When students start writing their essays, they understand how overwhelming it is for experienced learners and newbies. Moreover, when they are assigned to write an essay in a foreign language, the task’s complexity increases significantly. Today students have more opportunities to level up their knowledge and write freely in any language they want. Since most schools moved to online learning, students can easily prepare for any writing task. Still, in our article, you will find seven universal recommendations that will help you to manage an essay on any foreign language.
1. Accept the Challenge
Considering an essay is not an easy task to write even in your native language, the first step is to understand the essay’s question. Both in a native and foreign-language piece, you need to understand why this task is crucial for you. First of all, you get excellent practice managing complex grammatical constructions, expanding your vocabulary, and obtaining general writing confidence. It is a perfect opportunity to learn the way of thoughts expressed in a foreign language.
2. Think Bigger
Writing an essay in a language secondary to your native language is one of the most incredible ways to train and enhance your out-of-the-box thinking. Brainstorm for the most exciting topic you can write about, and organize your thoughts to create the future essay’s plan. Stay confident your topic is something you can provide research on. Imagine your essay by depicting methods in diagrams, mindmaps, and topic sentences. Before starting your essay, you need to understand the importance of structuring the target language, not translating the draft later on.
3. Outline Your Essay
As an academic writing task should include an introduction, body paragraph, and summary, an essay on a foreign language is not much different. This structure provides enough space for a student to depict their thoughts on a specific subject. In the introduction, explain the importance of the topic to the reader. Here the audience can understand the method of your research. You present evidence from external sources with citations and links connected to the references list in three body paragraphs. In the conclusion, an author can summarize the idea and restate the thesis statement with robust arguments.
4. Use Foreign-Language Sources
As we mentioned earlier, translating is not effective in writing an essay in a foreign language. Therefore, we recommend basing your research on sources that are presented in your targeted language. Read as many articles, books, and documents as possible to efficiently prepare for the writing process. For example, if you are writing in English, you can visit a particular student service like EssayShark, and read their blog with many essay samples. Find out what other students say about how helpful it is at the EssayShark review page.
5. Keep Your Voice Unique
When you are not confident writing in a foreign language, you might think to copy someone’s idea to your essay. This might seem a great solution unless you understand it can totally ruin your writing process. The best thing about writing in a language you know less than your native one is concentrating on the meaning of the content more than style. Still, you can constantly improve it at the next stage of writing the essay. So, keep expressing your personal opinion despite the lack of language skills.
6. Make Your Writing Shine!
With editing and proofreading, you can make a miracle of your essay. Don’t underestimate revisions because students make mistakes even writing in their native language. If you write in English, you can always check your grammar, style, punctuation, clarity, and delivery with such apps as Grammarly, Ginger, and Hemingway. They work online, and they are totally fee.
7. Finally: Don’t Give Up From Making Mistakes!
If your teacher rejected the essay because it has parts to improve, don’t get disappointed instantly. This is actually a great opportunity to level up your foreign language writing skills and express your thoughts more constructively with the correct language tools. Keep practicing, and in time you’ll see better results not only in higher marks but in self-development. Believe it or not, this is much more critical for a career than a grade.
