How to Format Essay at Home (5 Easy Steps)
Essay writing can be a challenge, regardless of whether you are a student or professional. In some part of your life, you are asked to write blogs, articles, paragraphs, or even long essays. When it comes to essay writing, it is generally perceived that essays are sets of long paragraphs without any restrictions and guidelines. However, the fact remains that writing essays can be as complicated as writing an academic report.
An academic essay can have a word limit in the range of 500 to 6000 words. Here are 5 tips that you can use to easily perfect essay writing while quarantining at home!
1). Essay Outline
A typical essay comprises of 5 paragraphs. While it is not necessary to adhere to the standard essay outline, several academic institutions comply with this format only. This is because an essay with an outline tends to look more accurate and consistent.
- Introduction
- Body
- Conclusion
2). Choosing an Essay Format
When writing an essay, choose from any of the most frequently used formatting styles, such as the ones shown below:
MLA Format
- Times New Roman (12pt)
- Use double spaces throughout the document and avoid putting extra spaces between different paragraphs.
- 1” margins on all four sides.
- Heading on the essay’s first page.
- Your name; course name/number; your instructor’s name; and the submission date.
APA Format
- Times New Roman (12pt)
- 1” margins on all sides of the page.
- Title, name of author, and affiliation with the institution.
- Your name, course name/number, your instructor’s name, and the submission date.
3). Trim long sentences and paragraphs
Enumerating your facts and data in long sentences or paragraphs is not always a good idea. Owing to their low attention span, people can get bored while reading long paragraphs and sentences. Another advantage of this approach is that it helps you control your word count and give a cleaner and uniform look to the essay, thus augmenting its readability.
Another way of ensuring that the length stays within reasonable limits is to go through what you’ve written and shorten up wherever possible. If you find yourself writing long sentences, seek ways in which you can reword them to express what you’re trying to say more concisely. Always don the reader’s hat while writing the essay. Would you, as a reader, willing to invest the time and energy, in reading the essay?
4). Avoid tautologies
Avoiding tautologies is another way of formatting and refining your academic essays. Tautologies are repetitions of words that have the same meaning using words which adversely affect the overall quality of your essay. Students often use it to lengthen the size of their essay but the key is to ensure that the quality of content does not get compromised.
5). Adding the sources
When writing academic essays, it is a common and recommended practice to mention facts and quotes from famous people. However, what many students ignore or forget is that adding sources without duly acknowledging the original contributor n infringes upon the content created by them, which can land you in copyright entanglements. For this reason, it is imperative to properly cite the sources and back them up with references in order to help avoid copyright issues.
I hope the above-mentioned tips would be able to give you a basic idea on easily formatting your essay for college or business at home.
Source:https://www.writesmartly.com/blog/how-to-format-essay-at-home-5-easy-steps-writesmartly/