How To Write Better Essays: 5 Outside-the-Box Techniques + Writing Tips
Admin / August 3, 2024
Stuck on a B, chasing that A+? We've all been there.
I have two degrees in Creative Writing from the University of Warwick with First Class Honors. From 2013 to 2014, I also studied English Literature at the National University of Singapore.
Translation: I’ve written a lot of academic essays.
Some good. Some inspired. And others, plain lousy.
After a few Bs and the occasional C, I cracked the code on writing good essays. An average academic essay answers a question; but an essay that gets an A+ solves a problem — whether through discussion, analysis, definition, comparison, or evaluation.
In this blog post, I’ll walk you through how to write better essays. You’ll learn how to construct bullet-proof arguments with five unique thinking techniques, cut the fluff, and discover F.O.C.U.S. to improve your essay writing skills.
Because essays don’t have to be boring. And writing them doesn’t have to either.
What Makes A Good Essay?
What is “good” writing? The answer is subjective. For example, I loved reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, but to some, it might be drivel.
Nonetheless, many examples of good writing share some core qualities.
There are five overarching qualities of good essay writing: flow, organization, clarity, unity, and specificity.
I’ve made a fun little acronym to help you remember them better: F.O.C.U.S.™️
Flow: Does the writing flow smoothly from one point to the next?
Organization: Have you structured your essay with a clear beginning, middle, and end?
Clarity: Is the writing clear, error-free, and unambiguous?
Unity: Are all the elements of your writing supporting the central thesis?
Specificity: Have you provided specific details, examples, and evidence to justify your main points?
A Fellow at The European Graduate School, and my most cherished mentor, Dr. Jeremy Fernando, has perhaps read, written, and graded thousands of academic essays over the years.
His advice?
“You’re asking the reader to go on an explorative journey with you; the least you should do is ensure the trip you’re taking them on is the same as the advertised one.”
5 Creative Thinking Techniques For Writing Better Essays
The thing is, good essay writing doesn’t start at — or even as — writing.
There’s reading, re-reading, pre-writing, revising, then actually writing, editing, and then writing some more.
As with most persuasive arguments, you need frameworks: points of reference, mental models, and structured approaches to guide your decision making.
That's exactly what we have here.
1. Try Reverse Outlining
A reverse outline is just what it sounds like: a process that distills a paper down to its bare essentials, leaving only the key points and topic sentences. The result? A clear, bullet-point blueprint of the paper's structure, whether it's your own work or someone else's.
Key Benefits:
✅Creates an X-ray of a paper's structure to identify its central arguments and assess its logical flow.
✅Helps you actively engage with someone else’s work to deepen your understanding of the material.
✅Reveals structural issues in your own essay, such as missing or misplaced points, redundancies, or weak arguments.
How To Create A Reverse Outline:
This is a two-step, and perhaps infinitely repeatable process.
Take a blank page and draw a line straight down the middle.
2. Practice The Lotus Blossom Technique
In this structured brainstorming exercise, you plant your main problem in the center box of a 3x3 grid. Then, you’ll fill the surrounding boxes with related themes to expand your thinking. The method was developed by Yasuo Matsumura at Clover Management Research in Japan.
Key Benefits:
✅ A fun, novel alternative to traditional mind-mapping and spider-diagramming.
✅Helps you visualize your essay slowly unfolding from its core. (Like a lotus, basically.)
✅I like how it's creative and thorough at the same time. An equal combination of freedom and structure.
How To Practice The Lotus Blossom Technique:
When all your boxes are filled in, you'll have 64 ideas for one essay argument. As far as starting-off points go, this one’s hard to beat.
3. Build A Toulmin Argument Model
According to philosopher Stephen E. Toulmin, arguments are broken down into six key components: claim, grounds, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal, and backing.
There are three essential parts to every argument: the claim, the grounds, and the warrant.
Key Benefits:
✅Craft persuasive arguments through an in-depth analysis that closely examines each part of your essay.
✅Analyzing an argument from its components can help clarify its logic.
✅The rebuttal component encourages you to anticipate and address counterarguments. The more perspectives you consider, the more well-rounded your argument will be.
How To Build A Toulmin Argument Model:
Let’s take a published paper — “Coffee and Health: A Review of Recent Human Research” by Jane V. Higdon and Balz Frei — and break it down using the Toulmin model.
I don’t know about you, but I often get convinced of my own arguments when writing essays, and then it’s hard for me to consider other perspectives.
So, if you want a sparring buddy, here’s how Rewritai can help you with counterarguments:
4. Ask The Five Whys
You need to ask “why” five times to get to the root of any problem. That’s what the inventor of the method, and founder of Toyota Industries, Sakichi Toyoda, believed.
Key Benefits:
✅The approach identifies the real problem, not just its surface symptoms.
✅It’s an easy-to-do and straightforward process that gets to the heart of your essay question.
✅Use this approach in combination with the Toulmin Model to build a killer essay argument.
Asking The Five Whys:
Let’s look at a sample essay question and drill down to its core.
When you have the core of the problem in your palm, you can then start thinking of solutions. Perhaps finding more cost-effective ways to train and support teachers. Or exploring alternative funding options, such as grants and partnerships with local businesses.
5. Experiment With The Ben Franklin Exercise
Franklin wasn’t always a prodigious scholar. While working at a print shop, he reverse engineered the prose from the British magazine, The Spectator, to learn how to write better without a tutor.
He took detailed notes at a sentence level, contemplated them for some time, and then re-created the sentences without looking at the originals.
In fact, research from MIT shows that it's “not just the study of tiny details that accelerates learning; the act of assembling those details yourself is what makes the difference.” This is called constructionist learning.
Key Benefits:
✅Improve your essay writing by studying works of skilled authors through practiced imitation.
✅Organizing your notes from memory will help you construct a solid structure for your essay, and evaluate any gaps in logic and flow.
✅Actively deconstructing and constructing the material allows you to engage deeply with it, and therefore, write better essays.
How I Use The Ben Franklin Exercise:
One of my favorite passages in Literature — as clichéd as may it be — is from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.
Similarly, start by taking a paragraph from an essay you like. Make sentence-level notes and rewrite its essence without looking at it.
My Top Tips To Write A Good Essay
1. Write Lousy First Drafts
You heard me. Write as if your keyboard doesn’t have keys for punctuation. Write as if no one is ever going to read your essay. The goal is to eliminate self-censorship. When you first start writing down your main points, don’t assume the role of a self-editor.
TRY THIS: Open a blank page, set a timer for two and a half minutes, and type until the bell goes off. Take a break. Repeat. Don’t re-read what you’ve typed.
Forget proper spelling. Forget good grammar. Those polishes are all for later, when you have something to polish.
This is freewriting.
And it’s wildly effective in getting you to stop thinking about deadlines, blinking cursors, and that A+. My highest-scoring essays have all begun with messy, unstructured, poorly-worded first drafts.
2. Read Other Essays Like A Writer
Think of your favorite book. What makes you call it your favorite? Or a series you’ve watched recently. (Behind Her Eyes is especially good.) What compels you to see it all the way through? The same principle applies to good essay writing. Have you read an essay in your research that hooked you? Or a friend’s work you wish you could put your name to?
Read like a writer — become a proactive participant in examining why the writing works. Instead of passively drawing stars next to important observations, ask yourself, “Why do I like these passages? What are they doing? And how are they doing it?” (Use the Ben Franklin Exercise here.)
Take apart the essay you’re reading like a forensic pathologist doing an autopsy.
3. Start With An Outline
Speaking of autopsies, a good essay has good bones. Once you’ve disgorged your ideas on the page, start arranging them under headers.
This blog too, was born in the Notes app on my phone. But if you’re taking the reader with you somewhere, you should know where you’re headed too.
4. Cut The Fluff
The deadline’s in a few hours and you’re scrambling to hit minimum word count. Long, winding sentences with gratuitous adjectives you’ve just looked up in the thesaurus to sound more cerebral, erudite, scholarly.
I get it. I’ve done it. And those essays have bellyflopped. Professors know when you’re trying to game them.
Here’s an actual sentence from one of my essays I wrote in 2017:
“Ibsen’s realist drama, and in particular, A Doll’s House, is replete with the problems that chapter and verse modern life – the patriarchal model of the family, money and debt, and the performance of gender.”
And much to my embarrassment, this is the scathing comment from my then-professor:
“This makes no sense.”
Let’s rework this sentence to make sense using Rewritai (a clever AI helper I wish I had during my university days):
“The patriarchal family model, money and debt, and gendered performance are all apparent in Ibsen's realist drama, especially A Doll's House.”
5. Get Feedback, Edit, And Revise
I can’t emphasize this enough — don’t submit your first draft! Have someone else read it, perhaps a friend in the same class or even from a different major. Look at their eyebrows to see which sections make them frown in confusion.
Ask them to red-pen sentences and logical gaps. And then —- edit, edit edit!
Sleep on it. Let the essay stew in the back of your mind for a full night, and come back to it with fresh eyes.
Start (Pre-)Writing Better Essays
The ability to write persuasively will serve you well no matter what stage of your life you are in: high school, university scholar, or a professional trying to get ahead. After all, the human mind is hardwired for storytelling.
Remember, the key is to F.O.C.U.S.
Whether you’re crawling or speeding towards a deadline, bag that A+ with a smart AI assistant like Rewritai!