Essay Writing Process: Generating Ideas for your Topic

This is How You Can Choose the Right Topic to Write Your Essay

“Take care of your costume and your confidence will take care of itself.”
- Amit Kalantri from Wealth of Words

The topic of your essay is like a costume the fitter it is the better your essay would appear!

Writing an essay is an inseparable part of academic assignments and can prove to be utterly challenging when you do not understand the topic or fail to organise. Whatever the case may be if you fail to plan you plan to fail so be careful. Essay writing is a tedious and time-consuming task but a well-written essay impresses, engages and leaves readers craving for more. If you want to secure high grades in the essay writing assignment there are certain rules to be followed for choosing the right topic for your essays.

To put you at ease and help you write a well-crafted essay that wins hearts, we have come up with a few useful tips on generating ideas for the essay topic. So, the next time around when you come across this assignment just heave a sigh of relief and generate a topic on which you can write comfortably at length without being repetitive and sounding monotonous.

Essay writing is a widely given assignment and whatever your stream maybe you will have to deal with this assignment from time to time. Take care of these tricks and sail out smoothly through the process.

Look whether you are Comfortable with the Topic:

Do not plunge into writing abruptly. Just take care of the fact that a good idea can have a strange origin so do not think that you have to be very logical to get a bright idea. Instead of writing abruptly, it is better to look around, talk to your friends or peers and come up with an innovative idea on which you think you can feel comfortable. A good essay is one that suggests, argues and convinces. So, do remember that the topic of your essay should fall in your comfort zone and you are familiar with all the ins and outs associated with it.

You can conduct online research and find out ideas about the topic. Apart from taking care of relevance, make very sure that the topic can make you talk at length and looks more interesting and exciting to you.

Analyse the Topic and Take Care of the Essay-type:

Once you think that you have chosen a topic of your interest you should begin to analyse that topic. It is good to take care of the essay type you need to write and then decide the topic accordingly. So, what is your essay type??

Is it Narrative or in a Story Telling type?

Narrative essays require the writers to tell a story about their real-life experiences. This may sound easy as writing a story is what everyone is excited about but it is fraught with challenges. Narrative essays are generally about writing the real incidents of life and so the topic should be such that the writers have a clear memory about it.

Some people try to write using their imagination. This should be avoided, however. If you have real experience of a certain incident you can pour your heart on the same and the essay can have a better and more natural flow. You can make the story or essay as vivid as possible. Hence for a narrative essay pick up a topic that you have dealt with before and then with the written usage of words give it an interesting form. Add a conclusion that can put a quest in the readers’ minds and make your readers contemplate.

Is your essay descriptive or needs you to paint a picture?

Descriptive essays are about painting a picture in your own words. Here in this typewriters are needed to describe places, objects, persons or even memories of some special importance. But, do not think that it is just a bland description. This essay type is meant for conveying a deeper meaning and hence you just do not have to tell or describe but you need to create an appeal with emotions so that the outcome can be evocative.

While choosing the topic for descriptive essays, explore that you have all the ideas about the topic and can talk elaborately about the same without sounding monotonous or repetitive.

Is your essay expository where you have to put in facts only?

This type of essay is a completely informative one and needs the writer to present a well-balanced and thorough analysis of the topic. In this type of essay writers explain the topic, define it and use the right facts, vital statistics, data and examples they can strengthen the essay. In this type of essay, personal feelings or emotive language needs to be avoided.

They are simple “how-to” types and about revealing the facts or bland information. While choosing the topic of this essay type you need to make sure that you have all the literary materials having adequate facts, data and statistics available with you. The topic of this essay is dependent on the availability of materials with you.

Is your essay persuasive or needs you to persuade readers?

 The goal of this type of essay is the presentation of vital statistics and hence it is about using logic, arguments, statistics and other forms of data for the purpose of convincing readers. Here expert opinions and sound reasoning can be used for communicating. So, again if your essay type is persuasive then choose a topic in which you think you can get current statistics, data, facts and figures to endorse your argument so that you would be able to convince the readers.

Try to Narrow Down Your Topic:

If you go in for a broad topic, you will get confused and would land up in mess. So, it is better to be specific rather than general. For example, if the essay is a descriptive type on “Minerals found in Mars” you tend to get confused as there can be an end number of minerals on the planet. However, if you talk about the crystalline or amorous minerals found on Mars, you can be specific and will have a direction to go about. So, avoid being general if you need to write a quality of high-standard choose to be specific rather than broad or general.

Look for Ease in Finding Keywords:

The essay is all about outlining what all to be written and described. So, you need to look for the words which can best describe your topic. When you think of generating an idea about the essay to be written, prepare the list of keywords for the chosen topic. Look whether the topic that you want to choose has easy to find a list of keywords and the key concepts that can broaden your search abilities.

Topic Should Offer You Flexibility:

Choose a topic that is easy to modify. If the topic offers you the opportunity to modify you can be at ease in writing essays. There are times when you are likely to be caught in the intricacies of the topic and get confused. If you have chosen an essay topic that can be easily modified you would be able to give a different touch to the text body without sounding weird.

Have a Sample with You:

The best way to present a good topic is to have a glimpse of the previously written essays by an expert and decide which one can you write easily. If you have taken help from a professional assignment writing service, you should keep their completed assignments as a future reference.

This will help you to brainstorm the ideas and will also let you know how to write professionally to secure high marks. Make sure that you have looked into many pre-written samples by an expert writer and know on which topics it would be good to talk about in length and be creative.

Understand the Motive Behind the Essay:

Understand the motive behind allocating essay writing assignments before choosing the topic. Keep in mind the targeted readers. If you want to write an engrossing essay, you should know the motive of your teacher providing you with such an assignment. If it is given for testing your knowledge, you can choose a topic in which you can be descriptive.

Key Things to Remember While Choosing a Topic

• Apart from being interesting to you personally, the topic chosen by you should fulfil another criterion and that is how much you know about the topic. So, be very careful to choose a topic according to your understanding level. Make sure that you are fully aware of it.
• It is wise to choose a topic that you may have used in preparing your thesis or conducting any other research as this will enable you to talk elaborately and with persuasion on the topic. Not only this, but you will also have all the literary materials available to consult. So, reusing the same topic which you may have written on will make you feel comfortable.
• You should have a talk with your teacher to get an idea about the topic. This way, you will get to know which topics can help you get good marks. Do not choose offbeat topics just because they are appearing to be exciting. If you do so you will have a difficult time researching as the sources will be difficult to find.

A Quick Look at the Dos and Don’ts of Choosing a Topic:

Do’s

• The type of essay is important and hence you need to make sure that you have chosen a topic accordingly.
• A good amount of literary materials should be accessible to you. If you have an essay topic that you think would be a pleasure to write on, begin to find the resources.
• Have a word with an experienced guide or your teaching facility and get an idea.

Don’ts:

• Trying to look different by choosing a topic that is uncommon or offbeat. You will be caught in a mess if you do so because of the lack of information.
• Do not select a general topic that can be written at any length as this may confuse you. Try to narrow down the topic and be specific to be precise.
• Do not depend too much on the literary sources available to you. Grasp the topic and then put the essay in your own words. Give citations or references if you have chosen to take direct information from another source.
• Do not choose a boring topic just because you know everything about it. As the purpose of your essay is to bind the reader, try to choose a current topic of their interest.

Here are the two strategies of choosing the right topic:

There are two different situations that a writer can come across when it comes to choosing the right topic. The first one is when somebody else has the topics and the writer has to pick one from that. This is an easier situation where the writer can simply pick up a topic on which he is confident about writing and do not have to undergo the stress of deciding any topic.

Another instance is when a writer has an open choice to select any topic and have to present a descriptive or reflective or any other essay. Available literary sources and the interests of readers are to be kept in mind in this case.

Before You Pick the Topic Understand the Structure of Topic:

To pick up the right essay topic, you need to understand the structure of the essay and then explore what would make it truly effective. Choose to know the style of an essay by consulting with your faculty and know whether it is a typical five-paragraph essay or any other academic piece or a research paper and choose the topic accordingly after that.

In order to perform better in writing essays, make very sure that you have chosen a topic which you are passionate about and have written before. Besides that, check out the recent trends of that topic and gauge the engagement level of your target audience.

Last but not the least; your topic is not the same as the title though the title should be directly relevant to the topic.

Use these tricks to frame titles of your topics

• Make use of the terms like “outline”, “explain, “describe” for presenting information that is descriptive or elaborative in nature and has a linear structure.
• Use the terms like contrast, consider, compare etc. if the arguments are for or against and two sides have to be compared.
• Make use of the terms like arguing, justify or criticising if an argument needs to be developed on a specific topic.

Great ideas come randomly and this very fact holds true to choose your essay topic but to a certain extent only. There are so many other factors to consider as well like your familiarity with the topic and interest level for that topic, the literary source available to you for consultation, the type of structure of an essay you need to write and others.

If you have chosen just the right topic to write an essay, it is half the work done in making it successful. So, begin with meticulous planning and start with a bang.

Wish you all the luck!