Essay and Letter Writing

What you need to know

• Aim for about 450 words in four to six paragraphs, written in roughly fifty minutes with five of those spent planning. A plan of four or five point-words in the margin prevents the wandering that destroys the organisation mark.
• The marks are commonly split as content, organisation, expression and mechanical accuracy, with expression carrying the largest share. That means a modest set of ideas expressed in clean English beats brilliant ideas expressed badly.
• A FORMAL letter carries the writer's address at the top right, the date beneath it, the recipient's title and address on the left, the salutation 'Dear Sir,' or 'Dear Madam,', a title written in capitals or underlined, the body, and 'Yours faithfully,' with your full name underneath.
• An INFORMAL letter carries only the writer's address and date, the salutation 'Dear Tunde,' with no recipient address and no title, and closes with 'Yours sincerely,' or an affectionate ending followed by your first name only.
• Use 'Yours faithfully' when you began with Dear Sir or Dear Madam, and 'Yours sincerely' when you began with the person's name. Note that Yours never takes an apostrophe.
• Register must match the reader. A letter to your Local Government Chairman uses full forms and formal vocabulary; a letter to your friend may use contractions and everyday words. Mixing them loses marks in both directions.
• An ARTICLE for publication needs a title, the writer's name as a by-line, an opening that states the issue, body paragraphs each with one idea, and a closing that calls for action. Match the vocabulary to the named publication, whether a school magazine or a national newspaper.
• A SPEECH opens with vocatives in correct order of seniority, such as 'The Chairman of this occasion, the Principal, members of staff, invited guests, my fellow students', followed by a greeting, a statement of the topic, the body and a word of thanks.
• A DEBATE is a speech with a side. After the vocatives you must state clearly whether you are speaking for or against the motion, give your points with evidence, attack the opposing arguments directly, and close by restating your stand.
• A NARRATIVE or story is written in the past tense, usually in the first person, with a clear setting, a build-up, a climax and an ending. Dialogue in correct punctuation lifts the expression mark if you handle quotation marks properly.
• An ARGUMENTATIVE essay must acknowledge the other side before demolishing it. An EXPOSITORY essay explains a process or an idea step by step without taking sides, and a DESCRIPTIVE essay relies on sensory detail.
• Every paragraph needs a topic sentence followed by support, and paragraphs should be linked with connectors such as however, in addition, as a result and on the other hand. Single-sentence paragraphs read as if you ran out of ideas.
• Avoid contractions, slang, pidgin, text abbreviations and rhetorical padding in formal pieces. 'Lots of' becomes many, 'kids' becomes children, 'don't' becomes do not, and 'etc' should never appear in a formal letter.
• Leave five minutes to reread for third-person s, tense consistency, capital letters and full stops. Those four checks recover more marks than any extra paragraph you could write in the same time.