Using an appropriate style for an essay

1. Keep your writing formal

This is the basic principle behind all the other rules. ‘Formal’ means ‘done in accordance with convention; suitable for or constituting an official or important occasion’. The rest of the rules in this guide are essentially the conventions that your essay-writing needs to be done in accordance with in order for it to be considered ‘formal’.

2. Don’t use ‘I’, ‘me’ or ‘my’

This means avoiding phrases like “I think” or “I know this because” or “in my evidence”, and just avoiding the words ‘I’ or ‘me’ altogether. Everything in your essay is what you think, so you don’t need to keep saying that. The person reading it knows that it’s your thoughts already. And your essay should sound authoritative – like you’re confident in your views. It should sound like you’re writing about the text, rather than like you’re writing about your views of the text (even though that’s what you’re actually doing). There will be places for you to be tentative (see below) but these can be sign-posted in other ways.

It is okay to use ‘we’/’us’ as way to refer to the readers of a text (e.g. “Here we see Jack’s natural tendency towards violence”).

3. Don’t use slang or colloquial phrases

This one is important for formality too, though it can sometimes be difficult because people don’t always realise that certain words or phrases are slang or even colloquial (this word means the opposite of ‘formal’). But to the person reading your work, these kinds of words and phrases really stick out. Here are some examples of colloquial words or phrases to give you a sense of what this means: ‘blew her away’, ‘sketchy’, ‘shady’, ‘get out of hand’, ‘freak out’, ‘lose the plot’, ‘ditch’ (as in abandon), etc. There are lots of modern slang terms, which change all the time and which you are probably more familiar with than me, and you should avoid these too.

4. Don't review the text

When you’re writing an essay, you’re writing about your interpretation of the text (e.g. what you think it means). You are not writing about whether or not you think it’s good. This means you shouldn’t state whether you enjoyed the text in your essay, and you need to avoid evaluative phrases like "this fantastic novel" or “in her brilliant poem” or even “the writer successfully creates a deep and interesting character” (that still sounds a bit like a review). Stick to answering the question.

5. Don't address the reader

This is another important one linked to formality. Don’t address the reader (e.g. speak to them directly). This means you need to avoid phrases like “as you can see.” In fact, it’s very unlikely that you’ll need to use any 2nd person pronouns or determiners (you, your, yours) in your essays. Stick to the 3rd person.

6. Don't use PEA-words in your answers

Although we use terms like point, evidence, quotation and analysis to help you understand how to structure your essay writing, you should not use these words in your actual essays. You should not refer to “my evidence” or use phrases like “this proves the point” or talk about what “this quotation” shows. You won’t find these words used in the examples of PEA paragraphs that you’re given, or that you’ll find on this website, and you shouldn’t use them yourself. They are clunky and unsophisticated.

7. Use the present tense when discussing things that happen in the text

Whenever we write about things happening in a literary text (e.g. a novel or a play), we always write about it in the present tense, as if the events of the novel are happening as we read them. So, in our evidence we would say, for example, that a character “goes over to the window and looks up at the stars” and not that she “went to the window and looked up at the stars.” This can be counter-intuitive if the novel itself is written in the past tense, but you’ll get the hang of it eventually.

8. Use the writer’s full name or surname, never just their first name

We always refer writers by either their full name (Mary Shelley) or, more often, just their surname (Shelley). We never use their first name by itself (Mary). This is because referring to someone by their first name is informal and familiar – it’s what we do with our friends – and essays are formal texts. One easy way to remember this is to think how ridiculous it would be to refer to William Shakespeare as William, instead of Shakespeare.

9. Use the correct term for the type of text, rather than the word ‘book’

When you refer to a text, you shouldn’t use the word ‘book’. A book can be any kind of bound set of papers, including an exercise book. Writers don’t write books; they write novels or plays or poems. They write articles in newspapers. They write speeches. In your essays, you should use the correct form of writing (mostly novel, play or poem) for the text you’re analysing.

10. Use tentative language to offer more daring interpretations

Although you are not going to use the phrase “I think”, there are times when you might want to be a bit tentative about your interpretation of a text, especially if you want to say something a bit more daring or original. To do this you need to use what is called ‘hedging’. The easiest way to do this is with modal verbs of possibility like ‘may’, ‘might’ or ‘could’ (e.g. she may be trying to convince herself here, more than she’s trying to convince her friend). Another useful word for hedging is ‘perhaps’ (e.g. perhaps she is trying to convince herself…etc).

11. Don’t write about the characters as if they’re real people

One final good habit for your essay-writing style is to focus on the writer and to avoid writing about the characters as if they’re real people. Obviously, you want to apply your knowledge of real people to help you understand characters and make inferences about them. However, you need to remember that characters aren’t real people; they’re created by writers. And in your essays, you should try, as much as possible, to write about how the writer presents a character, and what the writer is telling us (the reader) about the characters, rather than talking about characters in a novel or a play in the same way you would talk about people in real life.

12. Try to write in as sophisticated a way as possible

Although essay-writing is primarily used as a means to assess your understanding of a text (it’s a ‘reading’ assessment rather than a ‘writing’ assessment), you still get some marks at GCSE for how well written your essay is. And, even more importantly, if you want to get highest marks for sophistication at GCSE, you will need to be able to write well. You will need to be able to explain your understanding in a eloquent, erudite and articulate way. You should take pride in how well written your essays are, just as you should take pride in how well written your stories or speeches or articles are. With this in mind, we have some recommended vocabulary and phrasing for essays in the vocabulary section of our website, which should help you.