How To Write An Interesting Essay

Your ability (or lack of it) to write an interesting essay can make the difference between you getting your dream job, and your not getting that job. Similarly, your ability (or lack of it) to write an interesting essay can make the difference between your getting a place in a top notch school and your not getting such a place. Many academic institution administrators in charge of admissions, as indeed many employers, these days insist on prospective students and employees writing essays on various topical issues (or about themselves), as a way of gaining insight into the prospective student's and prospective employee's way of thinking – and see if it is a 'way of thinking they can work with.'

Obviously then, the ability to write an interesting essay is something you would endeavor to acquire. So how do you go about writing an interesting essay?

The first key to writing an interesting essay is organizing your thoughts properly. As with everything in life, taking a short period of time and devoting it to planning and organizing your work before launching into the essay writing task can make the difference between coming up with an awesome essay and coming up with a mediocre piece of work. At this stage of your essay writing, you should work out what your essay is to say (the points you are to talk about in your essay); and your flow of thought in the essay.

Talking about 'flow of thought' in your essay brings us to the second key to writing an interesting essay, namely effective transition from point to point in the essay. The most uninteresting pieces of work presented in the name of essays tend to be disjointed jumbles of thoughts, which make for difficult reading. Ideally then, if what you come up with is to be termed as an interesting essay, it is upon you to ensure that by the time the reader (who might be a very important decision maker) gets to the end of the first paragraph, they have gotten interested in reading what you are to say in the next paragraph.
The idea of getting the reader to desire to read what you have to say in the next paragraph brings us to yet another key to writing an interesting essay, namely that you have to ensure that you use a tone that is engaging to the reader. For every point you identify as one of things you will need to talk about in your essay, you need to also ask yourself how you can present the same point in a way that is likely to personally engage the reader. This is perhaps the most important facet to writing an interesting essay; since if you can make your essay personally engaging to the reader, right there and then you get at least half the marks for having an 'interesting essay.' Your ability to personally engage the reader is dependant on your story telling skills, which are in turn dependant on how widely read you are.

Of course, as you go about trying to come up with an interesting essay, you must take care not to do things that will obviously bore the reader. Excessive use of cliches, or coming across as a 'know it all' in your essay are some of the major turn-offs in this respect, to avoid.