Top Tips on Writing a 5-page Essay

Of course, having little or no experience, you can still speed up the process of writing the paper. Here are some useful tips on how to write an excellent 5-page essay.

  • Don’t think that you can write it in an hour

Some websites promise to teach you to write an essay on five pages in an hour (or to write the essay for you). In theory, you really can type five pages in an hour; however, that will work only if your professor is not going to read even the beginning of your paper. Therefore, don’t put yourself in a tight time frame as even the experienced writer will not produce a high-quality essay in 1 hour only. Make sure you have at least a day for writing and research, and don’t hurry.

  • Do a preliminary research

Your thoughts won’t come out of anywhere, so the best way to find suitable arguments is to do research. It can take from several hours up to several days (depending on the depth of your research); however, the results are totally worth it. You will have a solid basis on which you will be able to produce a good 5-page research paper or essay.

  • Have a plan 

Create a 5-page essay outline to make sure that all your ideas are appropriately introduced and organized. Moreover, an outline will help you conveniently keep all the necessary information so that you won’t need to remember everything. In case you don’t have time to write an outline, write a short plan instead: don’t write full sentences, preferring bullet points, or keywords as an alternative. 

  • Review the issue from the different perspectives

Even if you are writing an argumentative paper, make sure to introduce several different points of view instead of sticking to only one. In such a way, you will show your expertise in the topic, being an open-minded author who is not influenced by a particular point of view. Being unprejudiced is essential for the academic writer and a researcher, so you will get more points from your professor by covering several contradicting aspects. 

  • Use at least several sources

As you need to review different articles, you shouldn’t stick to a specific source (unless your instructions require that). Even if you think that the source has all the necessary information, you should always double-check information elsewhere: it may be outdated, contradicting, or narrowed too much. There is no set number of sources to be used in the five-page essay, so try to use enough literature to cover all the necessary information in your paper.

 

Five Steps to Create a Perfect Five-Page Essay

As you already know the useful tips, it’s time to check the process of creating a powerful 5-page essay. You can subdivide some of the steps, but we don’t recommend omitting any of the stages, even if you find them too time-consuming or not that interesting.

Step 1: Write down the most essential parts of the paper

First of all, you need to draft a general idea of your paper. Therefore, you need to come up with the topic (which will be your title), thesis statement, and the main arguments. You can write as many as you have in your head, expanding or cutting down them after you review all the relevant literature. 

Step 2: Conduct research

Try to create a few keywords based on your topic and start looking for the relevant literature for your essay. Depending on the assignment, you can use any sources or limit yourself to peer-reviewed articles only. In any case, you can also review the links provided in each source to understand where the data comes from. Besides, try to rely on credible sources, even if there is no requirement to use academic articles only: instead of using the excerpts from the unknown blog, dig deeper and look for the materials in the credible online magazines at least. 

Step 3: Create an outline 

After you have gathered all the necessary facts, arguments, and ideas, start organizing them to make your essay strong and credible. Create a clear outline that will have all the necessary components of the essay: an introduction with the attention grabber and thesis statement, body sections with the topic sentences and arguments, and conclusion with the main results of your research. You can also include background information in your paper if your topic is complicated or not popular to the audience, and abstract if your instructor mentions that.

Step 4. Draft an essay

Having everything prepared, you can now start writing the paper. Consider the writing as a draft, capturing all the arguments with the proper polishing later. Don’t get stuck on one phrase or word — as you will waste your time by doing so — keep writing and return to the problematic fields later. Make sure you follow your outline while writing; however, it doesn’t mean that you should start strictly from the introduction, moving to the body and finishing with the conclusion. You can start with the body section first and build your essay around it — whatever you find convenient for you. 

Step 5. Polish your paper

After your draft is complete, read it once again (or several times, if you can) to improve the flow, work on the writing style, format everything correctly, and get rid of the grammatical errors. Double-check if your thesis statement corresponds with the information provided further (if not — change your thesis statement). Make sure that the introduction is linked logically with your body paragraphs, while the conclusion wraps everything and does not indicate any new piece of information. It is always a good idea to polish your paper the next day after you have written the draft; however, if you don’t have that much time, try to have a quick rest before starting revising.