We’ll say it again: Writing essays is hard! You hear all this advice about how you have to tell stories, and use details, and it’s human nature to want to try and impress your reader. And there are so many ways you can step in it.
Writing essays is a creative process to an extent, in that you have to struggle with all of the forces involved with creating something out of nothing. Any type of writing has this element to it, and it’s one reason for the difficulty of this task. If you’ve tried to write a short story or a poem or a song or you’re in the midst of writing the great American novel, you totally know what we’re saying. If you’ve ever written a report or a set of user requirements or a training manual at work, same thing. You’re bringing forth content into the world that did not exist before. Yup, difficult.
Sometimes BSers get off track in their essay development process and lose sight of the key objective for their draft of answering the question and communicating clearly. We warned against this in previous posts like this one about not withholding information from the reader.
Here’s another common issue that comes up frequently so we’ll caution you about this one today too.
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Essays that are trying too hard end up make the reader think the person is trying too hard. And this is the opposite of authentic.
If this shows up in a draft, don’t worry, we’ll let you know about it!
Tell us what you think.