Essays about grand themes such as love, beauty, goodness or morality guarantee a low rating in terms of essay quality. You can find threads of any or all of these concepts in any novel or literary work, which is precisely why you shouldn't write about them. A surefire way to contribute to the slush pile of bad essays is to write about pride in Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," for example. You can, however, use pride as a starting point to get to a more specific topic. Abstract ideas tend to mean different things to different people, while concrete terms have fixed and physical meanings, explains professor John Friedlander of Southwest Tennessee Community College. The primary difference between a strong essay and a weak one is specificity. Rather than write about the first theme or idea that strikes you, read through your material a second time, take notes and keep hunting until you find a topic that unites an interesting abstract theme with concrete and specific evidence.
If your professor asks for five pages, don't try to impress him by writing 20 or skimp by turning in three. Your introduction should account for roughly 20 percent of your essay, which means that a one-page introduction sets the stage for a five-page essay. You need to size your topic based on the length of the assignment. If you choose a thesis that covers a broad topic such as costumes in 18th-century literature or the history of the novel, for example, it will take far more than five pages to make your argument. Essays with this fault either go far beyond the page limit or present thin content on a vast topic. To avoid turning in a tome or a loosely formulated paper, narrow your thesis to suit the assignment.
An essay filled with over-the-top, convoluted language hints to your audience that you're stretching your sentences out to meet the page requirement. The same thing goes for large font size, exaggerated page margins and extra spaces and returns. A wordy paper is a pain to read, and you want a happy professor grading your paper. It's better to dig a little deeper for relevant points to your argument or spend more time unpacking and presenting an interpretation that interests you. The Online Writing Lab at Purdue University emphasizes the importance of using concise specific language to make your point more effectively. Follow the assigned format guidelines for font style and size, page margins and spacing to avoid losing easy points.
You need literary distance to effectively proofread your own paper, explains Purdue University's Online Writing Lab. In other words, read your essay again an hour or two after you finish your final draft. The next day is even better. Otherwise, you may miss simple grammatical and punctuation errors. Use a spell-checker program, proofread for word choice issues and hunt feverishly for the dreaded sentence fragments that so often wreak havoc on an essay grade. An effective method for catching sentence fragments is to start with the last sentence of the essay and read sentences in reverse order from last to first.