In order to write essays successfully, you need to have your own ideas and be able to express them.

The following are my beliefs of essay writing.

When you write an essay, you are trying to express a difficult idea clearly. Therefore, you need to organize your thoughts so that you present one idea at a time.

Each major idea should get a paragraph. Each supporting detail to that idea, should get a sentence.

Remember to connect your paragraphs together, and to connect your sentences together with transitions. These will help your reader along, amid the difficult ideas.

Transitions could be

Pronouns

Repetition

Specific words or phrases.

Everything you write should connect, in some way or another, to your life. Books and poems are not written in a vacuum. Instead, they are meant to express ideas that everyone feels. They are meant to be in someway universal.

So, the trick of an essay is to show how the universal ideas apply to you.

Possibly the most important of the beliefs, most people are more then willing to skip out on this. They will wheedle th "correct" answer out of the teacher or will try to sling enough in the essay so it appears that they know what they are talking about.

Accept no substitutes. Think your own way through to an answer.

After you have written an outline, and maybe even after you have written a draft, you will realize that your initial idea has transmogrified into something else.

Follow you bliss and change the essay. It is better to write what you believe than to try and fake your way out.