Cambridge C1 Advanced (CAE): How to Write an Essay

in today's video we are going to look at how to write the perfect essay for c1 advanced or cae let's have a look at the right structure as well as the different parts of an excellent essay to make sure that your writing can improve as fast as possible hello and welcome to teacher phil where i help people like you pass their cambridge exam please make sure you subscribe to the channel and like this video as this helps a lot with the youtube algorithm and make sure that you check out the full article on my website teacherfield.com the link is in the description box below and without further ado let's get started essays are the only mandatory task in c1 advanced writing you can't avoid it so it is even more important than with the other tasks to know as much as possible about it every writing task comes with its unique requirements and criteria and we are going to look at all the important stuff so you can focus on practicing and improving an essay is usually written for your teacher or another academic official and it is normally based on a documentary or some kind of discussion that the task talks about as you can see in this example task there are always three topic points given you choose two of these topic points to discuss in the context of the task there are also three additional ideas on the right which you can but don't have to use in your text if you want to write a really good essay there are a few things that you need to focus on and keep in mind the first thing is to present an argument and support it with reasons and examples on top of that you should be able to express agreement or disagreement in order to show what you think about the task and the question given another really important point that is often forgotten is the organization of your text make sure that your essay is well structured in paragraphs and that you use a wide variety of linking expressions to connect your ideas last but not least you should always use formal language when you write an essay but more on that a little bit later in this video after this brief overview let's go and look at a practical example the first thing you should always do when you see a new task is to analyze it in order to find out what you need to write about and what exactly you should include in your essay in a good task analysis there are always three questions that you should ask the first one is what is the topic that i have to write about knowing the topic gives you a good idea of what you should include in your essay for example the right vocabulary and specific expressions that match the topic and the task looking again at our example task from before we can see that we need to talk about different facilities which should receive money from local authorities so from the start think about certain vocabulary other expressions that might make sense in this context so you can get ready to write about this topic the second question of what exactly you have to include in your text goes into a little bit more detail and looks at very specific topic points as i've mentioned before in our example there are three topic points on the left you only choose two of them to discuss them in the context of the task always remember to leave out one of the topic points as you might actually lose marks if you write about all three of them here we can choose between museums sports centers as well as public gardens the choice is really yours and you can decide which two are the most appealing to you or which two you know how to write about best also included in the second question of our task analysis are the three additional ideas that you can find in each essay writing task in our example just as in any other essay writing task the ideas are on the right hand side remember that these ideas are optional and you can choose not to include them at all but instead only work with your own ideas that you might find during the planning stage of your essay however if you decide to use these ideas in your text make sure that you don't simply lift them off the task and use them in the same way word for word but instead try to paraphrase what you've got in the task this is one of the main features of the writing exam in c1 advanced the examiners want to see if you can take ideas from the task and write them again in your own words the third and final question of every good task analysis is to find out who is going to read your essay luckily every essay in c1 advanced needs to be written for a teacher or another academic official which means that we need to use formal language looking at formal language there are certain things that we need to be careful with and that we should avoid for example you shouldn't use any contractions in your essays as they are feature of informal language contractions are combinations of words like i'm or you're so try to avoid them and instead separate the two words and write them as two another feature we should try to avoid in formal writing are informal phrasal verbs there are certain phrasal verbs that we exclusively use with an informal connotation and these shouldn't be part of your essay the list is way too long for me to mention them all here in this video but if you go online and look for formal phrasal verbs you might find a list of good phrasal verbs that can be used in an essay as well last but not least colloquial expressions should also be excluded from your formal writing as the name suggests colloquial expressions are phrases that we only use in spoken interaction and they are therefore unsuitable for a formal essay okay now that we've looked at how to analyze a task properly let's see how we can take this and structure our essay in the best possible way every good essay comes in basically three main parts the first one is your introduction where as the name says introduce the topic and tell the reader what to expect the second part are your topic paragraphs in the topic paragraphs you focus on the main topic points in the task and as we said before you might also include some of the ideas that are given in the task or simply use your own ideas to discuss the topic points in the context of what the task gives you thirdly and lastly you should always finish your essay with a good conclusion to summarize the text and to give your final opinion so we've already looked at task analysis and the structure of an excellent essay now of course you need to know how you can make these parts special and how to earn the highest possible marks let's start with the introduction the introduction of a good essay usually serves three distinct purposes first of all we want to put the topic in context second of all we want to restate what the topic is and what we are going to talk about in the essay and last but not least we want to peak the reader's interest let's have a look at an example to see how we can do that in this example introduction the first thing i do is put the topic in context i talk about the financial problems many local authorities have experienced the two topic points that i have chosen for my example essay are sports centers and public parks which are mentioned in the introduction as well and last but not least i posed the question which ones deserve the money more this is there to generate a little bit of interest in the reader so they want to keep on reading and find out more about the topic you see that it is not that difficult to include these three ideas in a good introduction if you keep them in mind and if you incorporate them every time you write an essay you will see that your introductions will become better and better really quickly next in line we have our topic paragraphs the topic paragraphs are where you address the main topic points from the task in my example those were sports centers and parks i think that it makes sense to make two distinct paragraphs for the two topic points but this is not the only way you can do this if you find another way of splitting up your ideas into paragraphs please do so as long as it makes sense and is in a logical order within each topic paragraph there are also a few things that we should always consider first of all start your topic paragraph with what we call a topic sentence this first sentence gives the reader an idea of what you are going to discuss in the next few sentences from there you continue with the presentation of your argument you write your ideas and support them with reasons and examples also try to include different linking expressions to make sure what the connections are between your different ideas and once again let's see how we can put that into practice in my two topic paragraphs that you can see here it immediately becomes clear from the beginning what to expect as i mentioned sports centers and public parks i've also included different ideas and i support my arguments with examples one stylistic feature that you can observe in these paragraphs is that i try to avoid the pronoun i even though an essay reflects your personal opinion it is more formal to express that in general statements it still shows what you think about these points but it keeps the level of formality higher and finally what would a great essay be without an amazing conclusion the conclusion together with the introduction builds the frame of your essay so we want to make sure that we have a strong conclusion that ends the essay well in your conclusion you want to do exactly two things you want to summarize what you talk about in the topic paragraphs and most importantly you want to answer the question and give your opinion in my example you can see that i did exactly that first of all i summarize what the topic paragraphs say and then in the second part of my conclusion i say what i think about the topic and give my final opinion that's all you have to do there's nothing crazy about writing a good conclusion just as we said about the introduction as well but both of them have vital importance for the success of your essay okay i hope you found the example useful if you take these ideas and my advice and implement them in your own practice i'm sure that you will see quick results and improvements remember that essays always follow the same structure and you can reproduce it whenever you practice so after all they are a lot easier than they might seem for more information on c1 advanced writing you can download my free writing cheat sheet i also offer personalized writing feedback where you can send me your practice tasks and i give you detailed feedback on the different marking criteria in c1 advanced all the links are in the description box below and i see you next time

Channel: Teacher Phill

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Length: 14min 21sec (861 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021