microsoft word essay writing

Microsoft 365 Life Hacks > Writing > How to Write a College Essay from Start to Finish

How to Write a College Essay from Start to Finish

No matter if you’re approaching your first essay in a 101-level class or you’re a little further into your undergraduate career, crafting a college essay that gets you the grade you’re looking for is no easy feat. Use this guide on how to write the college essay—and, first, how to format it—to help pave the way toward an easier A on your next assignment.

Formatting the College Essay: Know Your Style Guide

To know the correct way to format your college essay, you will first need to know which style guide your field or course requires. More often than not, a college essay follows one of these three guides:

• Modern Language Association (MLA): Perhaps the best-known of these academic guidelines, the MLA format is widely used in research papers written at both the high school and college level. Once scholars begin specializing in specific fields, however, MLA format ends up being the preferred format for writing in the humanities—areas of study like literature, philosophy, history, and anthropology.
• American Psychological Association (APA): APA style, which differs from MLA in some small but noticeable ways, is the preferred format of most research conducted in social sciences like medicine, sociology, and psychology. Though it’s less often used in high school essays, it’s something you will likely see at some point in during your days in college.
• Chicago Manual of Style (CMS): Although rare in college, some classes might require you to use the Chicago Manual of Style. This extensive style guide offers guidance on a massive range of style and formatting questions, from the grammatical to the purely typographical. While it’s more commonly used to institute uniform style within non-academic writing found in magazines, advertising, and more, you still might encounter it in the college classroom.

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Each of these style guides has its own standards for formatting essays and their citations. Once you know which guide your professor or field prefers you to use in your essay, you can consult resources available at your college’s library or writing center, or online, from somewhere like the Purdue Online Writing Lab , to ensure your work is formatted correctly.

Where to Begin: Tips for Starting—and Finishing—the College Essay

It might be hard to know where to start with an essay, especially one with an intimidating page count. Break down the whole process into something that’s a little more manageable with these end-to-end tips for college essay writing.

Read the Assignment

The most important place to start with your essay is always the prompt or assignment that you’ve been given. Each assignment will vary in its specificity: some college essays are quite open-ended, challenging you to explore your own interests and ideas within a broader sphere of thought; others are very precise, asking you to present an argument and evidence in response to one or more concrete questions.

Familiarizing yourself with the task that’s ahead of you will not only help you find inspiration for your upcoming writing sessions but it will also help you understand straight away whether or not you need to consult your teacher or another resource about any questions you might have.

Find Some Direction

Once you have clarified just what the assignment entails, take some time to consider how you want to approach your essay. Before you sit down to write, it’s useful to first have a brainstorm. Consider your topic, along with any research you have already conducted on it, and try to develop your own take or angle. While you might change your mind as you research and write, it can helpful at this early stage to develop a hypothesis or working thesis that your research and writing will ultimately attempt to prove.

Do Your Research

Armed with this unique angle or working thesis, it’s time to hit the books. Some college essays may require that you cite a minimum number of primary and secondary sources. Regardless of whether there is a minimum number or not, though, you will want to search for authoritative sources that support and strengthen your own analysis. Explore sources online and at your school library, taking notes on each, and compile your research in one place that will be easy to access and reference once you begin writing later.

Create an Outline for Your College Essay

As you’re doing your research, you’ll likely start getting some new ideas for the direction and shape of your essay. Save yourself some work later on by organizing your research into an outline that follows the same structure that your final essay will take. Each college essay typically sticks to the following structure:

• Introduction: Every essay should begin by situating its readers. Use an opening hook to grab their attention, then provide them with the wider context that your essay is working within. Summarize the ideas that your essay will explore and end your introduction with a thesis statement. Your thesis statement, usually just one sentence long, provides a summary of your essay’s main point and describes to readers the point that your writing will attempt to prove.
• Essay Body: The body of your essay, which is where the bulk of your writing will be done, serves to present evidence in support of your thesis statement. This is where you display and cite all of that research you have done and lay out an analysis of your topic.
• Conclusion: The ending of your essay should close things out by restating your thesis statement and summarizing the points you have presented in support of this argument. It should also explore the implications or importance of the argument you have presented. In short, you should conclude your essay by not only recapping the writing that came before, but also answering the question, “So, now what?”
• Works Cited or References Page: The text of your essay will be followed by a list of the works you have cited within your essay. Be sure to follow the (sometimes stringent) citation format dictated by your style guide here. Luckily, online citation generators like EasyBib , Scribbr , or Citation Machine can help make this process a little easier.

Get Writing

By creating an outline for your essay as you research, you should be able to approach the writing of your piece with a solid skeleton or scaffolding in place, such that the writing process is mostly a matter of filling in the gaps around your research and fleshing things out with further detail. Still, as you write, you might identify areas of your essay that require further research or inquiry. For this reason, writing the body of your essay first, before an introduction or conclusion, can often be the easiest approach. Bring all of your ideas to the body of your essay, and then craft your introduction and conclusion to reflect everything that you’ve discussed within your essay.

Once you have a completed draft of your essay, take some time to revise. Using an intelligent writing assistant like Microsoft Editor can save you some time by catching typos, grammar errors, and unclear sentences as you’re writing.

Of course, you’ll also want to take some time to consider the contents of your essay more broadly and identify any places where your argument or evidence might be weaker than others. If your deadline isn’t looming right around the corner, it can be helpful to step away from your writing for a little while. After a break, you can come back to the page with a fresh set of eyes, making it that much easier to finish writing a paper that makes the grade.

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Erin Wright Writing

Writing-Related Software Tutorials

How to Use Microsoft Word (10 Core Skills for Beginners)

By Erin Wright

Do you want to learn how to use Microsoft Word quickly? This tutorial teaches ten core skills for beginners.

Table of Contents

How to Start a New Document

How to change the font, size, and color, how to change the alignment, line spacing, and indentations, how to add headings, how to change the margins, how to add images, how to add page numbers, how to add headers and footers, how to run the editor (spelling and grammar check), how to save and print your file.

Please note that this is a quick start guide. I have in-depth tutorials for most of these topics for those who would like to learn more.

Watch all the steps shown here in real time!

Explore more than 250 writing-related software tutorials on my YouTube channel .

The images below are from Word for Microsoft 365. These steps are similar in Word 2021, Word 2019, and Word 2016.

We will cover these ten core skills in Word for Mac in a separate tutorial.

• Open Word on your computer.

When Word opens, you will be in the Home screen of the Backstage view.

• Select Blank document to start a new document. (Alternatively, select Open if you want to open an existing Word document.)

When the new document opens, you will be in the Home tab in the ribbon , and your cursor will automatically be placed towards the top, left-hand corner of the page, ready to type.

You can change the font, size, and color before or after you type text. However, if you want to change existing text, first left-click, hold, and drag with your mouse to select the text.

• Select the Home tab in the ribbon if you are not already there (see figure 2).
• Select the menu arrow to open and choose from the (A) Font , (B) Font Size , or (C) Font Color menus in the Font group.

If you selected existing text, that text will change immediately. If you haven’t selected existing text, all new text will feature the choices you just made.

Further Reading: How to Change the Font, Font Size, and Font Color in Microsoft Word

Like the font choices shown above, you can change the alignment, line spacing, and indentations before or after you type text. However, if you want to change existing text, first left-click, hold, and drag with your mouse to select the text.

• Select the Home tab, if you are not already there (see figure 2).
• Select the Align Left , Center , Align Right , or Justify button to position the text on the page.

• Select the Line and Paragraph Spacing menu arrow and then choose a spacing option from the drop-down menu.

• Select the Decrease Indent or Increase Indent buttons to adjust the indent as necessary.

Further Reading: How to Adjust Line Spacing in Microsoft Word and Three Ways to Indent Paragraphs in Microsoft Word

You can turn existing text into a heading or choose a heading level before typing the heading text.

• Select the Home tab if you are not already there (see figure 2).
• Select a heading level from the Styles group.

• If the heading level you want isn’t visible, select the More button.

• Select a heading level from the menu that appears over the Styles group.

Further Reading: How to Create and Customize Headings in Microsoft Word

You can change the page margins for your entire Word document at once.

• Select the Layout tab in the ribbon.

• Select the Margins button and then select an option from the drop-down menu.

Further Reading: How to Adjust the Page Margins in Microsoft Word

• Place your cursor where you want to insert the image.
• Select the Insert tab in the ribbon, select the Pictures button, and then select the location of the image:
• This Device lets you choose an image stored on your computer or network server.
• Stock Images lets you choose stock images, icons, cutout people, stickers, and illustrations. The full stock image library is only available to users signed into Word for Microsoft 365.
• Online Pictures lets you search for images through Bing, Microsoft’s search engine.

For this tutorial, we will insert an image stored on the device.

• (For “This Device” option only) Locate and select the image in the Insert Picture dialog box and then select the Insert button.

Your image should now appear in your Word document.

• (Optional) Select one of the resizing handles and then drag the image to a new size.

• (Optional) Select the Layout Options button and then choose how the image is positioned with the surrounding text:

A. In Line with Text

E. Top and Bottom

F. Behind Text

G. In Front of Text

The effect of each option will depend on the size of your image and the density of your text. So, you may need to experiment with several options to find the one most suited to your content.

Further Reading: How to Insert and Modify Images in Microsoft Word

• Select the Insert tab in the ribbon (see figure 13).
• Select the Page Number button and then select a location from the drop-down menu, followed by a design from the submenu.
• Select the Close button to close the Header and Footer tab. (This tab only appears when the Header and Footers areas are active.)

Further Reading: How to Add Page Numbers in Microsoft Word

• Select the Header or Footer button and then select a design from the drop-down menu.

• Type your text into the placeholders.

• Select the Close button to close the Header and Footer tab (see figure 18).

Further Reading: How to Insert Headers and Footers in Microsoft Word

In Word for Microsoft 365, the spelling and grammar check is called the Editor. Your spelling and grammar options will depend on which version of Word you are using. Therefore, your interface may look different than the images shown below.

• Select the Review tab in the ribbon and then select the Editor button. (Older versions of Word will have a Check Document button, instead.)

• Select the corrections or refinements category you want to review in the Editor pane.

• If Word finds a possible error, select a recommendation or select Ignore Once or Ignore All .

Word will automatically move to the next issue within the category.

• Select a new category or select the closing X to close the Editor.

What Is the Difference between the Editor Button and the Spelling and Grammar Button?

You may notice a Spelling and Grammar button next to the Editor button in the Review tab. This button provides a quick way to check only spelling or spelling and grammar without checking the additional refinements reviewed by the Editor.

Further Reading: How to Use the Editor in Word for Microsoft 365

I recommend saving your file before printing just in case there is a disruption during the printing process.

• Select the File tab in the ribbon.

• Select the Save tab in the Backstage view.

• Select the location where you want to save the File.

• Type a name in the File Name text box and then select the Save button.

• Once you have saved your document to a specific location, you can then select the Save icon if you make changes to the document later.

• To print, reselect the File tab (see figure 26) and then select the Print tab in the Backstage view.

• Ensure the correct printer is selected and turned on, enter the number of copies into the text box, and then select the Print button.

From there, follow any additional dialog boxes provided by your printer.

Updated November 26, 2023

• Microsoft Word Tutorials
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• Writing Tips
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• Writing-Related Resources

Use an APA or MLA template to start a paper online

It's quick and easy to get started on a paper like this while you're online.

Choose an APA template or MLA template , or other college-related template and open it in Word for the web to make it yours.

As you work on the paper, you'll probably want to rename it and edit the header with a running head of your own. When you cite sources, you'll want to add footnotes , and then compile your list of references (bibliography). Be sure also to include a table of contents that can update automatically. That way, you won't have to re-type page numbers every time you make changes that affect page breaks.

Work with others on your paper

If you're working with others, or even if you just want some feedback, you can easily share a link to the paper. People with the link can leave comments for you in the document.

When more than one person is editing in Word for the web, everyone will see each other's updates in the document. For more about how this works, see Work together on a document in Word for the web .

Turn in a hard-copy version

When you're finished, print out your paper to turn it in. You can do this with the paper still open in Word for the web. No need to save it first (that's already done for you).

To print, press Ctrl+P, and wait for the Print dialog.

Note:  If you don't see a Print dialog box, click the link for opening a PDF version of your paper. From there, use the PDF program's Print command.

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