The first thing you should know is that writing a good essay is difficult.

I have written many in my life, but I can't boast of having written many good ones. I know how good ones should be written, but sometimes I was just too lazy to worry too much, and other times I just did not know how to apply the theory to that particular topic.

In this hub I'll put as an example an essay on the book Pride and Prejudice that I've been reading. This book, for those of you that havn't read it, is pretty complex. It must be difficult to write an essay about this. It has several different themes - love, relationships, marriage, position of women - so when writing an essay you must concentrate in each one individually and write about it.

A normal essay is divided into three parts. These are the parts, and what should be included in every one. Take into account that however the intro and the conclusion should be relatively short and direct, since they are only to introduce and to restate your topic, the body can be as big as required (depending on the length of the essay).

So, you will be wondering "Right, we know the structure, but what is it that we must actually write?".

Well, I can't tell you what you must write, but I can give you some advice on types on information you should include. First of all, there are various types of essay. There are objective essays (in which you have to describe objectively) and subjective essays. Continuing with our example, about a book we should write a subjective essay.

In subjective essays, the most important thing is our opinion. The second most important is support for our opinion from the text. Notice I have italicised 'from the text'. I knew people that would invent support. That would get your essay thrown to the bin by some authority in whichever topic you were writing about.

An analogy may be you people that know about AdSense, may directly not read a hub about AdSense that states that with it you can earn $1 million per day (just exaggerating).

So, when writing, you must always write about what you think. Procure that what you think makes some sense, so that you can get support from the text.

Ah, and a final note. In essays, you should not reference to pages in books, or chapters. The one who is reading (assuming he or she has some knowledge of the topic or book) should know about the references. That is what I was taught. Maybe in your countries adding page references is OK, I don't really know.

Well, I hope you have expanded on your essay-writing knowledge!

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