What makes for an essay? What makes it different from short stories, poetry, novels, nonfiction and other forms of literature? Does essay writing have to undergo a rigid process? These are quite common questions amongst university students, and this concise guide will brief you into the seemingly complex and, yet, simple steps in writing essays.

Stages of Essay Writing

Whereas short stories and novels go by fictional storylines, and nonfiction works are narratives and factual descriptions about certain topics, essays require your analytical skills in understanding and giving solution to a problem (a "hypothesis"). However, an essay is not as simple as a reaction paper or a summary of your resources. It goes through a method with these stages:

- Understanding what the essay question requires

- Planning your course of action

- Researching for reference materials

- Creating an essay outline

- Writing the essay (consider proper format, citation style, and your description and analysis of the problem as well as the appropriate solutions)

Essay length

Depending upon stated requirements, an essay should not be too long or too short. Technically, although a one-paragraph text may be considered an essay, it's not long enough to describe the introduction, body, and conclusion which are the three main parts of essays.

The shortest essays, therefore, can be just five-paragraphs long, but other essays could be as long as five pages. What's important is for your essay to answer the question and be able to articulate, in an organised and coherent way, your offered solutions as well as the supporting facts of your arguments.

Identify keywords

Essay writing is, therefore, an expression of your personal grasp of the topic in question and of the principles and theories associated with it. And, in order to understand the essay question you should be able to identify keywords in the question. Often, these keywords are effective enough to tell you what to do or what course of action to follow. An example is the keyword "analyse" which, in most instances, asks you to separate the parts and see how they contribute to the overall meaning of the work.

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