Qualities of Effective Essays

The English Department has identified six qualities that we want to encourage in your writing. These qualities are the main criteria used to evaluate your essays, although judgments about the grade for a particular essay may also take into account such additional factors as the difficulty of the assignment and its place in the semester's work.  The qualities are listed in order of importance, but serious deficiences even in the lower priority areas can significantly damage effective communication.

CONCEPTION
(Are you relevant, stimulating, interesting?)

1) Thoughtful ideas:  Your essays should meet the assignment by containing ideas that, if not completely "original," nonetheless go beyond stock responses, common wisdom, or ideas that are obvious or have been thoroughly discussed in class or online.  Thoughtful essays suggest that you have spent fruitful time conceiving your ideas, that you have engaged in critical analysis and creative thinking about the topic even before writing.

CONTENT
(Are you convincing?)

2) A claim with support:  Your essays should make a claim -- or a series of connected claims -- that your readers can identify clearly.  Support is essential but may take a number of forms, such as providing reasons to accept the claim, giving examples that illustrate the point, citing relevant authorities, referring to passages in a text being analyzed, or even perhaps through a rhetorical flourish.

3) Effective organization:  Your essays should follow a plan of development that is clear and appropriate for a particular rhetorical task, such as explaining the significance of an experience, proposing a solution to a problem, comparing stories on the same theme, advocating a position on an issue, or analyzing the techniques in a poem.

4) Coherence and clarity of transitions:  Your essays should show the relationships among claims or among different elements of support, so that at every point in an essay readers know where the argument is heading and how the current topic is related to the main idea.

EDITING
(Are you presentable?)

5) Mature and effective style:  Sentences should be of varied length and format; diction should be appropriate and precise, avoiding triteness and use of clichés. The style should reflect a level of syntax and diction consistent with the language employed in contemporary discourse about issues and ideas.

6) Attention to conventions, readability, and manuscript preparation:  Essays should follow the conventions for college writing, including standard forms for punctuation, spelling, verb tense, agreement, and other expectations for academic papers. Writers should ensure readability by editing for such mistakes as missing words, homonym confusions, tangled sentences, unclear references, confusing punctuation, and so forth.  Essays submitted for evaluation should demonstrate that care was taken in printing and preparation of the final manuscript.