thoughts focused. It is easy to go off on a tangent when writing about something, but, with an outline, writers always know what they can and cannot include in their essays.

This tip is especially good for students as they are quite prone to rambling in order to meet a specified word count.

3.     Focus on Improving the Readability

It may be very tempting for students to show off their advanced vocabulary in their essays, but this is something that they should avoid (unless they are literature students). That’s because writing is a medium of communication, and advanced vocabulary is difficult to understand.

You should take care that the essays are readable and understandable by most people. This requires that the writer use simple vocabulary, avoid technical terms where possible, and resort to paraphrasing if they do end up writing something difficult.

Paraphrasing is the act of restating something using different words but without altering its meaning.  Paraphrasing can be done manually if the person doing it has a large vocabulary, or it can be done using online paraphrasing tools.

With a paraphrasing tool, students can rephrase online. If they feel that they are unable to improve the readability of some passage in their essay, they can rephrase that part with a paraphraser.

Paraphrasing tools are much faster than humans when it comes to rephrasing, so there is an added benefit of saving time as well. With these tools, improving the readability of the text is much easier.

4.     Utilize Relevant Statistics and Examples

If the essay topic is argumentative in nature, using examples and statistics in favor of your views is very good.

Statistics and examples add authenticity to the essay, and it also shows the reader that the writer has done their research.

If students use proper statistics in their essays, their teacher can get impressed and give them a better grade.

There are some rules to adding stats. You cannot just put in any number or graph willy-nilly. The statistics must be:

• directly related to the topic;
• from a trusted source;
• not older than five years.

By adding stats that fit these characteristics, the quality of your essay will improve.

5.     Ask Thought-Provoking Questions

A great way to create and hold a reader’s interest is to ask thought-provoking questions in your essay. Another name for these is “rhetorical questions”.

Rhetorical questions don’t really have answers. They are simply asked to prove a point or to make people think about something.

Rhetorical questions add an element of interaction between the user and the writer, and that results in improved engagement.

A simple example of rhetoric would be to ask “what’s not to like?” after listing some positive features or qualities of something. In this case, the question does not expect to be answered and the reader simply has to agree with the sentiment in their mind.

Conclusion

Essay writing is useful in many ways.

Teachers can use it to measure the writing skills and depth of knowledge that students have on a particular topic. On the other hand, professional writers use them to expound upon controversial topics and prove/disprove arguments.

Primarily, essays are a means of communication as they allow a person to share their thoughts with others. To hold the interest of the readers, these essays need to be appealing. The tips discussed in this article are actionable tips that help with making essays more interesting and engaging.