The following are questions that many beginning college writers ask when confronted with the task of composing an essay. These insights should help you approach your writing assignments with direction, confidence, and security than you otherwise would have.
Yes. By titling your essay, you do two things: you give the reader a “sneak preview” of the work to follow, and you prove to your reader that you have enough of a grasp of your subject to provide your essay with an effective and descriptive name. Though your final draft should always have a title, you need not begin your essay with a title in mind. Often writers go through several titles when writing a piece or entitle their essays after the work is completely written. Additionally, you need not underline your title or place it in quotation marks.
In many cases, yes. Most essays are written in the third person, but some topics generate first-person responses. If, for instance, you are writing about the most important influence in your life, you would very likely use the first person throughout your essay.
Slang is usually inappropriate in academic writing (your college essays) and business writing. However, experienced writers often use slang for a special rhetorical effect in their essays. For example, a writer who is trying to convey a sense of what it might be like to be at a protest rally could write: “The protesters were encouraged to ‘hang tough.’” This writer wants you to hear the sort of things that were said at the scene in order to give you a better sense of what was happening there. So, use slang if you feel you can gain a rhetorical effect by doing so, but be sparing in your use.
Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Correctness of expression is equally as important as developing and organizing your thoughts. As a college writer, you can improve your grades greatly by mastering the conventions of your own written language. Nothing pleases a professor like a grammatically correct paper, so be sure to proofread your essays always, and if possible, have someone else proofread them after you feel they are perfect. Someone else can always find the errors you missed.
No. There is no need for you to assert that the ideas expressed in your paper are your own. The simple fact that your name is at the top indicates to your reader that the information which follows will be your personal ideas. Any ideas in your paper that are not your own will of course be documented and tagged with expressions like “According to C.S. Morris, . . . . .” You will see more on this subject later in this book.