- 1). Add your thoughts to an academic essay by constructing an argument based on reason, which leads to a conclusion reflecting your own opinion. You need to decide on a thesis that you believe in before you can proceed. Include statistics, facts and figures that you drew from sources, but cite them in the text and in a bibliography. Most of the essay should reflect your own thinking.
- 2). Ensure that an academic essay reflects your own thoughts and that it is not merely a compilation of other people's ideas (See Reference 1). Do the work of adding two and two for the reader, explaining how you arrived at an opinion, using facts, figures and other people's ideas only to support your opinion.
- 3). Insert apparently random thoughts into a personal essay by allowing yourself to enter a reverie. To do this, write from a controlled stream of consciousness; allow the narrative to follow an orderly descriptive thread that may at first seem a bit dreamy, but that always, ultimately, connects to one significant point. This technique ensures that the content is comprised of your own thoughts. You can always revise to tighten it up.
- 4). Stay focused in personal essays with allusions, the literary equivalent of making a subtle hint. You might do this by broaching a thought, but then abandoning it as if it were merely an aside. Later, you return to it. However, in the intervening text, you make allusions to it. Then, when you return to the original thought, the essay will feel cohesive and meaningful to the reader, making the would-be aside relevant.
For example, you have a thought: Early in a personal essay about the sweet little house you live in, you recall the big two-story blue house you grew up in. So, you include your memory in a little paragraph of its own; then, move on with your original discussion. But throughout the discussion of the house you live in, you lightly pepper it with mentions of things that are blue. You describe feeling cramped in your little house. You mention your little girl's Victorian doll house. Then, near the end, you return to your memory of the house you grew up in. You make the connection: What you have really written about is your wish to once again live in a big two-story house.
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