Ask yourself the following questions:


involves collecting original data through surveys, interviews, or experiments. This type of research is often used to gather firsthand information about a specific topic and is particularly useful when secondary sources do not exist or are limited.
There are several different types of research that you can use to gather information for your essay, including primary research, secondary research, and tertiary research. At six years old, I stood locked away in the restroom. I held tightly to a tube of toothpaste because I’d been sent to brush my teeth to distract me from the commotion. Regardless, I knew what was happening: my dad was being put under arrest for domestic abuse. He’d hurt my mom physically and mentally, and my brother Jose and I had shared the mental strain. It’s what had to be done. Living without a father meant money was tight, mom worked two jobs, and my brother and I took care of each other when she worked. For a brief period of time the quality of our lives slowly started to improve as our soon-to-be step-dad became an integral part of our family. He paid attention to the needs of my mom, my brother, and me. But our prosperity was short-lived as my step dad’s chronic alcoholism became more and more recurrent. When I was eight, my younger brother Fernando’s birth complicated things even further. As my step-dad slipped away, my mom continued working, and Fernando’s care was left to Jose and me. I cooked, Jose cleaned, I dressed Fernando, Jose put him to bed. We did what we had to do. involves using existing data and information that has been collected by someone else. This includes sources such as academic journals, books, and online databases. Secondary research is often the starting point for most essay research and provides a good foundation for your own original research. Once you have chosen a topic, it is time to conduct research. Research is essential for an academic essay as it provides you with the information you need to support your arguments. Use a variety of sources, including books, academic journals, online databases, and other reliable sources, to gather information about your topic. Essays are common in middle school, high school and college. You may even need to write essays in the business world (although they are usually called reports at that point). An essay is defined as a short piece of writing that expresses information as well as the writer's opinion. Learn how to write an essay using 8 simple steps.

The main goals of an introduction are to:

Check for errors in spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar. Look for ways to make your writing clear, understandable, and interesting. Use descriptive verbs, adjectives, or adverbs when possible. It also helps to have someone else read your work to point out things you might have missed. Then make the necessary corrections and changes in a second draft. Repeat this revision process once more to make your final draft as good as you can.

At the start of the essay process, I ask students two questions:

Tertiary research involves using summary or overview sources, such as textbooks, encyclopedias, and reference books, to gather information about a topic. This type of research is often used to gain a general understanding of a subject or to find specific information quickly.

Readers can sense when writers are inauthentic.

For some, writing an essay is as simple as sitting down at their computer and beginning to type. But a lot more planning goes into writing an essay successfully. If you have never written an essay before, you struggle with writing and want to improve your skills, or you're tasked with , it is a good idea to follow a number of important steps in the essay writing process.

Do you want to write about them?

When conducting research, it is important to use a variety of sources to gather information and to critically evaluate the information you find. Make sure that your sources are credible and relevant to your topic and avoid using unreliable sources, such as personal blogs or opinion pieces. Take notes as you research and keep track of your sources, including the author, publication date, and page numbers, so that you can easily reference them later in your essay.

Neither is true. (And to be sure it’s clear: .)

While choosing the topic for your essay, be sure to follow the formatting requirements and other guidelines of your essay prompt. Read your assignment or prompt thorough and assess what is needed. For instance, if the guidelines call for your essay to follow a certain (such as , , , , etc.), this should be applied and reviewed during the editing process. As with any academic document, be sure to apply principles to your essay.