How to write an essay

The order of operations — what to do first, second and third

Most advice about essay writing describes the finished object: it should have an introduction, three body paragraphs and a conclusion, and the thesis goes at the end of the first paragraph. All true, and none of it helps at eleven at night in front of a blank document, because the difficulty was never the shape. It is that you do not yet know what you think.

This guide is about the order of operations — what to do first, second and third so that the essay gets written rather than circled. The sequence below is what experienced writers do, and the single biggest difference between them and everyone else is that they do not start with the introduction.

The six steps, in order

Step 1

Read the question until you can say what it is really asking

Identify the instruction verb, the scope and the hidden assumption. Most marks lost on a competent essay are lost here, before a word is written.

Every essay question has an instruction verb, and it is not decoration. "Discuss" asks you to weigh competing positions and land somewhere. "Evaluate" asks for a judgement against criteria you have to make explicit. "Analyse" asks how the parts produce the effect. "To what extent…" is asking for a degree, so the answer is never simply yes or no — an essay that argues "completely" to a "to what extent" question has answered a different question.

Then find the scope. "The causes of the First World War" and "the causes of the First World War in the Balkans" are different essays, and the second is a better one to write because it can be finished. If the question is broad, narrow it yourself in the introduction and say that you are doing it.

Finally, look for the assumption the question is smuggling in. "Why did the policy fail?" presumes it failed. Sometimes the strongest essay is the one that contests the premise — but only if you notice it is there.

A practical test before you start: write the question in your own words in one sentence. If you cannot, you do not yet understand it well enough to answer it, and no amount of writing will fix that.
Step 2

Decide what you actually think, before you look anything up

Spend ten minutes writing your honest answer with no sources open. It will be wrong in places, and that is what makes it useful.

The instinct is to read first and form a view afterwards. It feels rigorous and it produces the most common failure mode in student essays: a summary of what other people have said, with a position bolted on at the end that the body never actually argued.

Instead, write for ten minutes before opening anything — what you think, why, and what would change your mind. It does not need to be good and nobody will see it. What it gives you is a position to test, which turns reading from collecting into checking. You now have a question when you open a source ("does this support my second point or undermine it?") instead of a vacuum.

You will often discover halfway through the reading that you were wrong. That is the process working. Change the position and keep going — an essay that records a mind being changed is far better than one that never had a view.
Step 3

Write a thesis somebody could disagree with

One sentence, arguable and specific. If no reasonable person could dispute it, it is a topic rather than a thesis, and the essay will drift.

The test is a single question: could an informed, reasonable person disagree with this sentence? "Social media has both positive and negative effects" fails — nobody disputes it, so there is nothing to prove and the essay will become a list. "Instagram harms teenage girls through social comparison rather than through screen time, which is why time-limit features have not worked" passes: it is contestable, specific about the mechanism, and it commits.

A good thesis also predicts the essay. A reader who finishes your thesis should be able to guess roughly what your paragraphs will be. If they cannot, either the thesis is too vague or the essay is about to wander.

Be wary of the three-part thesis you were taught at school — "X affects Y socially, economically and politically". It produces three paragraphs in any order, which is a list, not an argument. A thesis that makes the paragraphs depend on one another is doing more work.

And be honest about what you can support. A thesis you cannot defend in the word count, with the reading you have actually done, is one you will quietly abandon by paragraph three — and the marker will notice exactly where.
Step 4

Outline in claims, not in topics

One sentence per paragraph, written as an assertion. Then check that each paragraph needs the one before it.

This is the step that separates an essay from a collection of paragraphs, and it takes fifteen minutes. For each paragraph, write the claim it makes as a full sentence. "Background on the Industrial Revolution" is a topic — you cannot tell whether the paragraph succeeded. "Mechanisation raised output before it raised wages, and that gap is what produced the political reaction" is a claim; you can.

Next to each claim, write what evidence it needs. This turns the outline into a research plan and, more usefully, it surfaces the paragraph you cannot actually support before you have spent an hour writing it.

Then apply the shuffle test: swap any two body paragraphs. If nothing breaks, they are not yet an argument — they are a list, and the essay will read as one. Reorder until each paragraph needs its predecessor.

For anything argumentative, decide now where the strongest objection goes. Not the weakest one. An essay that defeats only a straw man reads as evasive, and the reader always knows.
Step 5

Draft the body fast and badly, on purpose

Write the middle first, quickly, without editing. Editing while drafting is what turns a three-hour essay into a seven-hour one.

Drafting and editing use different kinds of attention, and doing them at once is why people stare at the same paragraph for twenty minutes. Write the body straight through from the outline without going back. Leave a bracket where you need a quotation you have not found, a fact you have to check, or a sentence that is not working — [find the 1979 figure] — and keep moving.

Skip the introduction entirely at this stage. You cannot introduce an argument you have not yet made, and the introduction written first is almost always an introduction to a slightly different essay than the one that gets written.

Expect the first draft to be bad. Its purpose is to exist. The good essay is made in the next step, and it cannot be made from nothing.
Step 6

Revise in separate passes, largest first

Structure, then paragraphs, then sentences, then proofreading. Fixing a comma in a paragraph you are about to delete is wasted work.

Pass one, structure: does each paragraph earn its place, and are they in the order the argument needs? Cut whole paragraphs without mercy here. This is where the marks are.

Pass two, paragraphs: does each make one point, state it in the first or second sentence, and support it? Is the link to the next paragraph in the logic rather than in a connective word bolted to the front? "Furthermore" is what you write when you have not worked out the relationship between two ideas.

Pass three, sentences: vary the length deliberately. Cut the hedging that is not carrying real uncertainty — "it could be argued that perhaps" is three hedges for one claim. Replace abstract nouns with verbs where you can.

Pass four, proofreading, and do it last and differently: read it aloud, or have the computer read it to you. Your eye corrects your own typos silently; your ear does not. Only now write the introduction, and then the conclusion, when you know what you have actually argued.

Six mistakes that cost the most marks

Answering the question you wish had been asked

The most expensive mistake and the most common, because it does not feel like a mistake — the essay is well written and the research is real. It simply answers something adjacent. Before submitting, read the question again and then read your thesis. If the thesis does not contain the question’s key terms in some form, you have drifted. Marking rubrics weight relevance above almost everything else, which is why a brilliant essay about the wrong thing scores below a competent one about the right thing.

Summary wearing the clothes of analysis

Retelling what a source says, or what happens in a text, feels productive and fills the page. It is not analysis, and markers spot it instantly. The difference is the question the sentence answers: summary answers "what?", analysis answers "how?" or "why does this matter?". A practical fix — after any sentence that describes, write "which matters because…" and finish it. If you cannot, the sentence is doing no work.

The straw counterargument

Engaging with the weakest version of the opposing case makes your argument look strong and is transparent to anyone who knows the field. Steelman it instead: state the opposing position in the form its most intelligent advocate would recognise, then answer that. It is genuinely harder, it is the single clearest signal of real thinking, and if you cannot answer the strongest version, that is important information about your thesis.

Hedging everything

"It could perhaps be argued that there may be some evidence to suggest…" is four layers of insulation around a claim, and the effect is not caution but emptiness. Hedges should mark genuine uncertainty and nothing else. Where your evidence supports a claim, make the claim. Academic writing is not the absence of commitment; it is commitment that is proportionate to the evidence.

Padding to reach the word count

Long introductions, restated points, and sentences that announce what the next sentence will do. Every marker recognises it and it costs more than being slightly under length. If you are genuinely short, you are missing an argumentative step or an example — add substance, not words. A 900-word essay that argues something is better than a 1,000-word essay that argues it with 100 words of throat-clearing.

Leaving citations until the end

Reconstructing where a fact came from three days later is miserable and it is how accidental plagiarism happens — a paraphrase you made from a source ends up in the draft with no note attached, and by submission you genuinely no longer remember it was not yours. Put a rough reference in as you write, even just an author and a page. Tidy the formatting at the end; never the attribution.

How long should an essay be?

Whatever the brief says — and the brief always wins over any rule of thumb. Where there is no stated limit, these are the conventional ranges. Pages assume double-spaced 12pt with 1-inch margins, which is about 250 words to the page.

Words	Pages	Paragraphs	Typically
300–500	1–2	3–5	Short response, exam answer, discussion post
500–800	2–3	5–6	Standard school essay, application supplement
1,000–1,500	4–6	6–9	Undergraduate coursework essay
2,000–3,000	7–11	10–15	Term paper, extended essay
5,000+	18+	25+	Dissertation chapter, research paper

Where an AI writer actually helps — and where it does not

This site is an AI essay writer, so treat the following as interested advice and check it against your own experience. It is still what the evidence and the marking rubrics support.

Where it genuinely helps

Getting unstuck. The blank page is a real cost, and an imperfect draft to react against is easier to work with than nothing. Disagreeing with a generated paragraph is often how you discover what you actually think.
Structure. Seeing one workable arrangement of an argument is genuinely useful, especially when the material is unfamiliar. The shuffle test is easier to apply to a plan somebody else made.
Finding the objection you missed. Asking for the strongest counterargument to your thesis is one of the highest-value things you can do with a model, and it is the step most students skip.
Editing your own writing. Shortening a paragraph you wrote, or flattening a sentence that has tied itself in knots, is low-risk and keeps the work yours. This is the use that survives every academic-integrity policy.

Where it will let you down

Anything requiring a source. Models produce citations to papers that do not exist, complete with plausible authors and page numbers. A fabricated reference is treated as misconduct, not as an error. Never let a citation into your bibliography that you have not opened yourself.
Your actual reading. A model has not read the edition your seminar is working from, does not know what your lecturer emphasised, and will produce a confident account of a text that is subtly not the one in front of you.
Voice, in a personal essay. A personal statement in nobody’s voice is a worse essay, not a safer one. The specific, slightly odd detail that only you would have chosen is the entire thing that makes it work.
Submitting it as your own work. This is misconduct nearly everywhere, and it is also the version of using AI that teaches you nothing. Read your institution’s policy — the rules vary far more than people assume, and several universities now permit AI for planning while prohibiting generated prose.

The rule that survives all of it: never submit a sentence you could not defend in a conversation about it. That is a sharper test than any detector, and it is the one you will actually face.

Frequently asked questions

Is this AI essay writer really free?

Yes. You get three complete essays and forty outlines, rewrites or tool runs every month at no cost, with no card and no trial countdown. You can start writing without creating an account at all — one click, and the essay is yours. Quiremark Pro lifts the limits and raises the maximum length to 5,000 words, but the free tier is a real product rather than a demo, and it does not expire.

Can teachers tell if an essay was written by AI?

Sometimes, and AI detectors are not how. Detectors like Turnitin’s and GPTZero produce both false positives and false negatives at rates high enough that several universities have stopped relying on them; they are known to flag writing by non-native English speakers and neurodivergent students disproportionately. What does give AI writing away is the prose itself — uniform sentence length, hedged claims, phrases like "in today’s society" and "plays a crucial role", and an argument that never commits. A marker who has read your earlier work also notices when the voice changes. Quiremark is built to avoid the stylistic tells, but no tool can honestly promise a draft is undetectable, and any tool that does is lying to you. The safe use of this one is what it is designed for: draft, then rewrite in your own words.

Is using an AI essay writer cheating?

It depends entirely on your institution’s rules, and those rules vary enormously — some departments encourage AI for brainstorming and outlining while prohibiting generated prose; some require a declaration; some ban it outright. Submitting AI-generated text as your own unaided work is academic misconduct almost everywhere. Using AI to plan, to get unstuck, to see how an argument could be structured, or to edit your own writing is accepted in most places and is what this tool is designed for. Read your course’s policy before you submit anything — it is usually in the handbook, and "I did not know" is not a defence anyone accepts.

Will it invent fake sources and citations?

No, and this is the thing Quiremark is most careful about. AI models will confidently produce citations to papers that do not exist — with plausible authors, real journals and convincing page numbers — and a fabricated reference is treated as academic misconduct rather than as an error. Quiremark is instructed never to invent a citation, a statistic, a quotation or a study. Where a claim needs evidence, it writes a highlighted [NEEDS SOURCE] marker naming the kind of source required, so you know exactly what to go and find. If you paste in your own sources, it cites those and only those.

How long does it take to write an essay?

The outline takes about ten seconds. The essay itself starts appearing within a couple of seconds and streams as it is written, so a 500-word essay is finished in under half a minute and a 2,000-word one in a couple of minutes. You can read the opening while the rest is still being written.

Do I have to sign up to use it?

No. You can write your first essay as a guest with one click — no email address, no password. A guest session lives only in that browser, so creating a free account afterwards is what keeps your essays and lets you reach them from another device. Everything you wrote as a guest carries over when you do.

What kinds of essays can it write?

Argumentative, expository, analytical, persuasive, compare-and-contrast, cause-and-effect, narrative, descriptive, reflective, literary analysis, research papers and college application essays — at any level from middle school to doctoral. It also handles MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard and IEEE citation formatting for sources you supply.

Can I edit the essay after it is written?

Yes, and that is the point of it. Every paragraph can be edited directly, and each one has actions to expand it, cut it, simplify it, make it more formal or strengthen the argument — one paragraph at a time, so you keep the parts that are already right. Every save keeps the previous version, so an edit you regret can be undone.

Does it write the essay in my own voice?

Not by itself, and no tool can. It matches the level, form and tone you choose, which gets it close to the register your work should be in — but voice comes from your own phrasing, your own examples and the things you happen to care about. The most useful way to use a draft is to rewrite it paragraph by paragraph in your own words, which is faster than starting from a blank page and produces something that is genuinely yours.

What model does Quiremark use?

Claude, from Anthropic, running through a server that holds the API key — your writing is never sent from your browser to a third party directly. Anthropic does not train on content submitted through its API.

Is my writing private?

Your essays are stored in your own account and are not readable by anyone else, not published, and not sold. Your prompt and essay are sent to Anthropic to produce the text and are not used to train models. Error monitoring is configured to strip essay content before anything leaves the browser, and analytics load only if you opt in. You can delete any essay, or your whole account and everything in it, from the Account screen.

Can I use this for a college application essay?

For planning and feedback, yes — it is genuinely good at spotting that your opening is a cliché or that your story has no turn in it. For the submitted text, no: most universities require the essay to be your own work and some ask you to attest to it, and an admissions essay in nobody’s voice is also simply a worse essay. The thing that makes a personal statement work is the specific detail only you have.

Free tools for each step

Thesis statement generator — Paste your prompt or topic. You get three genuinely different theses — not three rewordings of the same one — each with the strongest objection it would have to answer.
Essay outline generator — Paste your prompt. You get a plan where every paragraph makes one claim, needs the paragraph before it, and names the evidence you will have to find.
Essay introduction generator — Give us your thesis or topic and we will write the opening paragraph: a concrete hook, the context a reader actually needs, and the thesis landing last.
Essay conclusion generator — Paste your essay, or just your thesis and main points. You get a conclusion that says something the introduction could not.
Essay title generator — Tell us what the essay argues. You get ten titles across three registers, so you can pick one that fits your marker rather than one that fits a generator.
Research topic generator — Give it your subject area. You get six narrowed research questions rather than six topic labels, each with what makes it arguable and the kind of evidence you would have to find.