Why essay examples help with essays

Anyone who has ever studied any form of Creative Writing will know that “show don’t tell” is said so many times that it has become a cliché. However, it is a very useful piece of advice both in demonstrating how to write a piece of fiction but also in any teaching area. This applies both to other people teaching you and also semi self-teaching. In this article, you will be reading about how examples can help you with your essay writing using semi self-teaching.

Semi self-teaching is a skill that you can use over and over with essay writing once you have discovered how to do it. Let’s imagine that you are studying female writers of the 18th century and you have an essay question that is: “Discuss one or more women writer’s responses to their treatment by men.” If you are stressed because you have too much work to do or you simply cannot quite grasp how you will write the essay, the best way forward is to read as many essays as you can find on similar topics. This will demonstrate to you how you might answer the question that you have been given. However, although reading lots of essays will help you to a certain extent, it can be a passive exercise. The problem with passive exercises is that often they do not teach us much so how do you rectify this?

The best way to get the most out of reading examples is to deconstruct them so that you can see how the writer has answered the question.

• Introduction. Notice if the writer has used a hypothesis as an angle to answering the question. For instance, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in ‘The Small Pox’(1) and Anne Finch in ‘Clarinda’s Indifference at Parting with her Beauty’ (2) illustrate the way in which a female’s merit is equated with beauty within a patriarchal society. (Patriarchal society is defined as a society which practises the oppression of women.) Moreover, they successfully illuminate how this treatment is used as a device to control women.” Can you see how the reader instantly knows what the essay is about. The question is wide but you now know that this essay will concentrate on two poems and how these poems are going to be investigated. Can you also see how the writer does not presume knowledge and defines exactly what she means by patriarchal society? This prevents misinterpretation with the argument. The poems also have the numbers for the notes which will be attached to the end of the essay so that the reader can refer to them if she or he so wishes. This will demonstrate to you how to use this system within your own essays.
• Main body of the essay. When you read an introduction in any essay examples, you should find that the main points have been briefly mentioned so that the reader can anticipate all the great critical analyses to come. When you deconstruct the main points of the essay, you will be able to see how the writer has developed the argument using these points. For instance, if we stay with the aforementioned example, comparing and contrasting the two poems, they could be: The subject of flattery is explored to investigate the poets’ responses to women’s treatment by men. The subject of threat is utilized to develop the argument. Can you see how the writer has searched for common themes in the two poems, in this case flattery and threat, and has used this as a way to structure the essay. This is what you should do when reading essays in an active manner – look for common themes. When you find them you have a springboard to develop your argument on.
• Conclusion. Read as many conclusions as you can. A conclusion should be brief and pull the main argument together; it should not repeat the main body of the essay. As an active part of your reading exercises, you should try to spot which conclusions work better than others. Particularly look for conclusions that are simply paraphrasing parts of the essay. If you can learn not to do this, you will receive better grades.