“Writing an Essay: Here are Ten Effective Tips” by Joe Bunting

 She sits hunched over her keyboard, surrounded by plants and used dishes. Her fingers fly over the keys in her improvised pattern. She had never learned how to type properly in elementary or middle school and her typing is choppy and uneven. The text on her monitor grows and shrinks like an inchworm desperately trying to crawl to its destination. She cleverly uses figurative language and smiles to herself, but while reading it back a few minutes later she shakes her head and deletes it. Her process is a constant push and pull which she still has not figured out. She takes a break to read what other students have written, and the lines on her forehead deepen. After countless breaks and freakouts, she proofreads it and submits it. Her computer breathes a sigh of relief and finally gets to rest for the night.

Pick two ideas in the short essay that you think are the most important. How will these concepts help you going forward as a college student facing writing assignments?

I was intrigued by “#1: Your essay is just a story.” through the name, and what Joe Bunting wrote made great sense to me. Viewing my essays as relationships between ideas that change and conflict would really help me improve the clarity of my writing. Sometimes my thoughts get muddled when I put them on the page. Boiling ideas down to “You probably think it’s one way, but in reality, you should think of it this other way” like Bunting said, is very effective. I have seen this in many research papers, but have never considered it for other essays. For my second tip, I chose “#7: Most essays answer the question, “What?” Good essays answer the “Why?” The best essays answer the “How?”” because I often find myself stuck. I have had teachers tell me to ask myself questions about the text we are writing about and I could never formulate what I thought were “good” questions. Focusing on the question “How?” seems very simple, but once I contemplated what Bunting meant I realized this tip could help me. I often leave out important parts of the “How?” and do not realize until later on when I reread. So, I intend to keep this tip in my back pocket this semester so I can use it when I feel like I’m not digging deep enough into topics.