If you have the ability to choose the subject of your essay, choose something that you are interested in. Not only will this motivate you to write the essay, but it may improve the quality of the essay as well. Make sure your subject also has a broad enough scope that you can write enough material about the topic to fulfill your essay's length requirements. On the one hand, if you choose a topic that is too specific you may not be able to find enough information to write about. On the other hand, if the topic you choose is too broad you may not be able to fully explain the issue within the length of the essay.
When writing your essay, consider who your target audience will be. You will want to write your essay in a way that will keep the reader’s attention. Depending on your topic, some styles of writing may be inappropriate. For example, writing in a humorous style is probably inappropriate when writing about starving children. If you compare the different styles of writing from a legal documents to newspapers, they are very different stylistically for good reason.
It is important that your essay has a strong structure including a beginning, middle and end. When starting your essay, make notes about what you want to say and any subcategories you want to include in the body of the essay. If you have a word limit on your essay, make sure you have enough room to write a solid introduction and conclusion.
If you are writing an academic essay, you need to use quality references to support your claims. Generally, you will want to list your references in a bibliography or list at the end of the essay, indexed alphabetically by the author's name and publication. You can also refer to references within the essay itself numerically, such as by putting [1] next to your cited information. However, reference format may depend highly on the preferences of the teacher that assigned the essay.
Plagiarism is considered a serious violation of ethics in colleges and schools and can be a cause for suspension of even expulsion. Using information to base your article on from another document is not considered plagiarism. However, using significant amounts of text verbatim without referencing the material or copying and pasting from another publication and claiming that it is your writing is considered plagiarism.