Beginning your essay doesn't start when you put pen to paper, or fingers to a keyboard, but when you start your lectures and are given the task of writing an essay for submission. It doesn't matter whether the essay is to go against your final grade or not (but 99% of the time they do), and you should put 100% into the effort of thinking about your essay and writing it effectively.

Once you have received the task of writing an essay for your class, you should look at the stages of planning, researching, and writing your essay; all good and effective essays have these elements and processes in them. If you want to write an essay that is informative and will keep the interest of the reader, then you must first start with a plan and follow that plan until completion. It goes without saying that you will need to adapt this plan as you progress through the research and writing stages of your essay – making your approach to the scope of the essay, and interpretation, effectively written and resulting in impact.

Without a clear grounding in any topic you will struggle to write an effective essay – what I am saying here is that you should attend most of your lectures. You will receive key information and resources that are rich with information, these will be specific to your topic and area of your course/module. You will not want to try and figure out what an essay question will be here, nor will you want to try to figure out what will be asked, but you will want to take note of the sources and information given, so that you can relate to and gain valuable information-rich resources for when you go to conduct secondary research for your essay.

You will also want to think about direction and planning when you do set out and start writing (or indeed typing) your essay. You will want to be clear that you will need to have a beginning, middle, and an end; you will also want to use Kiplings six honest serving men: what, where, why, how, who, and when, as well as keep questioning ‘so what?' to the information, opinions and notions that you are writing about in your essay. You will want to grasp the attention of your reader and ‘lead them on a journey' informing them of what your essay is about and why, and hope your research can be added to the ever growing knowledge in the academic arena.

There will be obstacles that you will have to overcome in your writing too, the clarity and tone of your content should be consistent and appealing to the reader of your essay. You should provide enough knowledge, but not too much to overshadow your won views, opinions, and conclusions to what theories and previous authors have established.

An effective essay will, therefore, have a plan, an objective to where you want it to be, establishment of relevant theory and thinking, as well as your ‘footprint' and understanding/interpretation behind what you are writing about.