Academia may seem like a whole other world with its rules and hierarchies. Even the pretty straightforward activity of writing to express one’s thoughts comes with millions of details, tiny aspects, and expectations. Students are often confused deciding what to put into their papers and what’s better not to.
It is true also for specific categories of academic products, like essays. If you expect an essay to be a universal format with strict structure and characteristics, you may be shocked to know there are multiple types of essays. Or you may know about the variations but still, be not sure what are the differences. Let’s clarify once and for all the key elements and requirements of each type of essay.
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Expository Essay
A popular exercise for exams and coursework, this type of essay aims at exploring ideas and concepts in a neutral objective way. It means, that the author would present a concept, but unlike the descriptive essay, in this case, one should explore alternative views and theories, and look for contradicting opinions and supporters.
Expository essays come in various forms, depending on the method one applies to explore and present the information. It can be a classification essay or a contrast-and-compare paper. Such essays can also serve to unpack a definition with the help of critical analysis of established understanding and unorthodox points of view of the concept.
This type of essay requires lots of research and pre-disposing knowledge, therefore might be a complicated task in some cases. To avoid the risks to your academic performance, you can order your paper from the highly professional essay writing service in Australia. Professional writers would conduct in-depth research and deliver an essay in line with all the requirements.
Descriptive Essay
A cornerstone of academic writing is a descriptive essay. As the simplest type of essay, it requires a student to describe a concept, activity, a source, or an artefact in a clear, comprehensive way. Such essays often go with a limited word count, so it may not be very easy to actually write a good brief description. But as with any trainable skill, the mastering requires students to follow the key rules:
- Proceed with your description from general to specific.
- When describing details, choose one at a time, or group them into categories logically.
- Strive for summarizing the ideas you’re describing in your words – it always creates an impression of insight.
The skills necessary to write a descriptive essay are important universally and would facilitate embracing more complex tasks.
Narrative Essay
Although any text is partially narrative due to its intrinsic logic and tendency to chronological sequence, narrative essays are specific in their format and crucial rules. The most important characteristic here is the logical completeness of the story. The events or concepts described should have a marked start in time and space and some finishing point where narration stops. This nature of writing governs its structure and approaches to thoughts presentation as storytelling.
Any good story has an arc:
- starting from a problem, conflict, or an idea;
- going through difficulties and challenges;
- coming to a solution or a problem resolution with valuable lessons in stock.
It may look like a fairytale structure, but those are popular for a reason. If you want readers to read your essay to the final dot and the format allows for it, tell a story to make your ideas more vivid and captivating.
Argumentative Essay
The key characteristic of this type of essay is the personal point of view of the author. Even without declarations of one’s feelings or beliefs about the paper subject, all the argumentative essays present the writer’s position in its regard. This position should be based on valid arguments and supporting evidence.
Argumentative essays usually follow a classic 5-paragraph essay structure with the introduction, three paragraphs of the main body and conclusions. In most cases, the last sentence of the introduction should be a thesis statement. A thesis statement is an idea you’ll be exploring and confirming in the main body of your essay.
Various types of essays exist not to torment the student but rather to enrich and diversify their toolset of scholarly skills. All the mentioned essays require different approaches. That’s why it is crucial to identify what kind of essay you’re writing based on the assignment instructions.
