Evaluation Example essay for CSN

Beals 1 Wesley Beals Professor Kaylee Baucom English 101 19 April 2022 What Makes Effective Essay Writing Writing an essay is a common activity done for the most profound or minute reasons: education, work, or personal. As someone writes essays over many years, they also read tons of papers, and learn by example what elements separate the effective essays from the bad ones. Effective essays convey the ideas of the writer to the reader in a clear, easy-to-follow way. Writing an effective essay can be a complex and delicate endeavor as writing is highly subjective matter, but there are common elements to effective essays. Effective essays have organized structure, focused ideas, and clean writing. Effective essay have an organized structure. Structure is how the essay is laid out and in what order the points of the essay are presented. Greg Ciotti, a marketing agent who writes articles, states this about the importance of structure by saying, “how you structure a piece matters, as do the words that create the structure” (Ciotti). An organized structure is critical in order for ideas to be conveyed to the reader in an effective matter. When an essay has a wellorganized structure, there is an introduction, body, and conclusion and each section builds on the foundation of the proceeding section. The points of each of the sections become stronger and the whole essay develops an increased level of cohesion. Structure adds a flow to the ideas and provides critical guidance through the writer’s thinking to the reader. It also fulfills the readers expectations because “all readers have expectations. They assume what they read will follow a logical order and support a main idea.” (Reid and Kowalski). Essays lacking organized structure Beals 2 are disjointed and jarring as the essay is out of logical order. The ideas become muddled and weaker in the madness leaving the reader confused rather than enlightened. The reader is left with untangling the chaos of ideas, analysis and background, and ordering them into their logical form. The untangling annoys readers because they are not in the author’s mind and thus figure out the writer’s intent. Organization and structure are key things to focus on in order to make an essay have focused ideas and be effective. Another important key for an effective essay is focused ideas. Kate Kiefer, an English Department, Composition Director summarized focus as, “The focus of the text is also referred to as its thesis, theme, controlling idea, main point. In effect, writers tell readers what territory they plan to cover…informally known as sticking to the point” (Reid and Kowalski). The start of focused ideas in the essay is the thesis statement and each point, piece of evidence, or analysis builds on the foundation the thesis presents. This focus provides another guide through the essay. Focused ideas are especially critical with complex or unfamiliar topics because without focus on the key ideas in the essay, a reader can get lost in the complexity. Focused ideas make an essay easier to follow and ultimately, read because the reader does not have to shift through the information presented to try and figure out what is important or not. Essays that cannot maintain focus are harder to read because the points presented are marred in extra or unnecessary information leading to reader confusion. Cynthia Spiers in her article about cleaning up writing, more specifically focus, states, “If you take too long to identify the main thrust of what you’re writing, readers will turn away, thinking they’re not going to find the information they want” (Spiers). Readers do not want to have to shift through unnecessary information to figure out the author’s main idea because it is frustrating trying to guess what the author is trying to say. Beals 3 Focused ideas are a key to effective essays and with the focused ideas, helps develop clean and clear writing. Lastly, effective essays have clean writing. Clean writing is error-free, precise, and concise. Clean writing makes it easier for the reader to understand what is being read and makes the essay’s ideas flow like water. This writing catches the reader’s attention and keeps it because the reader does not have to spend time on trying to understand the sentences and impresses them to keep reading. Ideas come through clearly because the language does not confuse or mislead. When writing is filled with errors, the errors both big and small distract the reader and turns their focus from the ideas presented to the errors in the paper. Errors show a lack of polish and a lack of care from the writer. With that lack of care, it can make the reader wonder why they should even care about ideas if the writer did not. In addition, when writing is too complicated or wordy, the ideas are lost in pointless fluff. Spiers states this, “You don’t want to obscure your message with complicated, excessively wordy copy, which is both ineffective and can turn readers off.” (Spiers). Unclean writing is ineffective because it forces the reader to untangle the writing and discern meaning from the sentences. This untangling process can irritate the reader and also cause the reader to lose the reader’s interest and not think about the ideas presented. Reader appreciate clean writing because of what Gail Radley says to her students, “No one wants to slog through entangling vines, no matter how pretty” and complicated (Radley et al.). Effective essays exemplify clean and clear writing. It is critical for effective writing to have structured organization, focus ideas, and clean writing. These elements are important because they make the presented ideas stronger and easier for the reader to read. When strong ideas are presented and are not held back in the execution, they can enlighten the reader, persuade the reader’s thinking, and go on to change lives and even Beals 4 societies. Writing essays will always be the focus of academia and the world at large and learning how to both write an effective essay and spot an effective essay are the most important things that can be learned. Effective writing has the power to change the world and the power of writing is not always what it is said but rather how it is organized, framed, and said.