The Types of Essays: Four Popular Genres
- ManagementPaper
- Apr 08, 2021
You all must be aware of what essays are and how to write essays. But the essay that you used to write in schools is a lot different than that of the one you get to write in college or higher education. These essays are known as academic essays which involve a lot of analysis and interpretation and extensive research that centers around a particular problem or argument.
Essays are academically rich pieces of writings that focus around a central idea which is generally an argument or a problem. In this essay, you have to identify the problem, interpret the aspects related to it and finally analyse and pen down your point of view. With the team of Management Paper, you will get to know more about the other various types of essays and what the specific features of each of them are.
The Various Types of Essays
There exists multiple types of essays, but broadly we can divide them into four particular categories. They are:
- Descriptive
- persuasive
- Analytical
- Critical
Though there is differentiation among all these kinds of essays, yet at times you have to inculcate characteristics of more than one kind of essays into a single essay. Critical writing can be used in the section of literature review to portray that in the existing study, there exists no literature gap or opportunity. The methodology section will be descriptive to provide details about the methods used, data collected and how they were analysed to chalk out the results. The results parts will make use of both analytical and descriptive writing to report about the collected data. The discussion part is both analytical and persuasive. Analytical as when you link the findings with the research questions and persuasive when the findings’ interpretations are proposed.
Descriptive Essays
Descriptive essays are the simplest form of academic essays where you are just required to define and discuss the research topic. If drawing an argument or problem is possible, we may even do so but have to describe it in detail first. This includes the illustration essays. In such a kind of essay, you generally have to define, summarise, record, report and identify.
The purpose of descriptive essays is:
- It depicts people, places, things or concepts in clear, transparent and in-depth details to help the reader in creating a picture in their mind about what is being talked of.
- It engages the reader to make them visualize what is being described in the essay.
- Through the sensory details, conveys and creates a dominant picture of what is being described.
- It can be both subjective and objective.
If you are planning to write a descriptive essay for your research, you can take a writing help from the brilliant academic service of the Management paper, who ensures quality and time and gives them equal priority.
Persuasive Essays
Persuasive essays, also known as argumentative essays, are an academic piece of writing where reason and logic is used to prove the legitimacy of your perspective. Clear arguments supported by convincing facts and logical reasons must be used. The most important part of this kind of writing is providing compelling and detailed evidence so that you can disapprove of the opposing arguments easily.
Ways to reach your point of view:
- Read and analyse some researcher’s point of view on that topic and find out who is the most convincing.
- Try looking for patterns within the references or data and analyse where it is the strongest.
- List down multiple interpretations and analyse the real-life implication of each of them; segregate the beneficial one and also the ones with some problems.
- Try discussing the facts and ideas with someone else and see if you can agree with their point of view or not.
The persuasive essay instructions or the things you need to do are: argument, evaluation, discussion and taking a position.
The purpose of the persuasive essay is a two-fold one:
- To make the reader accept the point of view of the researcher stated in the paper.
- To adopt the researcher’s way of thinking about the given essay topics.
Analytical Essays
Very few higher level essays are descriptive in nature; and mostly analytical and critical in nature. Analytical essays are similar to that of descriptive essays, but you need to re-organise the information and facts described into relationships, types, parts, groups, and categories. Often you will have to compare two given entities or two concepts from the same entity and draw an in-depth analysis. The instructions for analytical essays include examine, relate, compare, contrast and analyse.
An analytical essay is not a summary. Do not summarise the facts you have collected. Rather identify and analyse the problem to find out further gaps in that domain by collecting both primary and secondary data from the various previous conducted researchers and existing literature.
Critical Essays
A critical essay consists of the various features of a persuasive essay, with at least one point of view stated. While you have to state your own point of view in persuasive essays, but in critical essays, you are required to state at least two, including your own. Suppose you may explain the interpretation of a writer on a particular topic, analyse the merits or demerits of the topic and based on the demerits, draw another interpretation of the topic. The instructions of critical writing generally includes: evaluate, disagree, debate and critique. The things you need to do in such an essay are:
- Sum up all the main interpretations and assumptions of the research.
- Have a point of view for or against the work. Place it and justify it by authenticating it with the proper set of evidence.
Other Types of Essays
There are several other types of essays but even they can be grouped under the above four categories:
- Reflexive essays: A reflexive essay is completely your own perspective or your experiences in life, the researcher then writes about these incidents and analyses how they have changed, grown or developed from those experiences.
- Admission essay or scholarship essays: The essays that are used as assignments for the entrance level at any college or university is generally known as college admission essays, used for getting admissions and scholarship essay, used for getting scholarships. These can be of any four types of essays.
- Commerce essay: A commerce essay is nothing but mostly a type of analytical essay from the domain of business management and marketing. The leadership essays and the marketing essays are also a part of the commerce essays.
- Cause and effect essay: An amalgamation of both the critical and analytical essays is the cause and effect essay. A cause of the topic has to be identified and the various effects as a consequence of that topic has to be discussed in great details.
- Formal essay: Most of the academic papers are known as formal essays only, as they used for the professional level or at the student levels at various academic and educational institutes.
- Cultural essay: Cultural essays are analytical essays where you have to analyse a particular culture or the aspects of that culture and how it has affected the people touch with that culture.
The type of essay entirely depends on your research topic and how you are going to take an approach to it. With an efficient academic writing service such as that of the Management Paper can be very helpful in making you decide which type to choose from and what to include in your research.
