Essay Writing Skills

This guide is designed to help students to structure their work. Like any written work, essays require careful planning, reading and note taking, appropriate academic style, referencing and structure. An essay is different from a report in that it is generally written as one flowing document that uses paragraphs to separate ideas, without the section headings, underlining, numbering and bullet points that are used in reports. Usually, essays do NOT have diagrams or appendices.

Essays have 4 vital sections
:
Introduction
,
Main Body
,
Conclusion and
References/Bibliography
.
The word count applies to three essay sections, NOT including the References or Bibliography.

The Introduction paragraph/section

This helps set the context for the essay. It introduces the main ideas of the essay and draws the reader into the subject. A good Introduction gets to the heart of the subject and captures
（俘获）

the interest of the reader, acting as a trailer to what is to follow. It tells readers what to expect by addressing Who, What, When, Where, Why and How?
The Introduction outlines the main issues on which you intend to focus and others you just intend to mention. In this way it sets your parameters. It defines any terms or concepts that you need and acknowledges possible issues raised by the question and explains your approach.

It could include a comment upon the importance of the topic. It may act as an overview in summarising the issues to show an understanding of the exact question and present the method of research or experiment. It is often about 10% of the length of the essay.

An example of a basic Introduction for ‘
Discuss the relevance of the marketing mix for a tourism organisation’ might be:
The purpose of this essay is to…

(repeat the essay task in your own words, i.e.