Informative essay

Hi, I can write about 3 standard pages in an exam for a typical essay question. Smart people write less but I guess that three hand-written pages is OK. What is the essay about? Are you sure that your teacher hasn’t given the class a word limit? Anyway, here’s what I’d do.
* go to an encyclopaedia and research your topic
* identify the important issues
* give each issue a paragraph (but don’t use more than six or seven)
Your first paragraph should summarise everything that you want to say. Every following paragraph should be related to the first paragraph. The paragraphs should fit together neatly and flow in a logical way.
If you need to talk about the books you’ve read, then find a style manual in your library. The style manual will tell you how to present citations and footnotes.
Wu
Good luck!

Hi, this post is a little long maybe. Sorry to those of you with limited time to get exactly the right information quickly. Next time, I’ll just post a typical college essay; no chat!

In my previous post, I wrote a short informative essay. It’s maybe good enough for a middle-school student answer. However, for English 101 at college, I’ll have to do a little better. Here is a list of the issues I’ll consider to improve my essay.

1 analysing the title
2 organising notes and linking ideas together
3 planning the assignment
4 discussion and analysis
5 citations

1 analysing the title
The teacher asked me to write an informative essay. I went to the dictionary to find out what informative means. I discovered that I got the best information by reading about the verb ‘inform’ and also by understanding its synonyms (other words that mean approximately the same thing). To be cute, I decided to write my informative essay about being informative. This process helped me to organise my notes and link my ideas together in a logical way.

2 organising notes and linking ideas together
I used a quotation from Oscar Wilde as inspiration for my argument; my point of view. I said that it’s important to be interesting when I write or talk to people; there’s no way I’ll communicate effectively if my writing is boring. I chose that quotation after reading the dictionary definition for ‘informative’. Apparently, when the word ‘informative’ was first used (the Etymology reference), it meant “having the power to inform, animate, or vivify. OK, so I’ve found my line of argument for the essay. Now what I did was to just follow my curiosity and noted down what seemed important. I hoped that my curiosity was also putting ideas in a logical sequence.

3 planning the assignment
I looked for help about planning my assignment on the Internet. I used the www.google.com search engine. I looked for hits about essay writing. I’m familiar with IELTS preparation so I looked for IELTS resources. The information I found gave me examples of college papers and some hints about achieving a better score in the exam. When I post the next version of my informative essay, you should notice an improvement.

4 discussion and analysis
What is there to discuss about being informative? What is communication? What are the barriers to effective communication; the factors that stop my words reaching their target? These are the sorts of issues I want to discuss. Also, I’ll try to find information written by experts. I expect that some experts will have already struggled with these ideas and I’ll bet that there has already been a couple thousand years of history about communication in various cultures and in some fascinating contexts. As I read more and ask more questions, I expect to find references to communication (being informative) in professions like anthropology, psychology, medicine, philosophy, education…. So, the sky is the limit. I could keep reading and asking questions till I’d written a thesis!

5 citations
I referred to a style manual about writing citations (acknowledging the work of other authors). Sorry to just dump information here but maybe it will be helpful to read advice from a trusted authority.

Merriam-Webster Style Manual
“In high-school papers and in popular writing, sources are usually identified only by casual mentions within the text itself. In college term papers, in serious nonfiction books published for the general public, and traditionally in scholarly books and articles in the humanities, footnotes or endnotes are preferred. In this system, sequential numbers within the text refer the reader to notes at the bottom of the page or at the end of the article, chapter, or book; these notes contain full bibliographic information on the works cited. In scholarly works in the natural sciences and social sciences, and increasingly in the humanities as well, parenthetical references within the text refer the reader to an alphabetically arranged list of references at the end of the article, chapter, or book. The system of footnotes or endnotes is the more flexible, since it allows for commentary on the work or subject and can also be used for brief discussions not tied to any specific work. However, style manuals tend to encourage the use of parenthetical references in addition to or instead of footnotes or endnotes, since for most kinds of material they are efficient and convenient for both writer and reader. In a carefully documented work, an alphabetically ordered bibliography or list of references normally follows the entire text (including any endnotes), regardless of which system is used. Though different publishers and journals have adopted slightly varying styles, the following examples illustrate standard styles for footnotes and endnotes, parenthetical references, and bibliographic entries. For more extensive treatment than can be provided here, consult: Merriam-Webster's Manual for Writers and Editors (2nd ed., Merriam-Webster, 1995) The Chicago Manual of Style (14th ed., Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993) MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (5th ed., Modern Language Association of America, 1999) Scientific Style and Format (6th ed., Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994) Back to top Home My Account Contact Us Privacy Policy Site Help Merriam-Webster Online home © 2003 by Merriam-Webster, Inc.

Hello Andrea,

First create a free account at this web site,
then post your question again as a new thread.

Also, it is an NBC, not a NBC.

Good luck !!

It’s hard to trim a short essay by even 50 words because many sentences need to be changed, important ideas truncated & the writing style altered to be more telegraphic. An essay in a previous post is presented again but about 50 words shorter.

Discuss whether it is true that increasing income guarantees happiness.

Americans are not happier today than in the past even though productivity in US has more than doubled since 1948. Employers pay workers their productivity dividend in higher wages. Increasing income from increasing productivity has influenced US society but has lasting satisfaction resulted for most Americans?

Juliet Schor claims that American workers cannot choose to receive their productivity dividend as leisure time whereas counterparts in Europe do. Americans are time poor, that overwork strains the social fabric and that the work spend cycle fuelling consumerism threatens ecological sustainability.

Goods and services are available on impulse to credit-rich consumers. Instant gratification reinforces and conditions the behaviors that underpin the work and spend cycle. This cycle helps to structure the consumer’s time and defines social norms. Keeping up with the Joneses is a ‘game’ as defined in terms of the school of transactional analysis founded by Eric Berne.

Americans’ deepest psychological needs are manipulated through consumerism. Ad campaigns introduced as early as the 1920s manipulated consumers’ deepest desires and fears to influence discretionary spending. If consumerism doesn’t deliver contentment, then why doesn’t the American system correct itself? Significant factors include: the decline of unions; a consumer-oriented society in which workers take on additional overtime to pay for a material lifestyle fed by abundant credit; and the fact that employers seeking to increase revenues can reduce their labor costs by asking their employees to work overtime rather than hire additional workers - automation and downsizing increases the workload on remaining workers after each round of cost-cutting.