The guaranteed path to acing at essay writing

One of my professors who had been to Cambridge University for one study term back in the 1960s told me that in order to receive a degree in certain fields from the university, there were few formal requirements. Other than taking a certain exam, if one were simply hanging out in town for a certain period, it  sufficed as proof of academic enrichment.     

Now, one way to go about learning the craft of writing is to hone specific skills that produce good prose. After all, writing is an act of production.  

But a compelling case could be made for quite a different approach: immerse yourself in the best that has been written. 

Study the works of the finest prose writers (past and present), essayists in particular, but also the best long-form journalists and writers in various genres—science, history, philosophy, world affairs, culture and so forth—and even some practitioners of fiction.  

Study their word choice. 

Study the cadence of their sentences. 

Study their reasoning. 

Study how they suture sentences and paragraphs.  

Study how they start and how they end their work. 

Study how they create mood.

Study their voice: how different writers strike different notes.  

The wider your exposure, the more resources you can summon for expression, the more adept you will get at using them. For instance, there's a word in English: 'prudent'. The dictionary defines it as 'acting with or showing care and thought for the future'. However, it is only after you have seen it used in a dozen contexts that you can yourself learn to use it confidently and discerningly.

It is one thing to know five common techniques writers use to arrest the attention of their readers at the outset. It is quite another to sub-consciously absorb the deft exploitation of these tricks made by the masters of prose. 

Seeing is not just believing. In many places, seeing is becoming.      

The secret sauce of a smooth introduction

This piece is not about the power and purpose of an effective introduction to the essay. Before moving on, I suggest reading this other piece first. 

Here, I want to address one specific feature of a good introduction. In the pre-writing phase, building the introduction is limited to two construction tasks. And once you have locked in a provocative thesis and hammered out an arresting opening ('an attention getter'), there is nothing else to plan for in the introduction. 

But that is only insofar as the planning phase is concerned. 

In the writing phase, the introduction is achieved not simply by placing the chosen thesis next to the attention-getter. The transition from the attention-grabbing device (the quotation, story etc at the opening) to the thesis almost always requires a bridge. 

A bridge is made up of sentences that move—and move swiftly—in the  direction of the thesis. The function of the bridge is to establish the relevance of the attention-getter to the thesis.  

If the bridge is too short, it will result in a choppy introduction. Even if the opening device is powerful, it can easily misfire, unless it is carefully escorted to the thesis. But care is not the enemy of progression. The bridge should not be longer than necessary. It should not drift casually towards the thesis. A strong bridge progresses steadily towards the thesis—robustly without rushing to its goal.

There are at least four distinct bridge-making techniques. To start with, the essayist may draw out an implication from the attention-getter: a lesson learnt, a corollary (to the striking fact, quotation etc that set the essay into motion). The implication should walk the attention-getter right up to the essay thesis.  

Secondly, the essayist may draw an analogy between, say, the situation in the attention-grabbing story or quotation at the outset and a parallel scenario that prefigures and sets up the thesis.  

A third option for the essayist is to raise a question based on the attention-grabbing device (the definition, the story etc). The question should be so constructed that it immediately requires the statement of the thesis for its answer.

Another way to create a smooth transition between the opening and the thesis could be to follow up the attention-getter by highlighting an aspect of it that anticipates the thesis. This may be a short comment on a point made by the opening device: the point in turn becomes the reason for bringing up the thesis.  

To be clear, these are not the only techniques or options for bridge-making. Other factors being equal, a smooth introduction always leads the essay from the front.