Whether it is a scholarship application, an admission essay, an in-class essay, an exam essay, a standard essay assignment, or a college essay, sometimes you are required to submit a 500-word essay. It can also be a current event essay.
College students often find it hard to write a 500-word essay. While it is indeed a short essay, it is comparatively challenging to put together compared to long essays. Thus, this article on how to write a 500-word essay will help.
In this article, we demystify your concerns about how much a 500-word essay is. What is a 500-word essay? And how many paragraphs should a 500-word essay have? Plus, many more complex questions on 500-word essays.
As the name suggests, a 500-word essay is a short essay comprising an introduction paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph as its three main sections where the writer discusses, describes, analyzes, and writes about a topic. It is just a paper written in 500 words, either as one single-spaced paper or two double-spaced pages.
It is a common format preferred for short exam essay-based questions, college essays, descriptive essays, persuasive essays, argumentative essays, or personal essays. If you have come across a short essay about yourself, friendship, family, or a prolific person, you would agree that most of them are written in 500 words.
A 500-word essay is nearly the same as a two-page essay. It is mostly assigned in college, university, and high school.
From its name, it is clear that a 500-word essay is an essay that requires you to follow the 5-paragraph essay format. It involves writing on a topic, an issue, or a question in five hundred words. So naturally, the word count is usually 500 words.
How Many Pages are 500 Words? This is a common question. Well, we have an answer to it.
A page is approximately 500 to 550 words single-spaced. On the other hand, when considering a double-spaced page, the word count is 250-275 words. Therefore, a 500-word essay can either be one single-spaced page or two double-spaced pages.
And you might be interested in the number of paragraphs that make a 500-word essay. Well, given the understanding of the pages and the word count, a 500-word essay follows the classic five-paragraph essay format.
Thus, it has an introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph. You could have approximately 100-word paragraphs of 6-7 short sentences. Some of the prompts allow either plus or minus 10% of the indicated word count.
You probably wonder how long it might take to complete this variant of a short essay. Assuming that you are familiar with the topic and are researching and writing, it could take 1-3 hours to write an excellent 500-word essay.
If you are a professional, expert essay writer, you can write 500-word essays in 30 minutes to 1 hour. Of course, they are mavens in essay writing. Besides, they work with the best essay writing service.
A 500-word essay follows the conventions of five-paragraph writing in terms of structure. You are expected to follow an appropriate essay format to present your ideas. When writing a 500-words essay, consider the following structure.
You can simply follow the steps of classic essay writing to complete your 500-word essay. As long as your essay has solid arguments supporting your claim, you are good to go. Writing a 500-word essay should take less time than, say, a 1000-word essay, considering that it is short. Here are some steps you can use to craft a 500-word essay successfully.
Although most students either ignore this or do it lightly, reading the essay prompt prepares you to write the essay and sets you up for success. Therefore, read and comprehend the requirements, including the topic, preferred approach, paragraphing rules, citation style and format, and the deadline.
You can either use your computer or pen and paper to brainstorm and record your ideas based on the instructions. You can highlight some of the most exciting ideas that come to mind. Doing so also helps to use your creativity and critical thinking, which essay writing tests. Your rough list comes in handy during research and when writing the essay.
With everything held in place, it is now time to choose a topic. You can either do this from the list provided by your professor or choose an independent but relevant and interesting topic. Select a topic that you find exciting and has not been overdone. You can focus on controversial social issues, current affairs, and debatable areas related to your interests or field of study.
A topic for a 500-word essay should be exciting and narrow so that you share your insights and concepts briefly but exhaustively. The topic you choose should have enough content. You can gauge this by looking for evidence from scholarly articles.
If you are running short of time, you can combine research and writing. However, if you have adequate time, spend more time researching for resources that you can use to support your claims in the paper.
Consolidating the information you need to explore your chosen topic reduces time wastage during the writing process. Assuming that you organize the sources, you can write as you cite to avoid plagiarism.
You can then create a detailed outline to envision the structure of your essay. Remember, you only have 500 words to convince or inform your readers. Therefore, adequate planning is necessary. An outline is your essay plan or roadmap. It is the backbone upon which your essay rests.
Break down the main points for each section of your essay to ensure a logical and structured flow of information. Then, ensure that you refine the content to have an essay that is coherent, competent, clear, and classy.
Your outline will help you stay on course when writing.
Break the monotony of beginning your essay with an introduction during the writing process. Instead, start your 500-word essay by writing the body paragraphs first now that you have an outline. This approach is better because you can write the body paragraphs that support the thesis. And suppose there are changes in the paragraphs. In that case, you can tweak the thesis statement to reflect the change instead of cumbersomely doing it otherwise.
The body paragraphs comprise 80% of your word count. So, you have 400 words to spread the content of three body paragraphs, meaning you have to have short paragraphs. The paragraphs should each have at least 133 words. Remember you have a + or–10% word count allowance. So, a paragraph of 4-6 short sentences would suffice. The body paragraphs should have a topic sentence highlighting the main idea, examples and evidence, and a concluding sentence.
Related: Paragraph writing rules
Once you are done with the body paragraphs, write your introduction. Your introduction should be strong as it is a selling point to your readers. Convince your readers by including attention grabbers. Introduce the topic and give some background information. Finally, have a strong thesis statement to wrap up your introduction. For this, you have 100 words, which means you need not include irrelevant words and sentences.
Finally, write an impressive conclusion for your essay. It would help to summarize your main argument and then restate the thesis statement.
When writing, use relevant transition words for smooth flow and quality arguments.
Finally, because you focused on writing first and editing last, revise and polish your essay as a final step.
Read the essay aloud to yourself and correct the spelling, grammatical, punctuation, and stylistic errors you can identify. As well, check your paper through a plagiarism checker to ensure it is devoid of plagiarism.
Proofread your essay well, and if you need help, especially for critical essays such as personal essays, SOPs, and scholarship essays, hire a professional proofreader.
Everybody looks forward to writing an essay that earns them good grades. Writing an essay in just 500 words means packing your arguments and never wasting any words. To do so, you can use these tips used mainly by top students when writing short essays.
Below are some suggestions or topic ideas for your upcoming 500-word essay.
Understanding how to write a 500-word essay is integral to your academic journey. Students taking English courses would agree that writing essays and research papers is mandatory.
For your English 102 essay, you might be required to write a 500-word essay. Whichever subject you are pursuing and you need to write such an essay, do everything we have highlighted and set yourself up for success.
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