What Is A Diagnostic Essay?

A diagnostic essay is a brief essay that helps to build a sense of an individual's writing skills. Diagnostic essays are usually the first assignment given to students to examine the writing power of a student. The essay is typically non-categorized and asks the students to write about any given topic while keeping in mind some specific restrictions such as word count or time frame.

Students have to show their wisdom and skills that moment while writing the essay and have to show how well they can use it. This is the reason behind the diagnostic essay being a time-based task which is considered as the essay writing services provided by the best essay writing services.

Difference Between General Essays And Diagnostic Essays

Unlike most of the other essays, the aim of diagnostic essays is not to influence a student's final grade in examination, rather, revealing the strengths and weaknesses of the students which will help their teacher to mould the curriculum for the students to optimize their skills.

This is why students are asked to write a diagnostic essay in the beginning of their course of study, which defines their curriculum. The key point is that students do not need to show their best in this case; rather, they need to show what knowledge and skills they have at the very moment and how well they can express their thoughts in the paper through their writing.

Structure of Diagnostic Essays

The diagnostic essay is generally divided into five main parts which denotes the structure of the essay. Like every other essay this essay starts with an introductory paragraph. Then comes three main body paragraphs and at the end the concluding paragraph. Therefore diagnostic essays generally have five paragraphs. These essays are considered as the essay writing services provided by the best essay writing services.

Furthermore, students are generally given one topic to elaborate, however, sometimes there are more than topics from which students need to choose from. 

To make the work easier, teachers often describe the objective in the shape of a question or prompt and students are expected to answer the question in the concluding paragraph. Since it is a time based task, one must have a comprehensive plan of the structure in their head and must know what exactly they are going to discuss.

To complete the task just on time, one must go through the topic once, think about the topic, think about what and how they are going to express it in their writing, start writing the essay itself and finally before submitting revise it once to check if they have done any mistakes or not.

How To Write a Diagnostic Essay?

After understanding and having clear insights on the given topic, one should start writing the introductory paragraph. It will be good to start off by paraphrasing the topic that one is going to write about. After doing so, one needs to point out three major keywords that they are going to elaborate in the main body.

The three key points then need to be introduced briefly in the introduction. For example, if someone is going to write about what skills they have which make them distinctive from others, one must not focus on only one point. They have to illustrate some major characteristic detail that makes them unique and distinctive which they are going to mention briefly in the introduction.

As mentioned earlier the body will consist of three paragraphs and in each paragraphs, students have to illustrate the three major key points. following the earlier given example, in the first body paragraph, the student needs to expand the first key characteristic skill that they have which makes them distinctive from others. The student must give reasons and explain that reason why the characteristic feature is considered by the student as the distinctive one. 

In the second body paragraph the second key point needs to be illustrated. Again following the example given before, the student needs to talk about the second characteristic feature and illustrate it with justification.

In the third or last body paragraph the student has to expand the third key point. As per the example the student needs to illustrate and give justification on the third characteristic feature that makes them unique. After elaborating the three key points one can add more points to the final list which should be mentioned only and not be elaborated. Any essay must have a strong conclusion. As the diagnostic essay is written in a short time the conclusion must be short and powerful. The idea of conclusion is to give the reader knowledge that topic is covered well.

EssayExpert.us mainly focuses on writing different types of research papers and articles and diagnostic essays are among them which are considered as the essay writing services provided by the best essay writing services. This article will help the students to write a diagnostic essay properly.