How to Write an Academic Essay
(At the stages prior to editing)
Writing consists of a large number of skills. There is no doubt that everyone has to establish their own writing skills. I will provide some stages and points, based on the knowledge I learnt from the previous three-week course, on how to write a better academic essay in an efficient way in the following paragraph.
First of all, you have to try to find out as much as possible about yourself as a writer (e.g. How many writing skills have you had? How well do you wrote? and so on). Being not certain about that, you could draw a table and evaluate yourself according to the information in this table in order to seek your current status as a writer. At length, it is crystal clear for you to know how to use well-established skills and what kinds of skills need to be enhanced further. In addition, you should adjust your attitude to writing an academic essay if you have some bias on that before, since the bias can have a critical effect on how well you write.
Secondly, you need to establish your focus. The topic discussed can be a bit general, consequently, you have to decide what your specific response and scopes are. How to fulfill the task? Write down a topic sentence and try to ask questions about the questions your topic sentence contains. This stage helps you pay much more attention to the topic scopes to ensure you are not straying from the points. As the scopes are ensured, narrowing down the topic is an effective way to assist you in deciding on your focus, which leads to the following work becoming much smoother.
Thirdly, magnify the focus you have just made. The aim of this stage is to help you learn how to enclose the topic whilst there is a need to add some relative materials for it. I would say the focusing (the second stage) and magnifying stages are always dependant on each other. A feasible approach is to think of your topic as if you were looking at your initial writing focus through a magnifying glass. Sometimes, it is unavoidable to modify your original focus a bit, the point is that you should keep a point in mind that the focusing and magnifying stages are not really separate.
Finally, having decide on your focus and organised your points, drafting becomes an important stage. The purpose of this part is to polish up the details and eliminate some considerably unrelated points. In other words, you are needed to refine the elaborate and the most useful points from various types of information at the prior stages. The better framework you make, the easier you feel that the following writing will be plain sailing. J
So far, I do not plan my essays in terms of concrete academic writing skills. In fact, you are able to do that in the first stage. To finish, there is still one essential point I need to recommend. The point is that you should never fail to keep the audiences in your mind whichever you are in the stages, because what you write directly influences the effect of the understanding of the audiences. Once you take them into account in you writing all the time, the result probably will be better than you expected.
By oklook 
12/10/2006
PS: It's only my view on writing an academic essay especially at the stages prior to editing. I am expecting your comments or feedback on it. Cheers~~ 
