Essay Writing Skills is in High Demand!
Essay writing skills are one of the most demanded in the UK and English speaking education systems. Yet, there is little attention paid to training (with emphasis) students in the skills it takes to write the kind of factual, scholarly and analytical essays that teachers and academics expect.
Why is training needed in essay writing skills, you ask?
Because an essay in the western tradition of education has an important purpose and is different than other assignments. An essay is an essay, and not a report, or an article, or journal piece, precisely because of the foundational structure and formula it contains. Essay writing is both a science and an art – it requires its writer to pose as a learned expert, and not just a mere student who is learning by writing like they would writing a scientific deductive reasoning report or a creative flowing diary. And like anything that is both a science and an art which requires inductive reasoning skills, essay writing skills must be trained.
Isn’t it so frustrating that schools don’t teach proper essay writing skills?
Indeed! Parents of school and university students contact us all the time about tailored private tutoring for essay writing skills. Caring parents who observe their children’s performance and grades in their assignments always notice that when it comes to essay writing, teachers often demand it but rarely have trained their children in all the fundamentals of essay writing, including for example, how to first and foremost unpack a complex essay question, how to respond to the question through that all important one sentence answer called a ‘Thesis’. After all of these years of tutoring and teaching, are professional tutors, it never ceases to amaze us when students in GCSE or Alevels or even at university don’t know what a thesis is or how to write one with a three point argument. Most students in the GCSE or Alevel curriculum in the UK practice essay writing skills, especially at state schools, with a focus on the marking schemes in their examination boards, and only a few months before the end of year exams. These exams’ marking schemes require students to skip the all important introduction paragraph which contains the crucial thesis statement and to simply jump to the body of the essay, making points and evidence and explanations (PEE/PEA), without really understanding or outlining their one sentence answer that helps them clarify their own direction in writing. Learning to write deeper essays that require analysis and critical thinking often comes too late into our education experience, often only at the GCSE or Alevels and even then it is not a training per se in the ‘why and how’ of essay writing, but an exercise to practice exam questions. What this translates to is a lack of experience and therefore skilfulness in the scientific and creative approach required in inductive and persuasive essay argumentation and writing.
Essay Writing Teaches Critical Thinking
There is good reason for why our education curriculum demands essay writing skills. But so often as mentioned above there is a lack of emphasis on supplying the instructions and deep and consistent teaching by every English, history, science, geography, and even art teacher in school. Essay writing demonstrates the skills in a student and learner to think through and unpack a complex question with multiple dimensions and perspective. It enables students to go on a journey of research in fact finding and expert knowing – it asks us to find out who the original knowledge seekers, known as ‘scholars and experts’, who have asked this kind of question prior to us are and what they’ve said. These scholars have spent their lives in pursuit of researching and asking the same questions, so their theories and data and facts are recognised by the body of experts as ‘fact’. It is through a journey of fact seeking and fact finding and ultimately reaching conclusions and deep answers to the complex question. Essay writing, because of its structure and demands for reaching a multifaceted approach to fact and analysis provides us with that ultimate ability called ‘critical thinking’ which students who have not been trained in essay writing often feel so confused and unclear about.
At Uber Tutors, one of our most sought after tutoring programmes is our ‘essay writing skills crash course’! Contact us today to find out how we tutor and mentor hundreds of students in proper essay writing skills and critical thinking and analysis, whilst getting top results and grades consistently in their essays in school and university – finally!
