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.

Master the writing process by starting, researching, outlining, and aligning style with structure to reduce anxiety and build confidence.

Explore the writing process by distinguishing writing for discovery from writing for presentation, and learn how to use discovery to shape ideas before polishing for presentation.

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

Recognize writing anxiety as situational and distinct from writer's block, then apply tailored strategies such as seeking support, embracing stages of writing, and exploring discovery techniques.

Adopt a flexible writing workflow that switches between brainstorming, outlining, and drafting. Embrace non-linear progress as outlines evolve and tools like pencil and paper or Word support iterative writing.

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.

Discover an ideal writing workflow that synchronizes outlining and drafting, switching seamlessly between outline mode and draft writing. Learn to integrate mind maps, hierarchy, and easy access to research sources.

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 how to implement a structured essay workflow using Scrivener and Evernote, with synchronized outlining and draft writing, and seamless access to organized research materials across devices.

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.

Shows a structured approach to essay writing with a Scrivner template, guiding assignment setup, research, notes, outlines, and drafting using an argument-objection-reply structure for dream skepticism.

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.

this lecture demonstrates researching, outlining, and drafting a four-to-five page essay on animation, illustration, or design, including thesis development and APA citations from at least four sources.

Examine whether a degree from an art program justifies the cost by exploring research, debates, and alternatives, and develop a working thesis for a persuasive essay.

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.

Clarify the misconception that style guides like Strunk and White define good writing by surface rules, and reveal how deeper stances shape multiple writing styles and success criteria.

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

Explore practical style, a reader driven, information efficient writing approach, and reflexive style, which foregrounds the writer and the writing itself within academic writing.

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 main elements of a strong argumentative essay and learn to analyze its structure. See a short student draft rewritten to fix structural problems using classical argument analysis.

Explore how to organize and write an argumentative essay using the introductory section, main body, and concluding section, and learn why this structure effectively communicates complex ideas.

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.

Frame the conclusion as a bookend that restates the main thesis and summarizes the key argumentative moves, then optionally comment on significance or future questions without new material.

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.

Analyze the first argument in an essay, clarifying how laptop note-taking relates to the moral claim that bans on laptops are unfair to students who rely on them.

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.

Analyze the third argument, presenting an objection to banning laptops in class and the author's reply that college students are adults who must take responsibility for their learning.

Reconstruct the essay's main body, evaluate three arguments, identify the hardship argument, and examine objections and replies to strengthen moral reasoning and argument structure.

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.

Explore the ethical and practical pitfalls of using paper mills and essay services, including quality concerns, plagiarism risks, and detection challenges.

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 avoid plagiarism by distinguishing your own writing from borrowed text, and cite sources properly when paraphrasing, so mixed writing isn't passed off as original.

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.