Writing+an+Outstanding+Essay+Response+on+a+World+History+Exam

You guessed it! We have a test coming up in World History, and it will be an essay test based on the units we have studied up to this point. We realize that you may not have formal essay writing training to date, so today we will devote much of the period to preparing you for this endeavor. This will be the format you need to follow for every essay test you have this year, so if you don't master it this time around, don't worry. You will have future opportunities to do so.

For today's discussion, we will be considering the following practice question, so please refer to it when practicing throughout this lesson.

Step #1: Understand the Question
This may sound silly, but oftentimes, students get tunnel vision when they take an exam. They have stayed up so late cramming that their brains stop functioning, and they get in such a hurry to write that they do not take time to fully comprehend the question and just spew out every fact they have memorized in their head about one concept in the question. This merely demonstrates to a teacher that you know how to regurgitate memorized facts; it shows no sense of critical thinking or analytical skills, which are the most important traits teachers want to assess in a world history class.

Before you write one single word in response to a question, break it down in your own words. Take time now to restate the question above in your own words to ensure that you understand what it is asking.

Step #2: Prewrite
At this point in your career, at least one of your English teachers has taught you a prewriting strategy to help get your brain focused on a writing prompt. Some popular ones include brainstorming, graphic organizers, T-charts, and Venn diagrams. After you have made sure you understand the question, choose a prewriting strategy that works for you and let your mind unleash all the facts you know about the question. Try to organize these informational gems as much as possible during this process without stifling your mindflow. Do this for a couple of minutes until you feel that you have included all the most significant facts in your memory related to the question. Take two minutes to do this now with the question above.

Step #3: Thesis
Once you have understood the question and conducted a brief prewriting session, you must develop the most important aspect of the essay: the thesis. I cannot stress enough how important your thesis statement is to the success of your essay. For those who have never been taught what a thesis is, it tells your reader what you plan to prove in your essay. The format for every historical essay test you will write is **persuasive argument**. Every time we give you an essay test, we expect you to persuade us to agree with your thesis based on the argument you make in your essay. The thesis will tell us exactly what you plan to persuade us to believe through your argument in your essay. Now, look back at your prewriting and compose a thesis statement that you can support with that evidence.

Step #4: Outline
Most students hate this I realize, but we can always tell the difference between strong and weak essays when we see that a student has organized his or her thoughts before actually writing an essay. While many of you have been taught the traditional roman numeral outline format, this is unnecessary for an essay exam where time is crucial. Using your thesis as your guiding light, simply take the prewriting you just conducted and organize it in a way that will allow you to effectively persuade us to believe your argument. Only include evidence from your prewriting that will support your thesis. Try to place the most important evidence first and work your way down the list until you have exhausted your argument. Make sure that these ideas will flow smoothly together once you begin writing. There should be a relationship between all items that appear next to each other in an outline. Take a few minutes now to organize your prewriting into an outline that will allow you to prove your thesis effectively in a persuasive argument.

Step #5: Introduction
Although the four steps above may seem time-consuming to conduct during an essay exam, the process will help the essay write itself once you master it. Instead of stopping and starting your writing continuously to gather your thoughts, they will already be organized for you so that you can concentrate on expressing them clearly and smoothly to prove your point. As you have probably learned in your English classes, every essay must have an introduction; you have to start somewhere, right? On an essay exam, the introduction allows you to acquaint the reader with your topic and present your thesis. With your introduction, you need to hook your reader so that he or she wants to actually read your essay, give a very brief background about your topic, summarize your argument, and wrap it neatly around your thesis statement at the end of the paragraph. Teachers often disagree with each other about where the thesis should be placed in the introduction: beginning, middle or end. This year, we are requiring all 9th graders **to place the thesis statement at the end of their** **introductory paragraph.**

Step #6: Body
No, we are not talking about PE class, but you do "have to feed the body to feed the mind." Your body paragraph or paragraphs will give you the opportunity to convincingly persuade your reader that your thesis is undeniably right. "Evidence, evidence, evidence" must be your mantra in the body paragraphs. When you present a piece of your argument within a body paragraph, you need to reinforce it with as many specific examples as possible to drive your point home. Probably the main reason students do not perform as well as they hope on essay exams is because they do not support their arguments well enough in the body of their work. Besides concrete examples, body paragraphs do not really differ from introductory paragraphs, you still need to have a topic statement that sets out to prove one or more components of your thesis statement. Each body paragraph needs to continue to hold the reader's attention as you transition from one idea to the next, and you need to reinforce the main idea of your paragraph with a concluding statement that you can hopefully make an easy transition from in the next paragraph.

Step #7: Conclusion
You are almost there. You have five minutes left to dazzle your reader with a knockout punch. You must finish as strongly as you began. Everyone loves a happy ending, so give it to them. Thankfully, writing the conclusion should be easier in many ways than starting your essay. Simply follow the same formula that you have used for every other paragraph thus far. The main goal of a strong conclusion is to reinforce your thesis statement and leave the reader with a closing thought that challenges him or her to think more intensely about your argument. Again, it does not matter if your thesis appears at the beginning, middle or end of your conclusion as long as you rephrase it so that it is not verbatim from your introduction. Try to leave enough time to summarize your argument in multiple sentences before leaving your reader with a flourish of brilliance before time is called.

Step #8: Proofreading
Okay, we realize that you may not always have enough time to do this depending on the limits of the exam, but ideally, you should try to use the last five minutes of an essay exam proofreading your essay and correcting careless errors and clarifying any vague points you made along the way. This may allow you an opportunity to strengthen a weak body paragraph with an additional example or rephrase a topic sentence that does not make as much sense now as when you wrote it a few moments ago. Hopefully, you will use your time efficiently enough to leave yourself this space to perfect your essay one last time before submission.