I am still a student myself with no expertise in essay writing but after passing through  competitive examinations I have arrived at some conclusions that may also prove helpful to the readers in their quest for getting good marks in essay paper and especially for those who have no understanding of how to start studying for this difficult task ahead. The first and very basic requirement for getting handsome marks is that you must have the strong solid basis in terms of grammatical know-how with a vast vocabulary at your fingertips but what for those who don’t have prior solid knowledge level? Don’t worry though it is a difficult task but still manageable through hard work and sheer keenness.

The first thing an aspirant should do is to start reading opinions and editorials from national newspapers like Dawn news, The news international, The nation with a blend of international newspapers like Forbes, BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera and New York times etc. But there is an important thing to be kept in mind which most aspirants usually ignore and that is to look for the punctuation marks, sentence structure, and sentence flow along with the story. Keep a dictionary with yourself that will help you in grasping the difficult words encountered by you during reading (better to use Standard Oxford dictionary and one can download it from Google). This will not only help you in acquiring a good vocabulary but will also help in understanding the use of punctuation marks, proverbs, and other relevant grammatical needs. This will also provide a solid basis for producing an essay which would precise and to the point with the great coherence of thoughts.

The next important and for me, the most important step is to write at least one page on those news stories in your own words. After writing an essay take it to an expert in the English language to point out your mistakes otherwise writing without checking them from experts will produce no results. But the main question arises that if someone is living in a small village and there is no expert of English language to approach then how can he or she cope with those mistakes. For me the best method would be go to an expert but if there is no expert to check your essay then you should install “Grammarly” extension in your browser which can help you big time in pointing out your mistakes. One can avail the premium version by paying some money but if you cannot pay then you should go for referral system which provides a free premium trial of one week per subscription.

Now comes the actual writing part which an aspirant has to go through in the examination hall. An aspirant can face three types of situations on that very day. The first supposed situation is that Essay in the Examination is on the topic which that aspirant has prepared very well and that would be easy for him/her to attempt. The second would the aspirant is not pretty sure of the material he has on that topic but is somewhat prepared so he/she will attempt it by gathering thoughts. The third and most serious situation that an aspirant can face is when he does not know anything about the given topic. The important question is that how to deal with such a situation. Though if you haven’t prepared properly or if you don’t have prior solid base it will always be difficult to attempt an essay but certain strategies can at least give you passing marks.

The very basic logic to keep in mind while attempting an essay is that you should discuss it both horizontally and vertically.  By horizontal I mean broader areas of discussion and by vertical I mean sub-portions of those broader areas. I would like to elaborate this by an example. For example, you were given an essay on the topic”Pen” and you don’t know anything about it. Then you should draw a list of horizontal areas ( I mean broader areas of discussion). The horizontal category can vary from a person to person but for your understanding, I would write some of them. The very first horizontal category would be to give a general introduction to the readers of the main topic, here “Pen”. Then write the broad categories on a rough page to further sub-divide them. The broad areas may include, “Religious, cultural, political, economic, historical and moral aspects but you can add further at your will”. Now I would discuss the religious aspect on the basis of our topic i-e “Pen”. I would first find out the importance of “Pen” in Islam and then would divide the Islamic aspect into Quran, Hadith and into saying of great Islamic scholars. Now if a person knows anything about other religion’s teachings regarding pen he can add that too i-e you can quote from Christian and Judaic scholars.

Now from the political perspective, I can add that due to the importance of pen for the development of a nation and due to its attraction for the people and especially for the younger generation, political parties are using it as an election symbol to garner more votes. Similarly, from the historical perspective, you can discuss that in old days, people would use to write by feathers and with advancements, in technologies people are using high-quality pens. This procedure of dividing each topic into horizontal and vertical aspects will give you a chance to at least save your day from failure.

Now comes the part of how to organize an essay. An essay consists of three parts: Introduction, body, and conclusion. The introduction basically introduces the topic to the readers and in this section mostly preliminary information is given. This section can be started in three fashions. One is to start with a simple introduction. Most of the people follow this method plus it is quite easy to comprehend for the newbies like me. The second method is to start from a quotation or proverb. This can also be employed if you think it further adds to your essay. The third method is to start with an anecdote (which used to be a short story). In this method, we basically relate a short story of characters to beautify our introduction but newbies must be very careful while using this method because it can land them into trouble.

Now moving towards the body or the main crux of the essay, this is the part of the essay where you can put all your facts, figures, quotations and whatever relevant material you have in your mind. Lastly, you will write the conclusion part. There can be two way to write a conclusion; the first one is, to sum up the whole essay in this section and the second one is, to sum up but by adding some new material to avoid monotony. The second method is preferable because of the mentioned reason. An essay should not be less than at least 2000 words and a single paragraph should be more than 4 lines to give a better look. Each and every paragraph should give a unique idea and the ideas not should be mixed with each other plus the transition of one paragraph to another should be as smooth as possible. Try to add quotations, proverbs and other such stuff to get good marks but try not to make a mess of the essay.

Note: I am not expert but I have written this to help newbies who have no knowledge how to deal with the essay paper. You can point out mistakes if you think there are! Thank you.