Writing Lessons & Advice: Essay Help-Styles
Think of the different food styles you know: Mexican, Italian, Mediterranean, Chinese, American, homestyle, seafood, fast food, desserts...essays exist in the same way. What you’re intending to express in an essay has an appropriate style and format to use.
The basic essay types that most learn are:
argumentative/persuasive- as the name implies, this kind of essay attempts to argue or persuade certain points on an issue.
descriptive/narrative- simply put, you tell a story with these kinds of essays. Some may start with personal prompts, like about your personal beliefs, experiences, values, and such.
compare-and-contrast- this kind of essay might be done with the intention of presenting or exploring a broad idea by weighing pros, cons, fact, figures, etc. of multiple subjects. You might compare and contrast literary elements in books or films or approaches to current events.
Expository- this kind of essay intends to explain or describe something, like processes, problems, solutions, etc.
Perhaps you can imagine some where these styles might fit in in the “real world”. You’ll find them in debates, speeches, and presentations. Written articles or podcasters will discuss, compare, and contrast their big topics of conversation. Instruction manuals, how-to guides, and tutorials describe how to do something or explain a complicated topic. On a regular basis, you might even tell stories or need to argue or persuade someone of your view.
If you’re thinking about essay styles in the sense of MLA, APA, and Chicago styles, those relate to the “appearance” of your paper, so to speak. They have certain formatting guidelines dictating things like margin sizes, headers, footers, works cited, title pages, spacing, and sometimes even the language of your paper. All kinds of guides exist that help writers tailor their work to the standards of these formats. Owl Perdue is a good one. This PrepScholar tutoring blog gives a good overview too.
There are several, but these are just the common ones and a broad, basic summation of their guidelines:
MLA format is considerably the easiest to use; most academic writing and English classes will follow it. This format looks for headers at the top of your pages, in-page citations, an alphabetical works cited page, and double-spacing.
APA format is used in science and research- based writing. APA requires a title page and an abstract of 150 to 200 words. An APA paper title cannot be more than 12 words long and your list of research sources is called references.
Chicago style is the most comprehensive yet the least used. Nonetheless it’s style guides are the most respected in the writing world. Business, computing, humanities, and history fields are a few that will use Chicago style. It utilizes footnotes and endnotes and the Oxford comma. Depending on how you use your resources, they’ll be listed either on your bibliography or references.
Formatting to your appropriate style can be done somewhere between drafting and proofreading. Be sure you keep an eye on your citations and correct any potential plagarisim and errors. Using the recommended proofreading tools can be a big help on that part.
Hopefully this gives you a little more clarity on the finer points of essay-writing!
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