Essays: Getting Started
So you've been assigned to write an essay. You know you'll be spending the next few weeks of your life with this sort of hanging over your head; you'll do a lot of writing and asking yourself "What on Earth am I trying to say?" and rewriting and re-rewriting, and then you'll turn the thing in and be done with it until the next one.
But the process gets a whole lot easier once you have a clear sense of what you're doing, what your goals are and what your instructor is likely to expect.
So let's walk through the essay writing process and familiarize ourselves with it. Just what does writing an essay entail?
To see the essay writing process in action, we'll also walk through my personal process of writing an essay assignment, from beginning to end.
From an English 1101 class at Georgia State University, I took an assignment prompt by Mack Curry IV and ran through the whole process of writing an essay. Let's see what my process looks like:
Adapted from http://sites.gsu.edu/mcurryiv1/rhetorical-analysis-prompt-gsu/