The Best Guide to Write an Essay, an Article... or Your Book!

Establishing a well-defined objective is the starting point when it comes to writing an essay, an article, or a book. It will help ease your creative force, writing process, and develop a great outline. It’s the structure you’re building your essay or book on. If not properly set-up, all the other steps will fall apart. Following the right idea is like adding the right base to your structure. All the entire pre and writing stages are very, very important.

“To know where you’re going, you need to have a destination in mind”. It’s the same when you’re writing. Your write begins with you and it searches a destination! Once you’ve established it, you have the perfect foundation on which you can build everything.

However, establishing your aim is not all there in your writing journey. You’ll also need to determine who you’re writing for, an idea of the sort of content, and an outline.

Identify Your Objective

Figuring out a good reason for your essay, article, or book is the best way to coming up with great content. You can ask yourself to help you come up with your objective:

“What do I want the write to accomplish for me?”

From there you can go on, such as:

What do the people and readers want to read?

Will this write serve more than one purpose?

What can help widen my reach and to get new leads?

We can show you how to answer those questions.

Objectives:

I want to share my expertise, establish my credibility, and to help fill a need for my audience.

Share Your Expertise

You’re someone who loves what you do and wants to prove to others how well you do it?

In that case, your essay, your write, your song, your article or your book can help you do that.

So how can you do this?

Well, by writing something you’ve studied or taken courses in or even apprenticed for. Write about specific tricks of the trade your experience has taught you. It can be a cook-related myth that people have bandied about for years but you have the evidence to prove or disprove.

Establish Your Credibility

Write about something you’ve honed yourself that has gotten good reviews. Maybe it’s a recipe you developed that has people drive all across town to come to taste it. You can even show reviews or thank you notes from your fans.

Write about something that you’ve developed and others appreciated so well. Maybe it’s an app, a poem or a memory… whatever the case may be, you can use it in your essay, inspirational article or eBook.

Take advantage of anything that makes you stand out and feature it. If you received any awards, certification, recognition, or if someone famous has spoked of you, definitely, don’t hesitate to make your readers be aware of it.

Help Your Audience Out

Do you feel you can provide a better service than anyone else in the market?

So why not use it to your advantage?

You can create articles to explain this idea, innovative inspiration or your journey.

For example, an eBook will be a great way to help your readers/customers learn more about what you do. Show your audience how you stand out with your ebook.

Determine the Target Audience

To consider what the audience would want to read, there are a few things to focus on… after all, what’s the point of an ebook that no one wants to read?

Objective questions:

Are you targeting a particular age group or gender?

People working in a specific field or particular interests?

Once you answer these questions, you’ll have the audience you’re targeting and you can tailor your content to better suit them and their interests.

CREATE!!!

The first step was the objective. The second one, the scheme of things to do.

Now, find new ideas within your given topic to write about.

So, how do you do that?

Brainstorm

1. Write down all the points you want to write about in your essay, song, article or ebook. Anything that comes to mind that you feel would be important.

2. Keep a notebook nearby, you never know when inspiration arrives.

3. Mind mapping. It not only helps generate ideas, but it also helps trigger your creativity and keep your thoughts going. If you don’t know how to create a mind map, check this: MindMup, Scapple, Mind Meister, iMindmap, and XMind.

Research

1. If you have a particular genre in mind to write about, do some market research and see what others are doing.

2. Learn from the mistakes of the others.

3. Take notes of what to do and what not to do.

Search Online

The best way to generate ideas is by figuring out what people want to know or learn more about.

How to do that?

Well, it’s easy to head on to where they ask the most questions. Websites such as Quora, Yahoo Answers, Reddit, and Ubersuggest can come in real handy there. Look for questions you can answer and you can even head on to Google Trends and see what the most searched things are, which will also help you out.

Look Inside of You

Sometimes the answer we’ve been looking for has been inside us all along, philosophical, right? In any case, when it comes to your startup, company or business, the likelihood of knowing what your customers want to read is right there. All you’ll need to do is to refer to your customer service, marketing departments or coworkers. They’re the ones that spend the most time in the field with your customers. They know what your customers like, don’t like, what they’re curious about and basically anything that might interest them.

Plan the Content

This is the point in which you can apply what you learned back in your life. Whether you want to do that by creating an outline or a mind map, that’s up to you. Both hold various advantages. They will give you a clear image of where you’re going. Additionally, they’ll help you stay organized.

You can think of the plan as your trusted guide. If you miss something or get lost on what to write, you can go back to it and figure out where you went wrong. But at the same time, it’s okay if you realize later on that you’ve forgotten something and want to add it as you go along.

Determine the Structure

There are 2 different structures you can use: point-by-point and block. It will help if you have a clear image of how you’re approaching the topic you’re going to talk about in your essay, article or book. In that case, there are 5 different types of writing you can choose from depending on the purpose of your ebook.

1. Cause and Effect

This type of writing is used to discuss something that happened and the effect that it had. Let’s say your article is meant to help writers create interactive ebooks. After all, with the increase in the use of ebooks in every walk of life, people need to adapt to that. So the structure here can also be either point-by-point or block.

2. Problem and Solution

This type of writing is used if the purpose behind your ebook is to help tackle a problem in the market or a problem your readers might be facing. This type of writing can work with either structure. You can point out each problem in a chapter with its solution then go onto the next (point-by-point). Or you can point out all the problems in one chapter, then all the solutions in the next (block).

3. Compare and Contrast

This type of writing is used to compare different options. If you’re selling a product and want to show your readers how this product is better than the rest out there in the market, this one’s for you. Like with the other two, you can use either point-by-point or block structure.

4. Definitions and Classification

The structure here will be point-by-point. This type of writing is used when going in-depth to explain a term or concept and how it can benefit the reader.

5. How-to

The structure here will be point-by-point or in the form of steps and examples to help give your readers valuable input. This type of writing is used to give readers instructions or ways to do something. Maybe you can hand out some tricks you’ve learned, or recipes you’ve come up with. Whatever your business, you can help spread some knowledge with an instructional book.

5. Create an Outline

Have you ever seen an artist get to work? The first thing they do is sketch an outline so that they more or less know what they want to draw, and where. The outline isn’t meant to do anything but give the artist a helping hand. The same is true of an article’s outline. The basic structure of an outline: Introduction, Key Points, Conclusion (This is the most basic outline for everything, the bare minimum that needs to be met. Don’t worry, there’s more to it than that).

6. Introduction

The introduction is meant to help the reader get a basic understanding of what they’re about to dive into. Depending on the type of article, essay or book you’re writing, it can also be referred to as the “Preface”, “Foreword” or “Prologue”.

7. Key Points

The outline’s key points are a little complicated because they won’t be in just one point like with the introduction. The key points refer to every chapter you’ll have in your ebook. So here you’ll need to jot down each idea that you’re hoping to write about as a heading. In addition to that, you can have subheadings with all the possible things to address within the heading’s topic. The list can just go on until you have listed all the points you want to write about.

8. Conclusion

In a conclusion paragraph, you summarize what you’ve written about in your paper. When you’re writing a good conclusion paragraph, you need to think about the main point that you want to get across and be sure it’s included. If you’ve already written a fabulous introductory paragraph, you can write something similar with different wording. Here are some points to remember:

Use your introductory paragraph as a guide. If it’s a longer paper, a good place to start is by looking at what each paragraph was about. For example, if you write a paper about animals, each paragraph would probably be about one particular animal. In your conclusion, you should briefly mention each animal again. “animals like bears, monkeys and dogs are amazing creatures”.

Leave your readers with something to think about. Suggest that they learn more with a sentence like, “We have a lot to learn about racism.” You can also give them something to do after reading your article or paper. For example, “It’s easy to make your recipes. Grab some vegetables and give it a try!”.

How to Close… Make a Good Conclusion Paragraph

Remember that it’s important to wrap up your writing by summarizing the main idea for your readers. This brings your writing to a smooth close and creates a well-written piece of work.

What is the closing paragraph?

A closing paragraph or conclusion is what you will leave with your reader. It “wraps up” your article. It demonstrates to the reader that you accomplished what you set out to do. It shows how you have proved your idea. It provides the reader with a sense of closure on the topic.

Structure

A conclusion is just the opposite of the introduction. The conclusion begins specific and moves to the general.

What to include?

Your conclusion wraps up your essay in a tidy package and brings it home for your reader. Your topic sentence should summarize everything that you said. This suggests to your reader that you have accomplished what you set out to accomplish. Your supporting sentences should summarize what you have already said in the body of your article. If a brilliant idea tries to sneak into the final paragraph, you must pluck it out and let it have its own paragraph in the body, or leave it out completely. Your topic for each body paragraph should be summarized in the conclusion. Wrap up the main points. Your closing sentence should help the reader feel a sense of closure. Your closing sentence is your last word on the subject. Demonstrate the importance of your ideas. Propel your reader to a new view of the subject. End on a positive note. Your closing sentence should make your readers glad they read your paper.

Final Strategies

When you read a statement from the conclusion, ask yourself: “Why should anybody care?”. Ponder that question and answer it. Return to the theme or themes in the introduction. This brings the reader full circle. If you begin by describing a scenario, you can end with the same scenario as proof that your essay or article helps create a new understanding. Refer to the introductory paragraph by using keywords, or parallel concepts and images that you also used in the introduction. Include a summary of the paper’s main points, but don’t simply repeat things that were in the paper. Show your reader how the points you made and the support and examples you used fit together. Include a provocative insight or quotation from the research or reading you did for the paper. Propose a course of action, a solution to an issue, or questions for further study.

So you’ll be on the right track to make an “epic” closing!

Good luck.