OMG it’s the end of August! September is almost here! YOU SHOULD BE WRITING ESSAYS!!! To support you in that, this week we’re dedicating the blahg to posts about writing. This will be a fairly random assortment of tips and tricks for putting together a strong MBA application essay (today, with puppies). You may want to read this post from the ‘snarchive first – “The hardest part of learning to write good essays” — to understand why we spend so much time on the “writing skills” part — at least as much on the “content strategy” part!
For our in-depth coverage to kick off Writing Week today, let’s start at the end.
Essays have three parts: Intro, body, conclusion.
It’s like a dog: Head, body, tail.
All dogs have all those things. Even the dogs with little nubs of a tail where when they shake their tail they’re actually shaking their whole butt and wiggling a lot because they only have a nub of a tail because it got docked or they’re some breed with a tiny tail … they still have a tail.
When a dog is happy to see you then it wags its tail. When it wags its tail you smile.
When your reader gets to the end of your essay you want them to smile.
Give them a conclusion to make them smile.
Don’t just end your essay at the body. Because then they get there and they’re like, “Hey! What happened! I thought there was going to be a tail here!”
We think you’ll agree with this guy: Tails are worth having!
You don’t want your reader to be reading along and then… fall off a cliff.
Essays should not just stop.
Essays need a conclusion.
Otherwise your reader is left with the sense that, “Darn it, something’s missing!” (Kinda like with the title to this post, right? 😉 See what we did there? hahaha)
Here’s a special bonus tip for our paying blahg members…
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Check back tomorrow for another WRITING WEEK! post — oh look here it is!!! — and good luck with your essay-writing this week, Brave Supplicant! YOU GOT THIS!
username123 says
Thank you for the advice! Is it normal to be yelling at your screen at this stage of essay writing? Asking for a friend 😛
essaysnark says
LOL – you can tell your friend YES! If there wasn’t yelling at inanimate objects or hair-pulling or a certain amount of cursy-words then we’d wonder if maybe they’re doing it wrong. Not sure why this process must work this way, but yeah, there can be some serious frustrations that must be expressed along the way! Common, very common indeed.