Avoiding Long-Windedness With Short Essays
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009An essay usually seems like it is going to last for ages. Whether you are a year 7 pupil given their first extended writing task of secondary school, a weary, truculent teenager having to be dragged through his GCSE coursework, or a sometimes diligent, too often party-loving student trying to get through the demands of a degree with a constant hangover, getting that essay title will leave you groaning at the amount of research, planning and writing you will be obliged to do. It can feel all too consuming and never-ending. With such dread and lethargy involved in completing essays, it would seem that having to produce a short essay would be a welcome alternative. However, it is a paradox that the short essay can be a more complex beast to complete than its longer counterpart.
The first thing is that we become gradually hard-wired to accept that an essay is long. The very word evokes feelings of reams and reams of pages, imprinted with complex terminology and a challenging lexicon of jargonistic terms and references. Under those presumptions, do we stumble into the task of completing our assignment. When it comes to delivering a short essay, we are so used to writing long essays, the shorter variant becomes a difficult task to get into.
Be short on execution but not short on planning
A short essay may well be simply summarising a topic. Having to write a short essay for your Romeo and Juliet coursework, say on the nurse’s role in the relationship between the two lovers, will not demand as much detailed, analytical exploration as would a normal length essay. Yet, it is often found that brevity is harder to achieve than when there is scope to be as extensive as needed. Whilst the idea of having to produce 3,000 words can seem daunting, once you have established your essay plan so you know what it is you want to write, the vista of word length is actually more than useful. The problems are greater when asked to fit what you need to say in a very limited amount of words. It can become like trying to fit a bullock into a telephone box to the essayist trained to analyse expansively. Writing a short essay calls for a different kind of creative composure.
The answer to tackling such problems that short essays bring is to learn how to be economical with words, being able to explain themes, concepts and ideas without verbosity and without being sidetracked. It is not good in any type of essay to be led by tangential distractions, but very much so in a short essay, should you be mindful of sticking only to the most pertinent of issues. This is where good planning is essential. Having the essay structure laid out clearly is a must as this is will keep your discipline as you write.
Having at your disposal, a clear essay outline of central themes to mention will be the key to how successfully your short essay reads.
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