Essay Format Tips from an English Teacher

Essay Format Tips from an English Teacher

As you study you will find out that the way in which you present your research papers and other assignments will have a great impact on your grade.

For this reason, we decided to put down a step-by-step guide to help with your essay format, so that you can make it in a way that most teachers will be impressed with.

Why is formatting so important?

The reason for your essay format is readability.

If you come up with a paper with the best content ever written, but it turns out to be messy and hard to read, the person who is evaluating your grade will probably not even read it completely.

This is why a proper essay format will guarantee that, at first, your paper is fully read.

This is how you should format your paper

If you are wondering what is essay format, well it consists of the way in which you organize and show your researched content and comments.

Now, there are two important aspects of your essay format:

  • The first one is the word format, which will give symmetry to your paper and make it more visually appealing.
  • The second one is the structure of your essay, the order in which you release the information to the reader.

About the first part, there are plenty of options for a result of several essay formats, but you will find out that there is a major preference, especially in college to keep things as follows:

  • Use the Time News Roman font in size 12 for the content
  • Keep all your document with a double space between lines
  • Use page breaks to avoid paragraphs from breaking in half
  • Use page breaks and create sections to separate the Title, introduction, body, and conclusion of your essay.
  • Use a proper margins format –Usually, the default setting (2.5-2.5-3-3) is ok, but some teachers can ask for a specific format when giving you the assignments.

With this in mind, you can start writing, so, next, we are going to show you how to structure your format of an essay.

Essay Format Tips from an English Teacher
Essay Format Tips from an English Teacher

The parts of an essay?

As we mentioned above, you should use section breaks to define the parts of your essay for the reader: Title, introduction, body, and conclusion.

Therefore, this is how you are going to proceed with writing and structure your essay. Make sure you go through the following points as they are the key points here.

  • Front Page

Keep using your format as in the whole document with 12 size letters and write down the name of your institution.

Next, set three spaces under the name of your institution and place your title.

And finally, in the last lines of that page, write down your name, the information of your classroom and assignment –course name, number, your teacher’s name and the date in which you are submitting the format essay.

Make sure that all written on this page is centered and then, add a section break at the end.

  • First page

Now, from here and until the moment you open the bibliography section, you should always add a header to each page which should include your last name + the page number.

Next, start writing from the left the information of your essay:

  1. Your full name
  2. Your teacher’s full name
  3. Your class name
  4. Submission date
  5. (This one goes centred) Your papers Title

Then, at the very first line of your title start writing your introduction.

  • Introduction

As explained above, when using this essay format you will start writing immediately after the set title of your paper.

Your introduction should always be kept simple. Here, you will break down to the reader how your paper is built, explaining the information contained in order and giving to know what are the questions that you answer at the end in your conclusions.

Regardless of your essay format, you need to keep the introduction short. Usually, about two or three paragraphs will make the reader notice that there is enough and yet not excessive information.

From this point and on, use page breaks on the last paragraph of every page to keep them from being cut.

  • Body

As for the body of your essay, the best is to create a structure in which you determine subtitles based on the important aspects of your essay’s topic.

Keep in mind that using citations, statistics and news can give your work a better backup and more credibility.

  • Conclusion

In the end, write down what you learned from the research and give the answers to the questions made in the introduction.

Here, you apply a section break and open your bibliography.

  • Bibliography

You will need to base your writing on something other than your actual knowledge; therefore, using reliable sources implicates that you have to mention them.

This is how your proper essay format example would go:

In the body

In the body of the text, just wrap your quotes inside quotation marks and follow them with:

  • (Page number) if the author appears in the actual quote
  • (Author’s last name, page number) if the name doesn’t appear

In the bibliography

Here, you should list all the sources in alphabetical order for your essay bibliography writing the last name of the author, followed by his pile name, the title of his work and publishing information –Editorial, place, and date-

Keep in mind that there are different formats for different types of sources –like videos, slides and such-

There is another way?

If you need essay writing help or with essay formats let us know, and our team of professional writers will take care of your project in no time.