Step 1: Issue 101 - Chapter 1: Understand the Job Is How You Begin Essays
ESL Writer Step 1 answers your initial questions about any writing effort. Where do I start? What are they asking? How should I shape it? What is the tone I can use?
How Do You Begin Essays?
So, you will write an essay, a report, or an important email. What do you do first?
Okay, let’s say you get a writing assignment in your university class, an idea for a report, or an essay test question on the TOEFL or IELTS; how will you start?
What’s your system? You must have a reliable, go-to procedure and a pre-writing checklist. Do you have that? What’s your strategy? When you ask yourself, where do I start? What is your answer?
ESL Writer Step 1 answers your initial questions about any writing effort. Where do I start? What are they asking? How should I shape it? What is the tone I can use?
What is the job? Then the Step 1 workbook helps you learn to apply these procedures.
This Step 1 workbook encourages you to practice writing all kinds of fun and helpful practice text. Engaging in writing exercises enables you to learn specialized techniques, which you can actively apply when needed—there are a dozen typical writing tactics you practice individually.
ESL writing students search the web, search for books and search for essays on starting essays.
Frequent answers in popular writing guides, written by native speakers, and written for native speakers, teach writers to use a thesis statement, which is not my answer.
Others teach you to use a main idea sentence, not my explanation.
ESL writing students ask me this all the time, “Where do I start?”
Thesis statements start essays promising to prove their proposal, while main idea topic statements start papers promising to support a single idea; both are correct, but neither is where essays start for similar reasons.
The first thesis statement is wrong on an entirely different level, and the second piece of advice is bad on a different level, so both are correct and incorrect.
Students who apply this advice are trapped in a circle of confusion, unaware of the cause.
Where is the ESL writer to begin?
Before starting, the beginning writer needs a pre-writing procedure to understand, discover, and organize their thoughts.
My answer to the question, “Where do I begin?” is why I wrote the ESL Writer Step 1 Self-Teaching Guide and Workbook.
To learn to write essays well, one must
UNDERSTAND YOUR ESSAY’S INTENT
before putting down one word.
An essay begins in the writer’s mind, setting up their strategy’s tactics long before they write any word, before they offer a thesis statement, and long before they provide a main idea topic sentence.
Starting an essay begins with clearly understanding what you will write; by doing that, you must understand the parts of any writing assignment.
Dauer ESL Essay Writing Step 1
With minimal backstory and wasted words, this ESL essay writing Step 1 gets right to the point: First, how to recognize any writing assignment or essay test questions in five parts. Then, it puts a dagger in the heart of any creature living in your head that causes confusion or doubt.
You learn to recognize them first, then their importance, and finally, to use the five parts of any essay test question—the prompt, the topic, the guidelines, the task, and the question type.
This ESL-student self-teaching guide and workbook uses essay test questions from the Independent essay on the TOEFL iBT® exam, but its lessons are equally valuable for any ESL essay writing you may need.
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