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How Has My Writing Improved – Essay About Improving Writing Skills

Writing of academic articles and term papers has often been a challenge to many students and I am not an exception. Academically, excellent writing skills aid in getting satisfactory grades. Sadly, I did not only have poor writing skills, but also a poor command of English. To improve my writing, I had to learn how to write proficiently by taking writing skills as an extra unit. Besides allocating more time to my extra unit, I had to do research on ways of improving my writing skills.

Tutors at a writing center, my lecturer, and frequent analysis of my low-graded papers assisted in improving my writing. Overcoming the hurdle of my writing inadequacy was not an easy task; however, collaboration between my lecturers and other experts in the writing center proved vital in ameliorating my writing skills especially in organization, spelling/grammar, and the overall quality of my work among others.

The first step in improving my writing skills was to analyze my written work critically. I had to rely on other students with strong writing skills to correct my papers. Most of my term papers had poor grades because of the spelling and grammar mistakes, lack of clarity and poor content. Rarely did the lecturer award any mark on the spelling and grammar slots. For example, the common comments on my papers included, “read your work before submission” or “read widely to improve your grammar”.

The last remark on my papers was always “below average”. Consequently, the disheartening comments resulted into terrible low-grades. From the comments and the results of the papers, my education was in crisis. Therefore, I had to read novels widely, and other articles to improve the grammar and spelling. While reading the novels, I had to note the spelling of new words and check their meanings from the dictionary.

The new advanced learner’s dictionary was my companion. Furthermore, I collected papers from my colleagues who performed better in class. Through reading and analyzing their papers, I was able to note the significant difference between the organization and content of their papers with mine. Eventually, I started receiving positive comments from my lecturer.

Secondly, I had to form a positive student-teacher relationship between my teacher and I. with my goals well outlined the lecturer was not hesitant in assisting me in improving my writing skills. The lecturer had to give me extra lessons and assignments to make sure I was picking up his comments.

Besides, rewriting my poor graded papers, I had to write extra papers as a practical lesson. At least I had to write a new paper every single day to check on my skills. My lecturer marked all the extra papers instructing me on, which ways to follow. I had to peruse through many English text books to learn about verbs, adverbs, and sentence construction among other issues. More over, I had to learn on the method of writing different essays (descriptive, expository, and argumentative) from books and read journals to improve my writing.

Although I killed my social life to create time for improving my writing skills, my papers started showing better comments. For instance, in one of the assignments I was happy when my lecturer commented, “cogent points”, which meant the paper was not only clear, but also the content was compelling. A clear paper means the audience or reader understands both the language and message of the writer, which is a quality of a good writer.

Thirdly, I had to learn on how to organize and construct an academic paper. All papers have a similar format , where the introduction, body and conclusion are mandatory. However, the content of these sections always seemed to be challenging especially in formulating a strong thesis.

The arrangement of the body paragraphs always seemed to be poor. Each paragraph has to have a topic sentence, which describes a specified point. Nevertheless, through continuous practice and reference from other well-written papers, I was able to sail through smoothly.

Due to the inability to construct a persuasive paper, I always submitted my assignments late, a fact, which led to the deduction of marks. Even writing a single page seemed tough to me. Nevertheless, currently, I can write more than a 1000 words within two hours and the paper will be devoid of errors. Therefore, the mastering of organization skills as a way of improving my writing has worked miracles. My papers are at per with other top students in my class.

Finally, I had to visit a writing centre to interact with the tutors and to learn from them on how to improve my writing skills. Before giving me a lecture on the basic qualities of a good paper, my tutor asked for my term papers to ascertain my level of skills.

He noted all the areas, which needed improvement guiding me on the way forward. For example, to improve my organization ability, he gave me written papers to go read and write the main points in each paragraph. From the small practical, I was able to master on how to organize my papers.

On the other hand, the quality of a paper is also a crucial element for a person who has decent writing skills. However, reading a variety of papers and books improves a person’s ability in writing an excellent paper. The last task in the writing centre was to write a 1-page paper on ‘how to improve my writing skills”.

By reading the paper, the tutor at the writing centre wrote comments on how to improve the quality of papers. I can clearly remember a comment in which he said, “read more on tenses”. In my paper, I had mixed both present and past tenses, which is a taboo in English. Finally, I had to read on all English tenses while taking practical exercise on each of them.

In a recap, the journey to an excellent has been a tough, but an exciting one. I had to learn from my mistakes to improve my writing skills. Reading a variety of books was not an exception.

Frequent consultations from the expert gave me the way forward. My lecturer and the writing centre are among the people I thank for the excellent writing skills I possess now. Luckily, I was not only quick, but also ready to learn, which enable me to grasp everything that a brilliant writer needs.

By taking negative comments positively, I rectified all the mistakes I had made in earlier papers. When compared to my previous results my papers contain positive comments like, “exemplary or average”. Occasionally, I emerge among the best in my class during assignments. In brief, although I have better writing skills, I still read articles, newspapers, peer reviews and other materials to improve.

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IvyPanda. (2023, October 31). How Has My Writing Improved – Essay About Improving Writing Skills. https://ivypanda.com/essays/my-improvement-in-writing/

"How Has My Writing Improved – Essay About Improving Writing Skills." IvyPanda , 31 Oct. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/my-improvement-in-writing/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'How Has My Writing Improved – Essay About Improving Writing Skills'. 31 October.

IvyPanda . 2023. "How Has My Writing Improved – Essay About Improving Writing Skills." October 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/my-improvement-in-writing/.

1. IvyPanda . "How Has My Writing Improved – Essay About Improving Writing Skills." October 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/my-improvement-in-writing/.

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A (Very) Simple Way to Improve Your Writing

• Mark Rennella

It’s called the “one-idea rule” — and any level of writer can use it.

The “one idea” rule is a simple concept that can help you sharpen your writing, persuade others by presenting your argument in a clear, concise, and engaging way. What exactly does the rule say?

• Every component of a successful piece of writing should express only one idea.
• In persuasive writing, your “one idea” is often the argument or belief you are presenting to the reader. Once you identify what that argument is, the “one-idea rule” can help you develop, revise, and connect the various components of your writing.
• For instance, let’s say you’re writing an essay. There are three components you will be working with throughout your piece: the title, the paragraphs, and the sentences.
• Each of these parts should be dedicated to just one idea. The ideas are not identical, of course, but they’re all related. If done correctly, the smaller ideas (in sentences) all build (in paragraphs) to support the main point (suggested in the title).

Where your work meets your life. See more from Ascend here .

Most advice about writing looks like a long laundry list of “do’s and don’ts.” These lists can be helpful from time to time, but they’re hard to remember … and, therefore, hard to depend on when you’re having trouble putting your thoughts to paper. During my time in academia, teaching composition at the undergraduate and graduate levels, I saw many people struggle with this.

• MR Mark Rennella is Associate Editor at HBP and has published two books, Entrepreneurs, Managers, and Leaders and The Boston Cosmopolitans .  

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How to Improve Essay Writing

Last Updated: December 28, 2023 References

This article was co-authored by Christopher Taylor, PhD . Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. There are 9 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been viewed 41,772 times.

Do your teachers always mark up your essays with red ink? Are you eager to learn how to express yourself clearly and effectively? If so, there are plenty of steps you can take to improve your essay writing skills. Improve your grammar, refine your style, and learn how to structure a well-organized essay. Since academic essays are especially tricky, learn the ins and outs of formal, scholarly writing. Be sure to read as much as possible; seeing how other authors use language can improve your own writing.

Improving Your Grammar and Style

• For example, while writing, you might not know whether to use “who” or “whom,” so you check the rule online. You’d use “who” for a person doing an action (called a subject), and “whom” for someone who gets something done to them (called an object). “Who called you,” and “Whom did you call” are grammatically correct.
• Find a general guide on grammar at https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/grammar/index.html .
• If you’re a student, see if your school has a writing lab. If so, they’ll have useful resources on grammar and tutors who can help you improve basic writing skills.

• That said, some exceptions apply. If you’re discussing a scientific study, “The subjects were divided into control and experimental groups,” is better than “Researchers divided the subjects into control and experimental groups.” This is because passive voice emphasizes the object of the action rather than the subject. In scientific writing, the object is more important than the subject.

• For example, “The author of the selection establishes the foundation of the work’s controlling metaphor in the initial stanza,” is packed with unnecessary words. A cleaner version of this example could be, “The author introduces the poem’s controlling metaphor in the first stanza.”
• Instead of “The animal sleeps during the day and is active at nighttime,” write “The animal is nocturnal.”
• Rather than "The fox ran very fast," write "The fox sprinted."
• In the sentence, “The argument is compelling and convincing,” compelling and convincing are close enough in meaning. Using one would get the point across, but using both is repetitive.

• Keep in mind the clause that follows a semicolon needs to be a complete sentence. It should also continue the idea conveyed in the clause before the semicolon. Proper use would be, “The platter dates to 1790; examples of British transfer-ware from this period are rare.”
• Use punctuation strategically. A complicated sentence, like this one, with too much, or confusing, or misplaced, punctuation is hard, for most readers, to follow. Aim instead for clear, easy-to-read writing.

• For example, “The platter dates to 1790. It is in pristine condition. There are no nicks or cracks,” are choppy and repetitive.
• Better phrasing would be, “An impressed back-stamp indicates that the platter was made in 1790. With no nicks, cracks, or discoloration, its condition is pristine; few pieces of this age and quality exist.”
• Keep in mind repetitive sentences aren’t necessarily choppy. For instance, “Since the platter has a maker’s mark, accurately determining its age is possible. Since it has no nicks or marks, it is in excellent condition,” are repetitive sentences, even if they’re not short and choppy.

Using Academic Language

• For example, instead of, “I think it’s pretty crazy how the artist made the painting so detailed,” write, “The artist achieves an impressive level of detail.”
• Note that you can use the first person and contractions in less formal essays, such as an autobiographical sketch or college application essay. However, your writing still shouldn’t be too casual. “I found myself questioning my assumptions” is fine but, in most cases, “I was like wow I didn’t know what I was talking about” is too casual.

• Say you’re writing an essay about school uniforms. “Uniforms are good because they make it easier to get ready in the morning,” might be a fair point, but it's not the strongest argument you could make. Backing up your point with objective evidence would be more convincing.
• On the other hand, “According to a 2017 study, schools reported an average of 44% fewer disciplinary referrals the year after implementing mandatory uniforms,” cites a specific, concrete fact.
• Additionally, use specific quantities whenever possible. In this example, “an average of 44% fewer disciplinary referrals,” is more effective than “a significant decrease.” [5] X Trustworthy Source University of North Carolina Writing Center UNC's on-campus and online instructional service that provides assistance to students, faculty, and others during the writing process Go to source

• Learning how to properly use subject-specific terminology can help you express yourself clearly and effectively. Academic writing is a dialogue, and learning the language of a scholarly dialogue is essential.
• For instance, if you’re writing a literary analysis, you might discuss how an author makes a comparison. While technically correct, the word “comparison” isn’t as precise as literary terms such as “metaphor” or “simile.”

• Using convoluted jargon or big words just for the sake of it will make your writing clunky. Furthermore, you’ll lose credibility if you misuse a complex word or technical term.
• For instance, “By utilizing efficacious examples, the author elucidates an irrefutable argument” is verbose. Simpler phrasing would be, “The author presents a convincing argument by using effective examples.”

Mastering the Writing Process

• Note that an essay prompt’s keywords have distinct meanings. Analyze, for example, doesn’t mean to describe; it means to pull apart and examine something’s structure.
• Suppose you have to analyze an argument. Your essay needs identify the argument's rhetorical elements, such as pathos (appeals to emotion), logos (employing reason or logic), or ethos (relying on authority or credibility). After breaking down the argument's structure, you'll then need to explain how the author uses these devices to make their case.

• Remember to check your sources’ credibility. If you’re writing about a former president, find the biography scholars consider most authoritative. Check the authoritative biography’s footnotes and references, which will help you track down more reputable sources.
• You won't conduct thorough research if you’re writing an essay for a test. Instead, read the sources provided with the exam. For example, if a literature essay test requires you to analyze an excerpt, read the passage carefully.

• For instance, “Schools should implement mandatory uniforms because they reduce disciplinary issues, help students focus on learning, and promote school spirit,” is clear and specific.
• The thesis, “Mandatory uniforms are beneficial, so schools should implement them,” makes a claim, but “beneficial” is vague. It doesn’t convey why uniforms are good, so it’s not a strong thesis.

• For the next Roman numerals, write the subtopics, citations, and other details that you’ll cover in each body paragraph.
• In the following example, Roman number II. would be an essay section, and letters A. through D. are body paragraphs that each focus on a sub-topic: II. Uniforms reduce disciplinary issues   A. 44% decrease in detentions after introducing uniforms (Smith, 2017)   B. Suspension decreased by 60% (Smith, 2017)   C. Absenteeism and tardiness decreased (Pew, 2013)   D. 66% of students report less bullying (Ohio Board of Education, 2016)

• Topic sentence: School uniforms may reduce the number of serious behavioral problems.
• Explain: Evidence suggests dressing alike lowers peer pressure, promotes discipline, and prevents the display of controversial or offensive imagery.
• Evidence: For example, according to the Ohio Board of Education, schools that introduced uniforms reported 44% fewer disciplinary referrals, such as detentions and suspensions. Furthermore, 66% of surveyed students said they witnessed fewer bullying incidents after they started wearing uniforms.
• Link: These findings suggest that implementing uniforms is an effective way to foster a disciplined school environment.

• A counterargument could be, “Opponents claim that mandatory uniforms stifle self-expression and lower self-esteem. Although uniforms do prevent personal expressions of style, studies show they actually improve confidence and encourage the expression of ideas. Rather than harm self-image, research suggests that uniforms positively impact mental health. In a 10-year Oxford University study, a majority of students reported that wearing uniforms boosts their self-esteem. With a level playing field, they worry less about choosing clothes that fit the norm.”

• First, revise your essay’s content. Check for unclear language, unorganized spots, awkward sentences, and weak word choices. Next, proofread your work and fix any spelling or grammatical errors.
• For important essays, like a term paper or an admissions essay, have someone read your work and offer feedback.
• In general, try to leave a day for edits at the bare minimum. For a big research paper, scheduling a week or more is ideal.
• For a quick, paragraph-long assignment that’s due the next day, you might only need 15 or 20 minutes for revisions. If you're taking a timed essay test, set aside the last 5 to 10 minutes to check your work.

Expert Q&A

• To improve your writing, read as much as you can. Reading a mix of fiction, newspaper articles, and scholarly works will help you learn new ways to structure sentences, refine your grammar skills, and improve your vocabulary. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• You might not have to conduct thorough research or develop a scholarly thesis if you’re writing an informal essay. However, basic elements such as strong word choices, varied sentence structures, and concise language still apply. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/passive-voice/
• ↑ https://slc.berkeley.edu/nine-basic-ways-improve-your-style-academic-writing
• ↑ https://emedia.rmit.edu.au/learninglab/sites/default/files/academic_style.pdf
• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/sciences/
• ↑ https://emedia.rmit.edu.au/learninglab/sites/default/files/vocabulary.pdf
• ↑ https://emedia.rmit.edu.au/learninglab/sites/default/files/Essay_writing_process_accessible_2015.pdf
• ↑ https://emedia.rmit.edu.au/learninglab/sites/default/files/super%20essay.pdf
• ↑ https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/developing-thesis
• ↑ https://emedia.rmit.edu.au/learninglab/content/paragraph-structure

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How to Improve Essay Writing Skills

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If you've been told time and time again that you express great ideas in your essay writing but your writing needs polishing, you aren't alone. The following tips will help improve your writing skills and turn you into a great writer.

Avoid repetition: It's an essay killer

Though it may seem difficult when writing a five-page term paper on a single idea or character, avoiding repetition is essential to improving your writing skills. When you use the same words ad nauseam, your reader views it as a sign of laziness. Here are three tactics that will help eliminate wordiness and eradicate repetitive words and phrases:

• The simplest approach to improving your writing skills is to eliminate the repetitive word or phrase from your essay.
• If you feel you need to keep the idea, replace the word or phrase with something similar. This may mean substituting a pronoun for a proper name, such as he instead of George; or it may mean searching for an alternative. Use a thesaurus only to remind you of words you already know but have temporarily forgotten. Don't select unfamiliar words that merely sound good; this risky path often leads to the use of words with different underlying meanings, which ultimately can hurt you more than the original repetition.
• The last of our techniques for improving your writing skills is more difficult, but usually the most effective. Begin by crossing out the offending repetition. Next, circle key words in the sentence (skip words such as a, of, while, it, etc.). Now craft a new sentence that retains the circled words but discards the repeat ones. This may require you to add more ideas to round out the thought, but our term paper editors have found that expanding on your new sentence in this manner will improve your paper.

Active voice: Breathe life into your essay writing

In order to improve writing skills, we encourage students to write in the active voice . For those of you who have misplaced your grade school grammar book, this means that the subject of the sentence performs the action; it does not receive the action. Compare the following examples:

• Tom tossed the ball (active)
• The ball was tossed by Tom (passive)

To find the dreaded passive voice, look for a "to be" verb (is, am, are, was, were, be, being, or been) followed by a past participle (often a verb ending with -ed). Ask yourself who is performing the action (the verb). Move that person or subject in front of the verb and make the necessary grammatical changes.

Trite phrases: Banish the banal

In order to improve your writing skills, force yourself to delete all idioms and clichés. Your reader wants original thoughts, not processed or canned sentiments. Yes, this means you must replace those mundane words with something clever of your own. Reduce—perhaps to zero—the number of similes and metaphors, particularly if they are common ones.

There may be instances in which you have devised the perfect comparison, one that highlights the essence of your argument, but chances are that an experienced reader won't be as impressed with your creativity as you are. While certain types of writing (advertising, speeches, etc.) may call for this, such phrases are anathema in formal writing. Eliminate these to improve your writing skills.

Literary present: Just do it

When writing about literature, you must write in the literary present. Your natural inclination will be to write:

The river symbolized freedom and enlightenment for Huckleberry Finn.

But the literary present demands that you write:

The river symbolizes freedom and enlightenment for Huckleberry Finn.

A key tip to improving your writing skills is that everything should be in the present tense. It doesn't matter that you read the book last week, or that the author wrote it a century ago. Write about the characters and events as though they exist in the here and now. This is one of those conventions that is just easier to accept than to question.

Mechanics: Sweating the small stuff is important when improving your writing skills

Always run a spell check. It only takes a moment, and it will save you the embarrassment of turning in an analysis of Julius Caesar in which you consistently misspell Caesar. Pay attention to the suggested replacements when editing your essay, however, as these canned wizards do not always understand your meaning. Even Bill Gates can't turn "it" into "in" or "you're" into "your" for you, so you also need to comb through the paper carefully with your own eyes to find every error before handing it in. Brilliant essays receive lower grades if simple mistakes are left unchanged.

Ask for a second opinion

If you're thinking that this seems like a lot to remember, you're right. But focusing on one or two areas at a time will help you steadily improve your writing skills.

Image source: condesign/Pixabay.com

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5 Tips for Improving Your Essay Writing Skills

• 5-minute read
• 5th November 2021

As a student , essay writing is an integral part of your education. So, how can you improve your essay writing skills? We’ve got five top tips that may help:

• Analyse the essay question so you understand the assignment.
• Write an outline to organize your ideas and prepare your essay.
• Do research to find evidence and sources to support your ideas.
• Use the drafting process to refine your essay before submitting it.
• Get your essay proofread to make sure it is clear and error free.

Read on to learn more about how to improve your essay writing skills.

1. Analyze the Essay Question

The most important step in writing an essay is understanding the assignment. As soon as you have your essay question, then, try to identify the following key words:

• Content words – Content words will tell you what the topic of your essay should be. For instance, in “Discuss the causes of World War II,” the key content words are “causes” and “World War II.”
• Instructional verbs – Instructional verbs will give you a sense of how to approach your essay. There is a big difference, for example, between explaining an idea and analyzing it. Look for what you’re being asked to do in the question, then let this guide your essay writing.
• Limiting words – Limiting words will tell you what to focus on. For example, “In discuss the consequences of the Brexit for trade in the EU,” the phrase “for trade in the EU” limits the scope of the essay question (i.e., while Brexit may have many consequences, the focus here should be trade in the EU).

Try underlining or highlighting these types of words in your essay question.

2. Create an Outline

Another great essay writing skill is to outline your work before you start writing. Most essays will follow a basic format, which you can use to structure an outline:

• An introductory section or paragraph that presents the topic, your thesis statement , and any important background information the reader will need.
• The body paragraphs (or sections), each of which should discuss a single point, example, or idea that supports your main argument.
• A conclusion , where you summarize how your argument supports your thesis.

When planning an essay, then, you can break it down in the way shown above and make notes about what each part will say. Once you are happy with your outline, you can then use this to guide the essay writing process.

3. Use Evidence and Sources Effectively

Having a point you want to argue for or a claim you want to make is fine, but a good essay will also use evidence and sources to support the points it makes.

Once you have worked out a position to argue for, then, do some research to find evidence that supports it. This can include quotations, statistics, and illustrations.

As well as including this evidence in your essay, though, you’ll need to analyze it and show how it support your arguments. Whatever you use, make sure there’s a clear connection between the evidence and the point you’re trying to make.

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In addition, remember to cite your sources properly! You need to show where you’ve found your evidence. This will usually include citing sources in the text of your essay and adding a reference list or bibliography at the end of your document, where you should provide full details of the sources you cited. If you’re not sure how to approach referencing sources, check your style guide or ask your professor.

4. Use the Drafting Process

The biggest mistake people make when writing an essay is to only write it once! Rather, you should always redraft at least once to polish your initial version.

Once you’ve written a draft, then, take a break from it (ideally at least overnight). Then, when you’re ready, go back over your essay and look for ways to improve it. This might be simply checking that you express yourself clearly. But you might also spot ways to strengthen your arguments, such as by adding more evidence.

If you do this at least once, your essay will be far stronger. And there’s always room for further redrafting if you want to be certain your writing is perfect.

5. Have Your Essays Proofread

Okay, strictly speaking this doesn’t quite fall under the category of “essay writing skills” in the same way as the other points here. But one of the smartest things you can do before submitting an essay is have it proofread by an expert.

At Proofed, for example, our academic proofreaders can check your writing to make sure it reads clearly and smoothly, correcting any spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors that slipped through the drafting process. We can even provide feedback on how to improve your academic writing.

If you need help polishing an essay, then, submit it for proofreading today.

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• How to Improve Your Essay Writing Quickly: A Step-by-Step Guide

About the Author Stephanie Allen read Classics and English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and is currently researching a PhD in Early Modern Academic Drama at the University of Fribourg.

Whatever your brand of brilliance – whether you’re a physics genius, a sporting hero or (like me) a blinky, bookish type – there comes a point in most students’ academic careers when being good at life means being good at essays.

You should also read…

• Focus and Precision: How to Write Essays That Answer the Question
• How to Conquer Your Nightmare Subjects

As the subjects you study get more advanced and complex, you’re increasingly asked to think, evaluate, and have opinions where you once might have simply made calculations or learned definitions. In general, the further you progress through your education, the more rote learning will be replaced by the kind of analysis usually best demonstrated by essays. If by some miraculous feat you manage to avoid writing anything substantial at high school, it’s something you’ll almost certainly have to face at university – yes, even if you’re studying a science subject (although the essays won’t usually be quite as long). One way or another, essay writing comes to us all.

The likelihood is that at some point in the not-too-distant future (unless you are both incredibly reluctant and startlingly resourceful) you will have to write an essay, either in exam conditions or in your own time, that will count towards a final grade in some way. If this is a scary prospect for you, there’s good news and bad news. The bad thing about essay writing is that it’s not something – like French verbs, or the ability to run long distances – that miraculously gets better on its own if you just keep having a go. To improve at essay writing, students often need a paradigm shift: to figure out exactly what isn’t working, and why, and to learn and apply a new way of doing things. The good news, on the other hand, is that the individual skills required to write a strong essay are things you can learn, practise and improve in. This article is all about pinpointing what those skills might be, and giving you some suggestions as to how you might develop them. Not all these tips will work for all of you, but being good at essay writing, like being good at any other school-related discipline, is all about trying different things, and devising your own way of doing things.

Getting organised

Before you even start planning an essay, I’d recommend you sit down and have a quick think about how you want to do it. First, what resources will you need? The internet, or library books? This might affect where and how you decide to work: I have wasted a huge amount of time trying to find versions of articles on the internet that I knew were in books at the library, or procrastinating because I wanted to work at home rather than leaving the house. I would recommend taking yourself to a library ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Secondly, if you’re working from books or downloadable articles, can you afford to work somewhere without the internet? The absence of Facebook and Instagram will guarantee your concentration will be about a hundred times better, which will show in the quality of your work. Next, make a little timeline for your essay. Make a list of everything you want to read and try to get hold of all your material before you start. Think about how long you’re going to spend reading and researching, planning, and writing – leaving a day or two before the deadline to make any significant changes, or just in case things don’t go to plan. I’d recommend allotting 3 hours to read a 20-page article, and about a day to write 2000 words. This might sound like a silly amount of planning, but the point of it is this: hundreds of all-nighters have taught me that essay-writing becomes incredibly stressful and painful when you’re up against the clock, and a reader can tell immediately if something is rushed or dashed off at 2am on the day of the deadline. What’s more, you simply won’t have your best creative ideas under pressure. If you’ve got time, have a look at this – comically eighties and slightly cringey – video about creativity . A lot of what the speaker says about thinking and playfulness is, in my opinion, directly applicable to essay-writing.

Gathering information

Some teachers set reading lists for essays, or make suggestions about where students should look for information; others ask you to find sources yourself. Even if your teacher does prescribe reading, it’s always worth seeing whether you can find something extra that will add breadth, depth or a fresh perspective to your argument. However, it’s important to think carefully about whether a source is reliable and valuable.

What sort of sources should I use?

The most appropriate sources will vary from subject to subject. Here are some common ones: – Academic articles: These are essays by scholars at universities, and usually published in journals or as books. They are always useful, and can be found by looking in the library (ask your teacher for recommendations!), having a poke around Google Scholar, or, if your school has a subscription, on the website JSTOR.org. Search for key words and phrases and see what comes up. – Newspaper articles: might be useful evidence for an essay in History, but may not be detailed or scholarly enough for Biology. If you use a newspaper article or opinion piece, think about the factors that might bias it and include your thinking in your essay! – Wikipedia: a very useful starting-point, and an increasingly reliable resource. However, avoid referencing it: a teacher or examiner might not like it and may take against your essay. Instead, look at the reference section at the bottom of the article and see where the writer has gathered their information from. – Online blogs: in general, stay away from these, as you don’t know who’s written them and how valuable their opinion is, or how reliable their facts. The exceptions are blogs by well-known experts.

How should I take notes?

It might feel like the world’s greatest faff, but taking good notes from your sources will save you a huge amount of time when you come to plan and write your essay: – Type out notes as you read, rather than simply underlining or highlighting – thus you’ll have a summary of the most important chunks of essays ready to use when you plan, rather than having to trawl through whole documents again looking for quotations. – For this reason, if you think you might want to quote something, copy it out in the exact wording of the writer. – Type notes in a different colour for each new source you read. In order to engage intelligently with what you’ve read, you’ve got to remember who said what, what they meant by it, who they were fighting against and whether you agreed with them or not. Colours are a really helpful visual aid to doing this. – At the end of each new essay or article, write a few lines summarising the author’s main points, and whether or not you agree with them. N.B. Your critical engagement with the scholars and authors whose work you’ve read will count for a huge chunk of marks. This does not mean listing a load of names and rehearsing their arguments; nor does it mean disagreeing with everyone for the sake of it. Instead, think about whether or not what they’re arguing holds true in your experience – or compare them to each other.

Planning is the single most important step in writing a good essay, and, frustratingly, also the step that’s most often rushed or neglected by students. If your essays often get criticised for having poor structure or unclear lines of argument, chances are you need to practise your planning. I use the following step-by-step process to turn my notes into a good plan; you can try it too, and see if it works for you. 1) Re-read your notes a couple of times, and underline anything you think is particularly important, interesting, or relevant to the area of the topic you want to discuss. As far as possible, try and organise your thoughts into sections, and see if you can link ideas together. Tip: It might be that you’ve got two or three different ideas for a topic, and you’re not sure which to go with: in this case, you can use a couple of different spider diagrams to see which works best. Where do the ideas link together most easily, or fall together into neat sections? Which question would you be able to answer most fully? 2) Sit back and look at your diagram(s), perhaps alongside your notes, and work out the main ‘point’ or conclusion you want to make in your essay. The best essays are characterised by a clear line of argument throughout – I don’t really buy the idea that essays should present both sides of a question. I always decide what I’m trying to say ; the point I want to conclude with, before I start. Now, the job you’ve got in writing the essay is to set this conclusion up. 3) Work backwards, using the links you’ve made on your spider diagram: what do you need to argue or show to make your point? Jot these ‘points’ down in a couple of words each. This forms the beginnings of a skeleton for your essay. 4) Start to fill out your skeleton with information from your notes, and any extra ideas you might have. If you’re writing a literature essay, it’s CRUCIAL that you include some close analysis of passages to support your argument. Jot down the sentences that link these in to the greater structure. 5) Fill out your skeleton more and more, until it’s essentially a rough draft in bullet points. Every twist or nuance of your argument should be in there; every introductory and concluding sentence for every paragraph, making it explicit how this paragraph answers your question.

6) At this point, it’s very helpful if you can get someone (a friend or a parent will do) to read over your plan and see if it makes sense. Does everything follow? Is it all relevant? Your plan should be so complete that the person who reads it will immediately be able to spot any flaws. Move things around, add or delete to incorporate their criticism: it’s much easier to change something in bullet-point format than when it’s all written out properly. Don’t expect this process to be quick or easy. For a 1500-word essay, I usually write a plan of about three sides, and spend at least three hours making sure that before I put pen to paper, every kink in my argument is ironed out. The pay-off of doing it this way is that the writing process is short and easy – a case of joining up the dots, polishing bullet-points into sentences – much better than coming up with ideas and organising thoughts at the same time as finding the words to express them. Get better and better: If you struggle with structure or clarity, practise your planning! Give yourself a limited amount of time (say, two hours), pick three previous essay questions from an exam or coursework paper, and plan your answers as thoroughly as possible. Get your teacher to look over your plans when you’re done.

The ‘actual writing’-bit can be the most daunting and stressful part of the essay process, and is where most students get stuck. Here are some tried-and-tested solutions to common writing problems:

I can’t get started

It’s quite common to want your first sentence to be arresting, paradigm-shifting, to propel your reader headlong into your essay. However, this desire can be paralysing: one of the most stressful feelings in the world is that of staring at a blank page, thinking about the number of words you’ll need to fill it all up. The key to getting started is to just write something . Don’t worry about how good it is – get it down, and move on, and come back and change it when you’re well into your flow.

Writers’ block

Go back to your plan and make sure you know what you’re arguing. If you still can’t get the words out, try and write down what you want to say as simply as possible. Then move on to an easier section of the essay. Alternatively, you can try going for a walk, making a cup of tea or having a break.

It all feels a bit wrong…

Sometimes, in the process of writing, you’ll realise that you entirely disagree with two-days-ago you, and you don’t really believe in the argument you’re trying to make. If it is the case, go back to the drawing board. Don’t plough on regardless – a lack of conviction will show in your essay. Return to your plan, and see if you can use similar material but change the emphasis, and perhaps the odd bit of evidence, to produce a different argument.

Everyone has their own individual writing style: your might be as purple and flowery, or scientific and direct as you like (within reason). However you write, to get top marks, it’s crucial that you learn to be precise .

Style-wise, there are two poles of wrongness: vagueness, and over-complication. Of course, every subject has its particular vocabulary, and learning this will be crucial, and sharpen your analysis; but remember that little words are your friends too! Make sure that you know the exact meaning of each word you use. Crucially, make sure you know exactly what each word you’re using means, and think carefully about whether you’re applying it in the right context – remember that whoever is reading your essay will know better than you the meanings of zeugma, stagflation or symbiosis. Finally, don’t hide behind subject-specific vocabulary: make sure that you’re using terms to contribute to and develop your essay, and nothing of the flow is lost.

The boring stuff

– Get good at conventions like footnoting, and writing bibliographies. Examiners really do check these! – When you’ve finished, leave the essay for a day or two, and then re-read it. If possible, get someone to proofread for you. This way, you’ll avoid making lots of silly mistakes that threaten the clarity and flow of your essay.

Image credits: banner ; runner ; old library ; new library ; pens ; map ; parent ; tapping pencil ; egg . 

Essay and dissertation writing skills

Planning your essay

Writing your introduction

Structuring your essay

• Writing essays in science subjects
• Brief video guides to support essay planning and writing
• Writing extended essays and dissertations
• Planning your dissertation writing time

Structuring your dissertation

• Top tips for writing longer pieces of work

Advice on planning and writing essays and dissertations

University essays differ from school essays in that they are less concerned with what you know and more concerned with how you construct an argument to answer the question. This means that the starting point for writing a strong essay is to first unpick the question and to then use this to plan your essay before you start putting pen to paper (or finger to keyboard).

A really good starting point for you are these short, downloadable Tips for Successful Essay Writing and Answering the Question resources. Both resources will help you to plan your essay, as well as giving you guidance on how to distinguish between different sorts of essay questions. 

You may find it helpful to watch this seven-minute video on six tips for essay writing which outlines how to interpret essay questions, as well as giving advice on planning and structuring your writing:

Different disciplines will have different expectations for essay structure and you should always refer to your Faculty or Department student handbook or course Canvas site for more specific guidance.

However, broadly speaking, all essays share the following features:

Essays need an introduction to establish and focus the parameters of the discussion that will follow. You may find it helpful to divide the introduction into areas to demonstrate your breadth and engagement with the essay question. You might define specific terms in the introduction to show your engagement with the essay question; for example, ‘This is a large topic which has been variously discussed by many scientists and commentators. The principle tension is between the views of X and Y who define the main issues as…’ Breadth might be demonstrated by showing the range of viewpoints from which the essay question could be considered; for example, ‘A variety of factors including economic, social and political, influence A and B. This essay will focus on the social and economic aspects, with particular emphasis on…..’

Watch this two-minute video to learn more about how to plan and structure an introduction:

The main body of the essay should elaborate on the issues raised in the introduction and develop an argument(s) that answers the question. It should consist of a number of self-contained paragraphs each of which makes a specific point and provides some form of evidence to support the argument being made. Remember that a clear argument requires that each paragraph explicitly relates back to the essay question or the developing argument.

• Conclusion: An essay should end with a conclusion that reiterates the argument in light of the evidence you have provided; you shouldn’t use the conclusion to introduce new information.
• References: You need to include references to the materials you’ve used to write your essay. These might be in the form of footnotes, in-text citations, or a bibliography at the end. Different systems exist for citing references and different disciplines will use various approaches to citation. Ask your tutor which method(s) you should be using for your essay and also consult your Department or Faculty webpages for specific guidance in your discipline. 

Essay writing in science subjects

If you are writing an essay for a science subject you may need to consider additional areas, such as how to present data or diagrams. This five-minute video gives you some advice on how to approach your reading list, planning which information to include in your answer and how to write for your scientific audience – the video is available here:

A PDF providing further guidance on writing science essays for tutorials is available to download.

Short videos to support your essay writing skills

There are many other resources at Oxford that can help support your essay writing skills and if you are short on time, the Oxford Study Skills Centre has produced a number of short (2-minute) videos covering different aspects of essay writing, including:

• Approaching different types of essay questions  
• Structuring your essay  
• Writing an introduction  
• Making use of evidence in your essay writing  
• Writing your conclusion

Extended essays and dissertations

Longer pieces of writing like extended essays and dissertations may seem like quite a challenge from your regular essay writing. The important point is to start with a plan and to focus on what the question is asking. A PDF providing further guidance on planning Humanities and Social Science dissertations is available to download.

Planning your time effectively

Try not to leave the writing until close to your deadline, instead start as soon as you have some ideas to put down onto paper. Your early drafts may never end up in the final work, but the work of committing your ideas to paper helps to formulate not only your ideas, but the method of structuring your writing to read well and conclude firmly.

Although many students and tutors will say that the introduction is often written last, it is a good idea to begin to think about what will go into it early on. For example, the first draft of your introduction should set out your argument, the information you have, and your methods, and it should give a structure to the chapters and sections you will write. Your introduction will probably change as time goes on but it will stand as a guide to your entire extended essay or dissertation and it will help you to keep focused.

The structure of  extended essays or dissertations will vary depending on the question and discipline, but may include some or all of the following:

• The background information to - and context for - your research. This often takes the form of a literature review.
• Explanation of the focus of your work.
• Explanation of the value of this work to scholarship on the topic.
• List of the aims and objectives of the work and also the issues which will not be covered because they are outside its scope.

The main body of your extended essay or dissertation will probably include your methodology, the results of research, and your argument(s) based on your findings.

The conclusion is to summarise the value your research has added to the topic, and any further lines of research you would undertake given more time or resources. 

Tips on writing longer pieces of work

Approaching each chapter of a dissertation as a shorter essay can make the task of writing a dissertation seem less overwhelming. Each chapter will have an introduction, a main body where the argument is developed and substantiated with evidence, and a conclusion to tie things together. Unlike in a regular essay, chapter conclusions may also introduce the chapter that will follow, indicating how the chapters are connected to one another and how the argument will develop through your dissertation.

For further guidance, watch this two-minute video on writing longer pieces of work . 

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100 Writing Practice Lessons & Exercises

by Joe Bunting | 50 comments

Want to become a better writer? Perhaps you want to write novels, or maybe you just want to get better grades in your essay writing assignments , or maybe you'd like to start a popular blog .

If you want to write better, you need practice. But what does a writing practice actually look like? In this post, I'm going to give you everything you need to kick off your writing practice and become a better writer faster.

What Is Writing Practice?

Writing practice is a method of becoming a better writer that usually involves reading lessons about the writing process, using writing prompts, doing creative writing exercises , or finishing writing pieces, like essays, short stories , novels , or books . The best writing practice is deliberate, timed, and involves feedback.

How Do You Practice Writing?

This was the question I had when I first started The Write Practice in 2011. I knew how to practice a sport and how to practice playing an instrument. But for some reason, even after studying it in college, I wasn't sure how to practice writing.

I set out to create the best writing practice I could. The Write Practice is the result.

I found that the best writing practice has three aspects:

Deliberate . Writing whatever you feel like may be cathartic, but it's not an effective way to become a better writer or build your writing skills. You'll get better faster by practicing a specific technique or aspect of the writing process each time you sit down to write.

This is why we have a new lesson about the writing process each day on The Write Practice, followed by a practice prompt at the end so you can put what you learned to use immediately.

Timed . It's no secret writers struggle with focus. There are just too many interesting distractions—Facebook, email, Kim Kardashian's Instagram feed (just kidding about that last one, sort of)—and writing is just too hard sometimes.

Setting a timer, even for just fifteen minutes, is an easy and effective way to stay focused on what's important.

This is why in our writing practice prompt at the end of each post we have a time limit, usually with a link to an online tool egg timer , so you can focus on deliberate practice without getting distracted.

Feedback . Getting feedback is one of the requirements to deliberately practice writing or any other craft. Feedback can look like listening to the reactions of your readers or asking for constructive criticism from editors and other writers.

This is why we ask you to post your writing practice after each lesson, so that you can get feedback from other writers in The Write Practice community. It's also why we set up The Write Practice Pro community , to provide critique groups for writers to get feedback on each finished piece of writing.

Our 100+ Best Creative Writing Practice Exercises and Lessons

Now that you know how we practice writing at The Write Practice, here are our best writing practice lessons to jumpstart your writing skills with some daily writing exercises, for beginner writers to even the most expert writers:

All-Time, Top 10 Writing Lessons and Exercises

These ten posts are our most viewed articles to boost your writing practice:

1. What is Plot? The 6 Elements of Plot and How to Use Them . Great stories use similar elements in wildly different ways to build page-turning stories. Click here to read what they are and learn how to start using them !

2. Top 100 Short Story Ideas . Here are over a hundred writing prompts in a variety of genres. If you need ideas for your next story, check this out!

3. How To Use Neither, Nor, Or, and Nor Correctly . Even good writers struggle figuring out when to use neither/nor and either/or. In this post, our copy-queen Liz Bureman settles the confusion once and for all. Click to continue to the writing exercise

4. Ten Secrets To Write Better Stories . How does Pixar manage to create such great stories, year after year? And how do you write a good story? In this post, I distill everything I've learned about how to write a good story into ten tips. Click to continue to the writing exercise

5. 35 Questions To Ask Your Characters From Marcel Proust . To get to know my characters better, I use a list of questions known as the Proust Questionnaire, made famous by French author, Marcel Proust. Click to continue to the writing exercise

6. How a Scene List Can Change Your Novel-Writing Life . Creating a scene list changed my novel-writing life, and doing the same will change yours too. Includes examples of the scene lists from famous authors. Click to continue to the writing exercise

7. Why You Need to be Using the Oxford Comma . Most people I've met have no idea what the Oxford comma is, but it's probably something that you have used frequently in your writing. Click to continue to the writing exercise

8. Six Surprising Ways to Write Better Interview Questions.  The interview is the most-used tool in a journalist's bag. But that doesn't mean novelists, bloggers, and even students can't and don't interview people. Here's how to conduct a great interview. Click to continue to the writing exercise

9. Why You Should Try Writing in Second Person . You've probably used first person and third person point-of-view already. But what about second person? This post explains three reasons why you should try writing from this point-of-view. Click to continue to the writing exercise

10. The Secret to Show, Don't Tell . You've heard the classic writing rule, “Show. Don't Tell.” Every writing blog ever has talked about it, and for good reason. Showing, for some reason, is really difficult. Click to continue to the writing exercise.

12 Exercises and Lessons To Become a Better Writer

How do you become a better writer? These posts share our best advice:

• Want to Be a Better Writer? Cut These 7 Words
• What I Mean When I Say I Am A Writer
• How to Become a Writer: 3 Simple Steps
• 72% of Writers Struggle With THIS
• 7 Lies About Becoming a Writer That You Probably Believe
• 10 Questions to Find Your Unique Writing Voice
• The Best Writing Book I’ve Ever Read
• The Best Way to Become a Better Writer
• The Creative Writer’s Toolkit: 6 Tools You Can’t Write Without
• Should You Write More or Write Better: Quantity vs Quality
• How to Become a Better Writer in One, Simple Step
• 11 Writing Tips That Will Change Your Life

6 Lessons and Exercises from Great Writers

If you want to be a writer, learn from the great writers who have gone before you:

• 23 Essential Quotes from Ernest Hemingway About Writing
• 29 Quotes that Explain How to Become a Better Writer
• 10 Lessons Dr. Seuss Can Teach Writers
• 10 Writing Tips from Ursula Le Guin
• Once Upon a Time: Pixar Prompt
• All the Pretty Words: Writing In the Style of Cormac McCarthy

12 Genre and Format Specific Writing Lessons and Exercises

Here are our best writing lessons for specific types of writing, including essays, screenplays, memoir, short stories, children's books, and humor writing:

• Writing an Essay? Here Are 10 Effective Tips
• How To Write a Screenplay: The 5 Step Process
• How to Write a Great Memoir: a Complete Guide
• How to Write a Short Story from Start to Finish
• How to Write a Thriller Novel
• How to Write a Children's Book
• How to Write a Love Story
• How to Write a Coming of Age Story or Book
• How to Write an Adventure Book
• 5 Key Elements for Successful Short Stories
• 4 Tips to Write a Novel That Will Be Adapted Into a Movie
• Humor Writing for People Who Aren’t Funny

14 Characterization Lessons and Exercises

Good characters are the foundation of good fiction. Here are our best lessons to create better characters:

• Character Development: How to Create Characters Audiences Will Love
• Writing Villains: 9 Evil Examples of the Villain Archetype
• How NOT to Introduce a New Character
• The Strongest Form of Characterization
• The Most Important Character Archetype
• How Do You Build A Strong Character In Your Writing?
• 75+ Antihero Examples and How to Use Them
• How to Explore Your Characters’ Motivations
• 8 Tips for Naming Characters
• The Protagonist: How to Center Your Story
• Heroes vs. Anti-Heroes: Which Is Right For Your Story?
• The Weakest Form of Characterization
• How to Write With an Accent
• How To Create a Character Sketch Using Scrivener

15 Grammar Lessons and Exercises

I talk to so many writers, some of whom are published authors, who struggle with grammar. Here are our best writing lessons on grammar:

• Is It Okay To End A Sentence With A Preposition?
• Contractions List: When To Use and When To Avoid
• Good vs. Well
• Connotation vs. Denotation
• Per Se vs. Per Say
• When You SHOULD Use Passive Voice
• When Do You Use “Quotation Marks”
• Polysyndeton and Asyndeton: Definition and Examples
• The Case Against Twilight
• Affect Versus Effect
• Stop Saying “Literally”
• What Is a Comma Splice? And Why Do Editors Hate Them?
• Intra vs. Inter: Why No One Plays Intermural Sports
• Alright and Alot: Words That Are Not Words
• The Poor, Misunderstood Semicolon

4 Journalism Lessons and Exercises

Want to be a journalist? Or even use techniques from journalism to improve your novel, essay, or screenplay? Here are our best writing lessons on journalism:

• Six Ways to Ask Better Questions In Interviews
• How Should You Interview Someone? Over Email? In Person?
• What If They Don’t Want to Talk to You?
• Eleven Habits of a Highly Effective Interviewers

16 Plot and Structure Lessons and Exercises

Want to write a good story? Our top plot and structure lessons will help:

• The Ten Types of Story and How to Master Them
• Points of a Story: 6 Plot Points Every Story Needs
• How to Shape a Story: The 6 Arcs
• 7 Keys To Write the Perfect First Line of a Novel
• The Secret to Creating Conflict
• 4 Tips to Avoid Having Your Short Story Rejected by a Literary Magazine
• 7 Steps to Creating Suspense
• 5 Elements of Storytelling
• 3 Important Rules for Writing Endings
• A Writer’s Cheatsheet to Plot and Structure
• Overcoming the Monster
• How to Satisfy Your Reader With a Great Ending
• Pow! Boom! Ka-Pow! 5 Tips to Write Fight Scenes
• The Dramatic Question and Suspense in Fiction
• How to Write a Memorable Beginning and Ending
• How to Write the Perfect First Page

6 Lessons and Exercises to Beat Writer's Block

Writer's block is real, and it can completely derail your writing. Here are six lessons to get writing again:

• How To Write Whether You Feel Like it Or Not
• This Fun Creative Writing Exercise Will Change Your Life
• When You Should Be Writing But Can't…
• What to do When Your Word Count is Too Low
• 7 Tricks to Write More with Less Willpower
• When You Don’t Know What to Write, Write About Your Insecurities

7 Literary Technique Lessons and Exercises

These writing and storytelling techniques will teach you a few tricks of the trade you may not have discovered before:

• 3 Tips to “Show, Don’t Tell” Emotions and Moods
• 3 Reasons to Write Stream of Consciousness Narrative
• 16 Observations About Real Dialogue
• Intertextuality As A Literary Device
• Why You Should Use Symbolism In Your Writing
• 6 Ways to Evoke Emotion in Poetry and Prose
• 3 Tips To Write Modern Allegorical Novels
• Symbol vs. Motif: What’s the Difference

3 Inspirational Writing Lessons and Exercises

Need some inspiration? Here are three of our most inspiring posts:

• Why We Write: Four Reasons
• You Must Remember Every Scar
• 17 Reasons to Write Something NOW

3 Publishing Blogging Lessons and Exercises

If you want to get published, these three lessons will help:

• The Secret to Writing On Your Blog Every Day
• How to Publish Your Book and Sell Your First 1,000 Copies
• How to Get Published in Literary Magazines

11 Writing Prompts

Need inspiration or just a kick in the pants to write. Try one of our top writing prompts :

• Grandfathers [writing prompt]
• Out of Place [writing prompt]
• Sleepless [writing prompt]
• Longing [writing prompt]
• Write About Yourself [writing prompt]
• 3 Reasons You Should Write Ghost Stories
• Road Trip [writing prompt]
• Morning [writing prompt]
• The Beach [writing prompt]
• Fall [writing prompt]
• How to Use Six-Word Stories As Writing Prompts

Is It Time To Begin Your Writing Practice?

It's clear that if you want to become a writer, you need to practice writing. We've created a proven process to practice your writing at The Write Practice, but even if you don't join our community, I hope you'll start practicing in some way today.

Personally, I waited  far  too long to start practicing and it set my writing back years.

How about you? Do you think practicing writing is important?  Let me know in the comments section .

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The Writing Process | 5 Steps with Examples & Tips

Published on April 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on December 8, 2023.

Good academic writing requires effective planning, drafting, and revision.

The writing process looks different for everyone, but there are five basic steps that will help you structure your time when writing any kind of text.

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Table of contents

Step 1: prewriting, step 2: planning and outlining, step 3: writing a first draft, step 4: redrafting and revising, step 5: editing and proofreading, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about the writing process.

Before you start writing, you need to decide exactly what you’ll write about and do the necessary research.

Coming up with a topic

If you have to come up with your own topic for an assignment, think of what you’ve covered in class— is there a particular area that intrigued, interested, or even confused you? Topics that left you with additional questions are perfect, as these are questions you can explore in your writing.

The scope depends on what type of text you’re writing—for example, an essay or a research paper will be less in-depth than a dissertation topic . Don’t pick anything too ambitious to cover within the word count, or too limited for you to find much to say.

Narrow down your idea to a specific argument or question. For example, an appropriate topic for an essay might be narrowed down like this:

Doing the research

Once you know your topic, it’s time to search for relevant sources and gather the information you need. This process varies according to your field of study and the scope of the assignment. It might involve:

• Searching for primary and secondary sources .
• Reading the relevant texts closely (e.g. for literary analysis ).
• Collecting data using relevant research methods (e.g. experiments , interviews or surveys )

From a writing perspective, the important thing is to take plenty of notes while you do the research. Keep track of the titles, authors, publication dates, and relevant quotations from your sources; the data you gathered; and your initial analysis or interpretation of the questions you’re addressing.

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Especially in academic writing , it’s important to use a logical structure to convey information effectively. It’s far better to plan this out in advance than to try to work out your structure once you’ve already begun writing.

Creating an essay outline is a useful way to plan out your structure before you start writing. This should help you work out the main ideas you want to focus on and how you’ll organize them. The outline doesn’t have to be final—it’s okay if your structure changes throughout the writing process.

Use bullet points or numbering to make your structure clear at a glance. Even for a short text that won’t use headings, it’s useful to summarize what you’ll discuss in each paragraph.

An outline for a literary analysis essay might look something like this:

• Describe the theatricality of Austen’s works
• Outline the role theater plays in Mansfield Park
• Introduce the research question: How does Austen use theater to express the characters’ morality in Mansfield Park ?
• Discuss Austen’s depiction of the performance at the end of the first volume
• Discuss how Sir Bertram reacts to the acting scheme
• Introduce Austen’s use of stage direction–like details during dialogue
• Explore how these are deployed to show the characters’ self-absorption
• Discuss Austen’s description of Maria and Julia’s relationship as polite but affectionless
• Compare Mrs. Norris’s self-conceit as charitable despite her idleness
• Summarize the three themes: The acting scheme, stage directions, and the performance of morals
• Answer the research question
• Indicate areas for further study

Once you have a clear idea of your structure, it’s time to produce a full first draft.

This process can be quite non-linear. For example, it’s reasonable to begin writing with the main body of the text, saving the introduction for later once you have a clearer idea of the text you’re introducing.

To give structure to your writing, use your outline as a framework. Make sure that each paragraph has a clear central focus that relates to your overall argument.

Hover over the parts of the example, from a literary analysis essay on Mansfield Park , to see how a paragraph is constructed.

The character of Mrs. Norris provides another example of the performance of morals in Mansfield Park . Early in the novel, she is described in scathing terms as one who knows “how to dictate liberality to others: but her love of money was equal to her love of directing” (p. 7). This hypocrisy does not interfere with her self-conceit as “the most liberal-minded sister and aunt in the world” (p. 7). Mrs. Norris is strongly concerned with appearing charitable, but unwilling to make any personal sacrifices to accomplish this. Instead, she stage-manages the charitable actions of others, never acknowledging that her schemes do not put her own time or money on the line. In this way, Austen again shows us a character whose morally upright behavior is fundamentally a performance—for whom the goal of doing good is less important than the goal of seeming good.

When you move onto a different topic, start a new paragraph. Use appropriate transition words and phrases to show the connections between your ideas.

The goal at this stage is to get a draft completed, not to make everything perfect as you go along. Once you have a full draft in front of you, you’ll have a clearer idea of where improvement is needed.

Give yourself a first draft deadline that leaves you a reasonable length of time to revise, edit, and proofread before the final deadline. For a longer text like a dissertation, you and your supervisor might agree on deadlines for individual chapters.

Now it’s time to look critically at your first draft and find potential areas for improvement. Redrafting means substantially adding or removing content, while revising involves making changes to structure and reformulating arguments.

Evaluating the first draft

It can be difficult to look objectively at your own writing. Your perspective might be positively or negatively biased—especially if you try to assess your work shortly after finishing it.

It’s best to leave your work alone for at least a day or two after completing the first draft. Come back after a break to evaluate it with fresh eyes; you’ll spot things you wouldn’t have otherwise.

When evaluating your writing at this stage, you’re mainly looking for larger issues such as changes to your arguments or structure. Starting with bigger concerns saves you time—there’s no point perfecting the grammar of something you end up cutting out anyway.

Right now, you’re looking for:

• Arguments that are unclear or illogical.
• Areas where information would be better presented in a different order.
• Passages where additional information or explanation is needed.
• Passages that are irrelevant to your overall argument.

For example, in our paper on Mansfield Park , we might realize the argument would be stronger with more direct consideration of the protagonist Fanny Price, and decide to try to find space for this in paragraph IV.

For some assignments, you’ll receive feedback on your first draft from a supervisor or peer. Be sure to pay close attention to what they tell you, as their advice will usually give you a clearer sense of which aspects of your text need improvement.

Redrafting and revising

Once you’ve decided where changes are needed, make the big changes first, as these are likely to have knock-on effects on the rest. Depending on what your text needs, this step might involve:

• Making changes to your overall argument.
• Reordering the text.
• Cutting parts of the text.
• Adding new text.

You can go back and forth between writing, redrafting and revising several times until you have a final draft that you’re happy with.

Think about what changes you can realistically accomplish in the time you have. If you are running low on time, you don’t want to leave your text in a messy state halfway through redrafting, so make sure to prioritize the most important changes.

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Editing focuses on local concerns like clarity and sentence structure. Proofreading involves reading the text closely to remove typos and ensure stylistic consistency. You can check all your drafts and texts in minutes with an AI proofreader .

Editing for grammar and clarity

When editing, you want to ensure your text is clear, concise, and grammatically correct. You’re looking out for:

• Grammatical errors.
• Ambiguous phrasings.
• Redundancy and repetition .

In your initial draft, it’s common to end up with a lot of sentences that are poorly formulated. Look critically at where your meaning could be conveyed in a more effective way or in fewer words, and watch out for common sentence structure mistakes like run-on sentences and sentence fragments:

• Austen’s style is frequently humorous, her characters are often described as “witty.” Although this is less true of Mansfield Park .
• Austen’s style is frequently humorous. Her characters are often described as “witty,” although this is less true of Mansfield Park .

To make your sentences run smoothly, you can always use a paraphrasing tool to rewrite them in a clearer way.

Proofreading for small mistakes and typos

When proofreading, first look out for typos in your text:

• Spelling errors.
• Missing words.
• Confused word choices .
• Punctuation errors .
• Missing or excess spaces.

Use a grammar checker , but be sure to do another manual check after. Read through your text line by line, watching out for problem areas highlighted by the software but also for any other issues it might have missed.

For example, in the following phrase we notice several errors:

• Mary Crawfords character is a complicate one and her relationships with Fanny and Edmund undergoes several transformations through out the novel.
• Mary Crawford’s character is a complicated one, and her relationships with both Fanny and Edmund undergo several transformations throughout the novel.

Proofreading for stylistic consistency

There are several issues in academic writing where you can choose between multiple different standards. For example:

• Whether you use the serial comma .
• Whether you use American or British spellings and punctuation (you can use a punctuation checker for this).
• Where you use numerals vs. words for numbers.
• How you capitalize your titles and headings.

Unless you’re given specific guidance on these issues, it’s your choice which standards you follow. The important thing is to consistently follow one standard for each issue. For example, don’t use a mixture of American and British spellings in your paper.

Additionally, you will probably be provided with specific guidelines for issues related to format (how your text is presented on the page) and citations (how you acknowledge your sources). Always follow these instructions carefully.

If you want to know more about AI for academic writing, AI tools, or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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Revising, proofreading, and editing are different stages of the writing process .

• Revising is making structural and logical changes to your text—reformulating arguments and reordering information.
• Editing refers to making more local changes to things like sentence structure and phrasing to make sure your meaning is conveyed clearly and concisely.
• Proofreading involves looking at the text closely, line by line, to spot any typos and issues with consistency and correct them.

Whether you’re publishing a blog, submitting a research paper , or even just writing an important email, there are a few techniques you can use to make sure it’s error-free:

• Take a break : Set your work aside for at least a few hours so that you can look at it with fresh eyes.
• Proofread a printout : Staring at a screen for too long can cause fatigue – sit down with a pen and paper to check the final version.
• Use digital shortcuts : Take note of any recurring mistakes (for example, misspelling a particular word, switching between US and UK English , or inconsistently capitalizing a term), and use Find and Replace to fix it throughout the document.

If you want to be confident that an important text is error-free, it might be worth choosing a professional proofreading service instead.

If you’ve gone over the word limit set for your assignment, shorten your sentences and cut repetition and redundancy during the editing process. If you use a lot of long quotes , consider shortening them to just the essentials.

If you need to remove a lot of words, you may have to cut certain passages. Remember that everything in the text should be there to support your argument; look for any information that’s not essential to your point and remove it.

To make this process easier and faster, you can use a paraphrasing tool . With this tool, you can rewrite your text to make it simpler and shorter. If that’s not enough, you can copy-paste your paraphrased text into the summarizer . This tool will distill your text to its core message.

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Caulfield, J. (2023, December 08). The Writing Process | 5 Steps with Examples & Tips. Scribbr. Retrieved April 1, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-writing/writing-process/

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Writing My Autobiography

A re you still writing?” he asked.

“I am,” I answered.

“What are you working on at the moment?”

“An autobiography,” I said.

“Interesting,” he replied. “Whose?”

The implication here, you will note, is that mine hasn’t been a life sufficiently interesting to merit an autobiography. The implication isn’t altogether foolish. Most autobiographies, at least the best autobiographies, have been written by people who have historical standing, or have known many important people, or have lived in significant times, or have noteworthy family connections or serious lessons to convey . I qualify on none of these grounds. Not that, roughly two years ago when I sat down to write my autobiography, I let that stop me.

An autobiography, to state the obvious, is at base a biography written by its own subject. But how is one to write it: as a matter of setting the record straight, as a form of confessional, as a mode of seeking justice, or as a justification of one’s life? “An autobiography,” wrote George Orwell, “is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” Is this true? I prefer to think not.

Autobiography is a complex enterprise, calling for its author not only to know himself but to be honest in conveying that knowledge. “I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Let him relate the events of his own life with Honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.” One of the nicest things about being a professor, it has been said, is that one gets to talk for fifty minutes without being interrupted. So one of the allurements of autobiography is that one gets to write hundreds of pages about that eminently fascinating character, oneself, even if in doing so one only establishes one’s insignificance.

The great autobiographies—of which there have not been all that many—have been wildly various. One of the first, that of the Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, is marked by an almost unrelieved braggadocio: No artist was more perfect, no warrior more brave, no lover more pleasing than the author, or so he would have us believe. Edward Gibbon’s autobiography, though elegantly written, is disappointing in its brevity. That of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, heavily striking the confessional note, might have been told in a booth to a priest. Ben Franklin’s autobiography is full of advice on how the rest of us should live. John Stuart Mill’s is astounding in its account of its author’s prodigiously early education, which began with his learning Greek under his father’s instruction at the age of three. Then there is Henry Adams’s autobiography, suffused with disappointment over his feeling out of joint with his times and the world’s not recognizing his true value. In Making It , Norman Podhoretz wrote an autobiography informed by a single message, which he termed a “dirty little secret,” namely that there is nothing wrong with ambition and that success, despite what leftist intellectuals might claim, is nothing to be ashamed of.

Please note that all of these are books written by men. Might it be that women lack the vanity required to write—or should I say “indulge in”—the literary act of autobiography? In Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome , I recently read that Agrippina the Younger, the mother of Nero, wrote her autobiography, which has not survived, and which Mary Beard counts as “one of the great losses of all classical literature.” I wish that Jane Austen had written an autobiography, and so too George Eliot and Willa Cather. Perhaps these three women, great writers all, were too sensibly modest for autobiography, that least modest of all literary forms.

A utobiography can be the making or breaking of writers who attempt it. John Stuart Mill’s autobiography has gone a long way toward humanizing a writer whose other writings tend toward the coldly formal. Harold Laski wrote that Mill’s “ Autobiography , in the end the most imperishable of his writings, is a record as noble as any in our literature of consistent devotion to the public good.”

If Mill’s autobiography humanized him, the autobiography of the novelist Anthony Trollope did for him something approaching the reverse. In An Autobiography , Trollope disdains the notion of an author’s needing inspiration to write well. He reports that “there was no day on which it was my positive duty to write for the publishers, as it was my duty to write reports for the Post Office,” where he had a regular job. “I was free to be idle if I pleased. But as I had made up my mind to undertake this second profession [that of novelist], I found it to be expedient to bind myself by certain self-imposed laws.” Trollope recounts—emphasis here on “counts”—that as a novelist he averages forty pages per week, at 250 words per page. He writes: “There are those who would be ashamed to subject themselves to such a taskmaster, and who think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till inspiration moves him. When I have heard such doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn.” Trollope then mentions that on the day after he finished his novel Doctor Thorne , he began writing his next novel, The Bertrams . For a long spell the literati refused to forgive Trollope for shearing inspiration away from the creation of literary art, for comparing the job of the novelist to a job at the post office. Only the splendid quality of his many novels eventually won him forgiveness and proper recognition.

A serious biography takes up what the world thinks of its subject, what his friends and family think of him, and—if the information is available in letters, diaries, journals, or interviews—what he thinks of himself. An autobiography is ultimately about the last question: what the author thinks of himself. Yet how many of us have sufficient self-knowledge to give a convincing answer? In her splendid novel Memoirs of Hadrian , Marguerite Yourcenar has Hadrian note: “When I seek deep within me for knowledge of myself what I find is obscure, internal, unformulated, and as secret as any complicity.” The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the scrupulously examined one is rare indeed.

My own life has not provided the richest fodder for autobiography. For one thing, it has not featured much in the way of drama. For another, good fortune has allowed me the freedom to do with my life much as I have wished. I have given my autobiography the title Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life , with the subtitle Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life . Now well along in its closing chapter, mine, I contend, has been thus far—here I pause to touch wood—a most lucky life.

My title derives from the story of Croesus, who ruled the country of Lydia from circa 585–547 b.c. , and who is perhaps today best known for the phrase “rich as Croesus.” The vastly wealthy Croesus thought himself the luckiest man on earth and asked confirmation of this from Solon, the wise Athenian, who told him that in fact the luckiest man on earth was another Athenian who had two sons in that year’s Olympics. When Croesus asked who was second luckiest, Solon cited another Greek who had a most happy family life. Croesus was displeased but not convinced by Solon’s answers. Years later he was captured by the Persian Cyrus, divested of his kingdom and his wealth, and set on a pyre to be burned alive, before which he was heard to exclaim that Solon had been right. The moral of the story is, of course: Never say you have had a lucky life until you know how your life ends.

I have known serious sadness in my life. I have undergone a divorce. I have become a member of that most dolorous of clubs, parents who have buried one of their children. Yet I have had much to be grateful for. In the final paragraph of a book I wrote some years ago on the subject of ambition, I noted that “We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing.” In all these realms, I lucked out. I was born to intelligent, kindly parents; at a time that, though I was drafted into the army, allowed me to miss being called up to fight in any wars; and in the largely unmitigated prosperity enjoyed by the world’s most interesting country, the United States of America.

Writing is a form of discovery. Yet can even writing ferret out the quality and meaning of one’s own life? Alexis de Tocqueville, the endlessly quotable Tocqueville, wrote: “The fate of individuals is still more hidden than that of peoples,” and “the destinies of individuals are often as uncertain as those of nations.” Fate, destiny, those two great tricksters, who knows what they have in store for one, even in the final days of one’s life? I, for example, as late as the age of eighteen, had never heard the word “intellectual.” If you had asked me what a man of letters was, I would have said a guy who works at the post office. Yet I have been destined to function as an intellectual for the better part of my adult life, and have more than once been called a man of letters. Fate, destiny, go figure!

T he first question that arises in writing one’s autobiography is what to include and what to exclude. Take, for starters, sex. In his nearly seven-hundred-page autobiography, Journeys of the Mind , the historian of late antiquity Peter Brown waits until page 581 to mention, in the most glancing way, that he is married. Forty or so pages later, the name of a second wife is mentioned. Whether he had children with either of these wives, we never learn. But then, Brown’s is a purely intellectual autobiography, concerned all but exclusively with the development of the author’s mind and those who influenced that development.

My autobiography, though less than half the length of Brown’s, allowed no such luxury of reticence. Sex, especially when I was an adolescent, was a central subject, close to a preoccupation. After all, boys—as I frequently instructed my beautiful granddaughter Annabelle when she was growing up—are brutes. I came of age BP, or Before the Pill, and consummated sex, known in that day as “going all the way,” was not then a serious possibility. Too much was at risk—pregnancy, loss of reputation—for middle-class girls. My friends and I turned to prostitution.

Apart from occasionally picking up streetwalkers on some of Chicago’s darker streets, prostitution for the most part meant trips of sixty or so miles to the bordellos of Braidwood or Kankakee, Illinois. The sex, costing $3, was less than perfunctory. (“Don’t bother to take off your socks or that sweater,” one was instructed.) What was entailed was less sensual pleasure than a rite of passage, of becoming a man, of “losing your cherry,” a phrase I have only recently learned means forgoing one’s innocence. We usually went on these trips in groups of five or six in one or another of our fathers’ cars. Much joking on the way up and even more on the way back. Along Chicago’s Outer Drive, which we took home in those days, there was a Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer sign that read, “Have you had it lately?,” which always got a good laugh.

I like to think of myself as a shy pornographer, or, perhaps better, a sly pornographer. By this I mean that in my fiction and where necessary in my essays I do not shy away from the subject of sex, only from the need to describe it in any of its lurid details. So I have done in my autobiography. On the subject of sex in my first marriage (of two), for example, I say merely, “I did not want my money back.” But, then, all sex, if one comes to think about it, is essentially comic, except of course one’s own.

On the inclusion-exclusion question, the next subject I had to consider was money, or my personal finances. Financially I have nothing to brag about. In my autobiography I do, though, occasionally give the exact salaries—none of them spectacular—of the jobs I’ve held. With some hesitation (lest it seem boasting) I mention that a book I wrote on the subject of snobbery earned, with its paperback sale, roughly half-a-million dollars. I fail to mention those of my books that earned paltry royalties, or, as I came to think of them, peasantries. In my autobiography, I contented myself with noting my good fortune in being able to earn enough money doing pretty much what I wished to do and ending up having acquired enough money not to worry overmuch about financial matters. Like the man said, a lucky life.

If I deal glancingly in my autobiography with sex and personal finances, I tried to take a pass on politics. My own political development is of little interest. I started out in my political life a fairly standard liberal—which in those days meant despising Richard Nixon—and have ended up today contemptuous of both our political parties: Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, as the critic Dwight Macdonald referred to them. Forgive the self-congratulatory note, but in politics I prefer to think myself a member in good standing of that third American political party, never alas on the ballot, the anti-BS party.

Of course, sometimes one needs to have a politics, if only to fight off the politics of others. Ours is a time when politics seems to be swamping all else: art, education, journalism, culture generally. I have had the dubious distinction of having been “canceled,” for what were thought my political views, and I write about this experience in my autobiography. I was fired from the editorship of Phi Beta Kappa’s quarterly magazine, the American Scholar —a job I had held for more than twenty years—because of my ostensibly conservative, I suppose I ought to make that “right-wing,” politics. My chief cancellers were two academic feminists and an African-American historian-biographer, who sat on the senate, or governing board, of Phi Beta Kappa.

T he official version given out by Phi Beta Kappa for my cancellation—in those days still known as a firing—was that the magazine was losing subscribers and needed to seek younger readers. Neither assertion was true, but both currently appear in the Wikipedia entry under my name. The New York Times also printed this “official” but untrue version of my cancellation. In fact, I was canceled because I had failed to run anything in the magazine about academic feminism or race, both subjects that had already been done to death elsewhere and that I thought cliché-ridden and hence of little interest for a magazine I specifically tried to keep apolitical. During my twenty-two years at the American Scholar , the name of no current United States president was mentioned. If anything resembling a theme emerged during my editorship, it was the preservation of the tradition of the liberal arts, a subject on which I was able to acquire contributions from Jacques Barzun, Paul Kristeller, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Frederick Crews, and others.

That I was fired not for anything I had done but for things I had failed to do is an indication of how far we had come in the realm of political correctness. I take up this topic in my autobiography, one theme of which is the vast changes that have taken place in American culture over my lifetime. A notable example is an essay on homosexuality that I wrote and published in Harper’s in 1970, a mere fifty-three years ago. The essay made the points that we still did not know much about the origin of male homosexuality, that there was much hypocrisy concerning the subject, that homosexuals were living under considerable social pressure and prejudice, and that given a choice, most people would prefer that their children not be homosexual. This, as I say, was in 1970, before the gay liberation movement had got underway in earnest. The essay attracted a vast number of letters in opposition, and a man named Merle Miller, who claimed I was calling for genocide of homosexuals, wrote a book based on the essay. Gore Vidal, never known for his temperate reasoning, claimed my argument was ad Hitlerum . (Vidal, after contracting Epstein-Barr virus late in life, claimed that “Joseph Epstein gave it to me.”) I have never reprinted the essay in any of my collections because I felt that it would stir up too much strong feeling. For what it is worth, I also happen to be pleased by the greater tolerance accorded homosexuality in the half century since my essay was published.

The larger point is that today neither Harper’s nor any other mainstream magazine would dare to publish that essay. Yet a few years after the essay was published, I was offered a job teaching in the English Department of Northwestern University, and the year after that, I was appointed editor of the American Scholar. Today, of course, neither job would have been available to me.

Do these matters—my cancellation from the American Scholar , my unearned reputation as a homophobe—come under the heading of self-justification? Perhaps so. But then, what better, or at least more convenient, place to attempt to justify oneself than in one’s autobiography?

Many changes have taken place in my lifetime, some for the better, some for the worse, some whose value cannot yet be known. I note, for example, if not the death then the attenuation of the extended family (nephews, nieces, cousins) in American life. Whereas much of my parents’ social life revolved around an extensive cousinage, I today have grandnephews and grandnieces living on both coasts whom I have never met and probably never shall. I imagine some of them one day being notified of my death and responding, “Really? [Pause] What’s for dinner?”

I take up in my autobiography what Philip Rieff called, in his book of this title, the Triumph of the Therapeutic, a development that has altered child-rearing, artistic creation, and much else in our culture. Although the doctrines of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others are no longer taken as gospel, their secondary influence has conquered much of modern culture. My parents’ generation did not hold with therapeutic culture, which contends that the essentials of life are the achievement of self-esteem and individual happiness, replacing honor, courage, kindness, and generosity.

In my autobiography, I note that when my mother was depressed by her knowledge that she was dying of cancer, a friend suggested that there were support groups for people with terminal diseases, one of which might be helpful. I imagined telling my mother about such groups, and her response: “Let me see,” she is likely to have said. “You want me to go into a room with strangers, where I will listen to their problems and then I’ll tell them mine, and this will make me feel better.” Pause. “Is this the kind of idiot I’ve raised as a son?”

T hen there is digital culture, the verdict on which is not yet in. Digital culture has changed the way we read, think, make social connections, do business, and so much more. I write in my autobiography that in its consequences digital culture is up there with the printing press and the automobile. Its influence is still far from fully fathomed.

One of my challenges in writing my autobiography was to avoid seeming to brag about my quite modest accomplishments. In the Rhetoric , Aristotle writes: “Speaking at length about oneself, making false claims, taking the credit for what another has done, these are signs of boastfulness.” I tried not to lapse into boasting. Yet at one point I quote Jacques Barzun, in a letter to me, claiming that as a writer I am in the direct line of William Hazlitt, though in some ways better, for my task—that of finding the proper language to establish both intimacy and critical distance—is in the current day more difficult than in Hazlitt’s. At least I deliberately neglected to mention that, in response to my being fired from the American Scholar, Daniel Patrick Moynihan flew an American flag at half-mast over the Capitol, a flag he sent to me as a souvenir. Quoting others about my accomplishments, is this anything other than boasting by other means? I hope so, though even now I’m not altogether sure.

I have a certain pride in these modest accomplishments. Setting out in life, I never thought I should publish some thirty-odd books or have the good luck to continue writing well into my eighties. The question for me as an autobiographer was how to express that pride without preening. The most efficient way, of course, is never to write an autobiography.

Why, then, did I write mine? Although I have earlier characterized writing as a form of discovery, I did not, in writing my autobiography, expect to discover many radically new things about my character or the general lineaments of my life. Nor did I think that my life bore any lessons that were important to others. I had, and still have, little to confess; I have no hidden desire to be spanked by an NFL linebacker in a nun’s habit. A writer, a mere scribbler, I have led a largely spectatorial life, standing on the sidelines, glass of wine in hand, watching the circus pass before me.

Still, I wrote my autobiography, based in a loose way on Wordsworth’s notion that poetry arises from “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Writing it gave me an opportunity to review my life at the end of my life in a tranquil manner. I was able to note certain trends, parallels, and phenomena that have marked my life and set my destiny.

The first of these, as I remarked earlier, was the fortunate time in which I was born, namely the tail end of the Great Depression—to be specific, in 1937. Because of the Depression, people were having fewer children, and often having them later. (My mother was twenty-seven, my father thirty at my birth.) Born when it was, my generation, though subject to the draft—not, in my experience of it, a bad thing—danced between the wars: We were too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam. We were also children during World War II, the last war the country fully supported, which gave us a love of our country. Ours was a low-population generation, untroubled by the vagaries of college admissions or the trauma of rejection by the school of one’s choice. Colleges, in fact, wanted us.

Or consider parents, another fateful phenomenon over which one has no choice. To be born to thoughtless, or disagreeable, or depressed, or deeply neurotic parents cannot but substantially affect all one’s days. Having a father who is hugely successful in the world can be as dampening to the spirit as having a father who is a failure. And yet about all this one has no say. I have given the chapter on my parents the title “A Winning Ticket in the Parents Lottery,” for my own parents, though neither went to college, were thoughtful, honorable, and in no way psychologically crushing. They gave my younger brother and me the freedom to develop on our own; they never told me what schools to attend, what work to seek, whom or when to marry. I knew I was never at the center of my parents’ lives, yet I also knew I could count on them when I needed their support, which more than once I did, and they did not fail to come through. As I say, a winning ticket.

As one writes about one’s own life, certain themes are likely to emerge that hadn’t previously stood out so emphatically. In my case, one persistent motif is that of older boys, then older men, who have supported or aided me in various ways. A boy nearly two years older than I named Jack Libby saw to it that I wasn’t bullied or pushed around in a neighborhood where I was the youngest kid on the block. In high school, a boy to whom I have given the name Jeremy Klein taught me a thing or two about gambling and corruption generally. Later in life, men eight, nine, ten, even twenty or more years older than I promoted my career: Hilton Kramer in promoting my candidacy for the editorship of the American Scholar , Irving Howe in helping me get a teaching job (without an advanced degree) at Northwestern, John Gross in publishing me regularly on important subjects in the Times Literary Supplement , Edward Shils in ways too numerous to mention. Something there was about me, evidently, that was highly protégéable.

I  haven’t yet seen the index for my autobiography, but my guess is that it could have been name-ier. I failed, for example, to include my brief but pleasing friendship with Sol Linowitz. Sol was the chairman of Xerox, and later served the Johnson administration as ambassador to the Organization of American States. He also happened to be a reader of mine, and on my various trips to Washington I was often his guest at the F Street Club, a political lunch club where he reserved a private room in which we told each other jokes, chiefly Jewish jokes. I might also have added my six years as a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Arts, whose members included the actors Robert Stack and Celeste Holm, the Balanchine dancer Arthur Mitchell, Robert Joffrey, the soprano Renée Fleming, the novelist Toni Morrison, the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, the architect I. M. Pei, the painter Helen Frankenthaler, and other highly droppable names.

Confronting one’s regrets is another inescapable element in writing one’s autobiography. Ah, regrets: the red MG convertible one didn’t buy in one’s twenties, the elegant young Asian woman one should have asked to dinner, the year one failed to spend in Paris. The greater the number of one’s regrets, the grander their scope, the sadder, at its close, one’s life figures to be. I come out fairly well in the regrets ledger. I regret not having studied classics at university, and so today I cannot read ancient Greek. I regret not having been a better father to my sons. I regret not asking my mother more questions about her family and not telling my father what a good man I thought he was. As regrets go, these are not minor, yet neither have I found them to be crippling.

Then there is the matter of recognizing one’s quirks, or peculiar habits. A notable one of mine, acquired late in life, is to have become near to the reverse of a hypochondriac. I have not yet reached the stage of anosognosia, or the belief that one is well when one is ill—a stage, by the way, that Chekhov, himself a physician, seems to have attained. I take vitamins, get flu and Covid shots, and watch what I eat, but I try to steer clear of physicians. This tendency kicked in not long after my decades-long primary care physician retired. In his The Body: A Guide for Occupants , Bill Bryson defines good health as the health enjoyed by someone who hasn’t had a physical lately. The ancients made this point more directly, advising bene caca et declina medicos (translation on request) . For a variety of reasons, physicians of the current day are fond of sending patients for a multiplicity of tests: bone density tests, colonoscopies, biopsies, X-rays of all sorts, CT scans, MRIs, stopping only at SATs. I am not keen to discover ailments that don’t bother me. At the age of eighty-seven, I figure I am playing with house money, and I have no wish to upset the house by prodding my health in search of imperfections any more than is absolutely necessary.

The older one gets, unless one’s life is lived in pain or deepest regret, the more fortunate one feels. Not always, not everyone, I suppose. “The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum,” said George Bernard Shaw, who lived to age ninety-four. Though the world seems to be in a hell of a shape just now, I nonetheless prefer to delay my exit for as long as I can. I like it here, continue to find much that is interesting and amusing, and have no wish to depart the planet.

Still, with advancing years I have found my interests narrowing. Not least among my waning interests is that in travel. I like my domestic routine too much to abandon it for foreign countries where the natives figure to be wearing Air Jordan shoes, Ralph Lauren shirts, and cargo pants. Magazines that I once looked forward to, many of which I have written for in the past, no longer contain much that I find worth reading. A former moviegoer, I haven’t been to a movie theater in at least a decade. The high price of concert and opera tickets has driven me away. The supposedly great American playwrights—Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee—have never seemed all that good to me, and I miss them not at all. If all this sounds like a complaint that the culture has deserted me, I don’t feel that it has. I can still listen to my beloved Mozart on discs, read Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Willa Cather, and the other great novelists, watch the splendid movies of earlier days on Turner Classics and HBO—live, in other words, on the culture of the past.

“Vho needs dis?” Igor Stravinsky is supposed to have remarked when presented with some new phenomena of the avant-garde or other work in the realm of art without obvious benefit. “Vho needs dis?” is a question that occurred to me more than once or twice as I wrote my autobiography. All I can say is that those who read my autobiography will read of the life of a man lucky enough to have devoted the better part of his days to fitting words together into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into essays and stories on a wide variety of topics. Now in his autobiography all the sentences and paragraphs are about his own life. He hopes that these sentences are well made, these paragraphs have a point, and together they attain to a respectable truth quotient, containing no falsehoods whatsoever. He hopes that, on these modest grounds at least, his autobiography qualifies as worth reading.

Joseph Epstein  is author of  Gallimaufry , a collection of essays and reviews.

Image by  Museum Rotterdam on Wikimedia Commons , licensed via Creative Commons . Image cropped. 

Articles by Joseph Epstein

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