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5 Steps to an Excellent Economics Essay

We all know that essay structure is important. It's been said that a good essay is like a sandwich... you need an introduction, main body and a conclusion. This is rather vague advice, and so here are some pointers that should help you to construct an excellent economics essay. This post is designed to support questions that require all the assessment objectives tested. These types of questions tend to feature command terms like 'discuss', 'to what extent' or 'evaluate'... Image source The 5 step process This process is not perfect but does provide a framework to help you construct your essay. Feel free to use whatever elements you believe will add to your performance... 1 - Annotate the question Simply underline the command terms, highlight the parts which you need to respond to and the key terms etc. This will ensure you understand the question, helps you to focus and reduces the likelihood that you'll go off topic. 2 - Plan  I would...

Keep it simple, appear smarter

Image source:  Blisstree.com Of the many personal statements written by our year 13s, many I read are scattered with long, complex words, some of which I often do not understand myself! When asked what they mean, it isn't particularly rare to find out the student didn't know either. They often admit to using the synonym feature in their word processor to make them sound 'more intelligent'. It seems, however, that they may be wasting time searching for more imaginative words with the intention of sounding more knowledgable. They may have been far better to keep the simple word after all! Daniel Oppenheimer of UCLA found (in this  study ) that using shorter words actually makes you seem more intelligent and this article explaining Oppenheimer's work by Fast Company gives a great review of the study and the findings. He and his team conducted studies that found that the use of longer words in texts had the exact opposite effect of making you seem smarter to the ...