Every semester, students have to complete numerous writing assignments. Some of them are fun to make, while others require a lot of time researching in the library. Overall, no essay is exactly like the other, so learning the specifics of each paper, as well as the unique structures, and purposes is important. Such knowledge can help you reach high results.
This guide will help you understand the nature, specifics, and overall tone of an extended definition essay. Here is how to structure, pick a theme, and outline.
How to Write a Definition Paper vs. an Extended Essay
So before you learn how to write an extended definition essay, you have to learn the basics of this essay writing first. First of all, an extended version of the essay doesn’t differ much from the original one. For the most part, you have completed the same type of work. Just this time, the extent of your work is slightly greater. Hence, you have to do more here and add up a few pages to your overall page count.
Usually, in an assignment like this, you have to pick a term and provide it with a full definition, just like the name of this paper type says. You’ll be surprised how many pages you can dedicate to just one word. If in a regular definition essay you have to pick a term and simply provide a proper explanation to it, then here you get to speak everything related to the term you have chosen. You can speak of its various uses or misuses of the world. Seek for connotative and denotative meanings. Provide examples with that word, offer personal observation, and more.
The main purpose of this assignment is to test your logical and critical thinking skills. This task shows you that the world is not as simple as people seem to think at first glance. One word can carry multiple ideas behind it, and it’s important to highlight the most appropriate of them. Giving an explanation to your choice also shows your ability to argue and build a case providing examples and logical explanations.
What to Write About?
So, once you understand the nature and purpose of your task, you have to decide on the major issue. What will you write about? A big question here is how to define terms in an essay. Well, to understand that, you need to learn how to pick the best terms for your assignment.
The best piece of advice is to pick a word that has some disruptive nature to it. It must be an interesting and complex topic to discuss. This is what can make your paper stand out. For that reason, abstract terms, such as home, affection, or happiness, can be a great choice for this task. You get to pick a work that no one could objectify. Hence, you have a right to personalize the term, use various uses of it, provide examples of multiple cases, how this word is commonly used, and more. An abstract term can also be a great way to offer several definitions to one word.
How to Write an Outline
An outline is basically a map for your entire work. Here you put what you want to say, where it belongs, in what order, and how you deliver it. Overall, the importance of a good outline is hard to overestimate. Once you know how your outline should look, you know how you want to write your paper. So here is an extended definition essay outline example:
- Introduction
- The context of a problem (term)
- The preferred definition
- Main body
- Definition #1
- An example
- #2
- An example
- Comparison
- #3
- An example
- Comparison
- General comparison of the three proposed definitions.
- Conclusion
- Summary of the arguments
As you can see, an outline has covered all the main stages of your essay. Let’s break them down a bit. First of all, as always, you should start with an introduction. During this stage, you get to explain the topic of your writing to your readers. That means that you introduce the term you have chosen and the reasons for why you picked it.
You can also point out the future plan for your work. For instance, in the given outline example, we have picked three different definitions and chose to compare them to one another in an attempt to pick the most appropriate one of all. However, you can go in many ways here. You can talk about common misconceptions when it comes to this word, cover its historical use in comparison to modern times, or else. Overall, your main body should have at least three paragraphs where each of them offers the main idea followed by the explanation and examples.
To finish, you need to provide a conclusion. The nature of your paper will dictate what type of conclusion you should have there. You have to summarize your arguments and explain why one of the explanations you have chosen in the introduction is the best option here.
To Sum Up
As you can see, there is nothing difficult or ambiguous about completing an extended definition essay. As long as you understand the purpose of this task, as well as the steps you have to complete, you should be fine. Keep it interesting, engaging, and straight to the point. Offer you versions of how the given term should be comprehended. Don't start writing without an outline. Conclude strong and restate your main objective set in the introduction.