Before writing your essay it is really helpful to study earlier essay examples or custom essays so that you understand what is required of you. However, you want to be sure that the essays you are looking at are reliable and achieved a decent grade.
Essay examples: University Sources
Your tutor should be able to provide you with examples of essays from past students. If you are really lucky they may give you a selection of essays with different grades so that you can see the quality of the different essays.
The university library may hold essays from past pupils. Ask the librarians for guidance.
Custom Essays Online
If your college or university can’t provide you with this material, or if you are studying by distance learning, finding essay examples can be harder. The internet has – literally – millions of examples of essays. Some are uploaded in their entirety for free. Others show you a taster and then ask you to pay a fee to see the rest of the essay.
The problem is, you can’t be sure how reliable these sources are. Who wrote these essays? Was the author really a student? Did the essay achieve a pass grade?
Although you may think that you should only view First class essay examples, looking at a range of different grades and analysing why one essay is better than the next is a more valuable way to build up your own critical skills.
One way of uncovering reliable sources is to search for essay examples and write ‘.ac.uk’ in the search field, which will give you essays that are coming directly from a university site. The university’s website may even give you some background as to the good and bad points in the essay.
Have a look at:
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillshub/?id=282&p=nav
Was this helpful to you? Have you found a great source for essay examples?
