Academic Essay

Experts from the essaypay.com website specify that the academic essay is a research and teaching form and an examination task which, using the broad possibilities of the essay as a genre, tests the linguistic and communicative competence of students and thus prepares them for the writing of more serious research work and a larger volume of academic texts which students themselves have to produce in the course of their studies. In the academic essay exam, students demonstrate that:

they can identify the problem contained in the assigned topic;
they are able to take a position in relation to that problem;
can express this position as a clear and precise thesis;
they are able to defend this thesis in a reasonable way, presenting a sufficient number of convincing arguments;
are able to produce a meaningful, coherent, argumentative text in which they demonstrate their command of the rules and capabilities of the Bulgarian literary language.
      The aims of the essay are related to presenting and defending personal opinion (informative essays) and convincing the interlocutor (reader, audience) of the rightness of the opinion expressed (persuasive essays).

     The academic essay has certain features that distinguish it from the essay as a literary genre. It is written on a predetermined topic; it must meet certain criteria that impose a precise structure (the academic essay must contain a clearly stated thesis, which is not mandatory for the essay as a literary genre, for example); and it has a limited length.

       Structural-compositional model of academic essays

Academic essays contain an introduction, an exposition and a conclusion.

The introduction introduces the specific aspect of the topic to be addressed in the essay and states the main idea of the text as formulated in the thesis. A good introduction introduces the reader to the order of the statement, challenges the reader's attention, and orients the reader to the content and direction of the essay. It states categorically the thesis to be proved, the position to be defended.