A+ Essays: A Structured Approach to Successful Essay Writing

Explore how writing and reading serve as technologies of the human mind, amplify meaningful communication, and support deep reading, deep thinking, and critical thinking in today's world.

Explore how structure drives essay success, prioritizing organization over spelling, vocabulary, or grammar. Learn about introductions, main bodies, and conclusions, and how writing style relates to structure.

From a 20,000 foot view, this lecture presents a hierarchical structure of writing principles—from general communication to academic essay writing—and shows how a text guides the audience through cognitive transformations.

Explore why the traditional three-part essay structure—introduction, main body, and conclusion—exists, outlining its rationale, the benefits in peer-reviewed academic writing, and when to break the rules.

Discover how essay style shapes structure by linking audience, author stance, and goals to features like introduction, body, conclusion, and inverted pyramid.

Embrace rewriting as essential to essay success, using drafting, feedback, and multiple revisions to transform ideas into a refined text rather than a failure.

Reframe your outlining as a diagnostic tool that evolves with your draft, guiding you to diagnose and improve your essay’s structure and content at any writing stage.

Explore how mind maps, outlines, and synchronized draft writing support a cohesive essay workflow, and compare tools from mind mapping to word processors for seamless export.

Learn a structured approach to essay writing that emphasizes the essay's structural features and a clear process for organizing your writing, with Scrivner as an optional example tool.

Explore how internal text structure and writing-process structure shape essay development, outlining, and habit formation, and learn to externalize tasks to reduce cognitive load and boost writing productivity.

Explore how a Scrivener template helps organize essay projects with draft, research, and revisions folders; use corkboard and outline views to plan introduction, body, conclusion, references, timelines and deadlines.

Explore a practical, real-world approach to essay writing by drafting a complete essay from start to finish, including research, working thesis, outlining, drafting, revision, citations, and a reference list.

Explore a structured approach to essay writing by outlining arguments for and against art school, examining tuition, salaries, and supporting sources to shape a final draft.

Explore drafting a real college essay with an exploded outline, a complete first draft, and concise revisions that preserve argument structure and clearly present objections and replies.

Learn to find, evaluate, and cite sources for a four-to-five page essay on animation, using AP style and inline citations, plus building a reference list.

Explore the evolving concept of writing style beyond traditional style guides, and see how academic essay writing reflects the writer's task, audience, and relationship to readers.

Explore oratorical, prophetic, and romantic writing styles via a model that links surface form to an underlying conceptual stance about author, audience, and scene.

Adopt classic style to present clear, simple truth through a window into the world, via a dialogue between equals that invites the reader to see what the writer sees.

Explore how classic style counters stuffy academic prose by reducing meta discourse, hedging, cliches, abstraction, and passive voice, while empowering clearer, more engaging science communication.

Explore the minimal five-part structure for a strong argumentative essay: introduction, main body with a main argument, objections, replies, and conclusion, plus strategies to address strongest objections for skeptical readers.

Master how to craft an introduction that states the issue, provides necessary background, presents the main thesis clearly, and outlines the essay's roadmap for the reader.

The second part of the tutorial analyzes a short argumentative essay on whether teachers should ban laptops in classrooms, diagnosing organizational structure and function and offering solutions.

Analyze how the introduction frames the issue of laptop use in college classrooms, distinguishes issue from thesis, and presents the thesis as the writer's answer.

Examine the second argument for laptops as a note-taking right. Evaluate how paying for courses and diverse learning styles relate to the conclusion, and suggest clearer reasoning.

Polish your conclusion by restating the thesis, summarizing the argument moves, and avoiding 'I feel strongly' language, while delivering a full review of the essay's reasoning.

Watch a rewritten, improved take on whether teachers should ban laptops in classrooms, detailing changes to the introduction, conclusion, main body, and analysis and recommendations, and tracing the essay's logical structure.

Review and rewrite an improved essay on laptops, highlighting headings, thesis, and a two-argument structure, hardship and paternalism, to guide readers through the analysis.

Learn to identify plagiarism and apply proper citation and paraphrase to integrate source material into academic writing. Develop skills to summarize and paraphrase clearly without relying on direct quotes.

Explore why we cite sources and how plagiarism breaches academic ethics. Preview basic citing rules, see plagiarism examples, and introduce commonly used citation styles.

Describe plagiarism as using another's ideas or expressions without credit, explain MLA style expectations for citing sources, and preview common examples such as paying someone to write a paper.

Learn why cutting and pasting from multiple sources qualifies as plagiarism. See how mixed writing styles reveal copied text and how to properly synthesize sources into original essays.

Learn to paraphrase accurately with proper citations to avoid plagiarism, using the Hobbes example to distinguish original ideas from paraphrased text.

Examine the debate on patchwriting as a form of plagiarism, its role in learning genre conventions, and the need to teach proper citation to move toward ownership of words.