Generic Essay

We use the term "generic essay" to talk about non-specific essay writing tasks. They can be assigned to us in many diverse fields - high school, college, or work, as part of coursework or any ASA style paper in general. This article contains basic recommendations on how to deal with general writing work and how to present a high-quality piece of writing for multiple purposes.

Overall recommendations on structure

The process of writing a generic college essay consists of the following stages:

• Understanding the topic and the task clearly and doing pre-research on the given topic to generate more ideas;
• Planning the essay and creating the core;
• Creating the text;
• Editing the text;
• Checking and proofreading.

First of all, it is essential to visualize with a single glance at all the topics that we want to include in our generic college essay. At this preliminary stage, the lineup is not very suitable: we risk writing the words in an orderly sequence and then realize that we want to bring up another topic. You start to erase and rewrite all the time, and the sheet botched before we already discourage us. Plan your essay by coming up with the important topics and then sequence them logically and chronologically.

Next, you have to think about the sources. That is where you can get the factual information that you need to write a generic essay. Research the Internet, or read some sample essays on capstone project topics. Once you find the sources and documentation necessary, immediately make a clear list or at least keep them on hand.

When writing a philosophy paper or a generic college essay, it is always good to cite the sources from which we took the information. Better still if at the end you give a list with all the references: the idea is that each of your readers should be able to verify what you have just said.

As we begin to write, let us ask ourselves an essential question: for whom are we writing? The text and its style will be different if the essay goes to the board of a bank, to a team of colleagues, to a common project or the school principal. In any case, a few basic rules apply to write a generic college essay, the same that you find in this website: write a few sentences in the introduction, each of the main body paragraphs and the conclusion, no beating around the bush nor theatrical style, a few adverbs and limited use of abstract words.

The technical jargon is only permitted if experts on the topic will read the essay. The language of a generic college essay must be clear: if you have described a phenomenon, use conventional terms; if you want to use abbreviations and acronyms, the first time you must explain in full what they mean; if you quote from other languages, check the related vocabularies; check the spelling.

Style, tips and creativity

The style of the report is to be relevant, that must adapt to the content and recipients. Many cognitive science papers topics and other essay formats are based on this ground rule.

If you are a parent who, as part of a school assignment, writes a brief report about the use of the other parents and teachers, there is no need to write in an oratory tone, long words, abundant adverbs. It will be well, indeed, to remember that your generic college essay may address diverse audiences, with different levels of education, and thus try to keep it simple and easy to follow. Which however, this does not mean your essay needs to be flat and uninspirational. Just try to find the middle ground for the written work.

If you are writing a strategic investment essay for the company to your CEO or a drama coursework to your course supervisor, you can adopt a more elaborate style, using precise language, anglicisms (no exaggeration), varied lexicon, lively rhythm with alternating long and short sentences. It all leads to a better perception and synthesis. After writing a sentence, or a paragraph, reread it to cut at least 30% of the words. Microsoft Word, the most widely used text editor, has a function (Menu Tools / Word Count) that allows you to count words and characters: it's easy, then, to make a comparison between the "before" and "after" and prune as much as possible.

The style of a generic college essay must also be consistent, that is, keeping the same register formal from the beginning to the end. The consistency should also apply to formal choices, such as the type and size of the text. You have to choose at the beginning to determine format and size one to use for the text, or else your initial task can predetermine it. In terms of fonts, don't use imaginative or tricky ones; keep it simple. Fonts like Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, Courier will perfectly do.

The tenses of the phrases: this is most suitable in the descriptions to use past simple and past continuous for reconstructing the events of the past. When you produce the text of a generic college essay, check that there are no leaps from one tense to another and that the relationship between past and present is consistent.

The subject of the sentence must always be expressed. If you use the pronouns, be sure that it is clear to whom they refer: "it", "these", "his", "the latter," etc. are sometimes visible only for the writer. Use the connectives to link sentences together (conjunctions, adverbs, pronouns). Many phrases that stand side by side to each other are not necessarily a single text.

Lastly, make sure that the information provided is in a logical relationship with the premise/introduction. Sometimes we start our generic college essay with the idea of demonstrating a certain thesis, but when writing, we find some new interesting implications. The risk is that you get to a destination that is not consistent with the title and the introduction. Good luck!