Find a topic that interests you and that you feel in your heart that others should care about. It is this genuine care, not your games with language, that will be the most compelling and seductive element of your style.-- Kurt Vonnegut Learning to write an essay can be a maddening and exasperating process, but it doesn't have to be that way. . If you know the steps and understand what to do, writing can be easy and even fun. Below are brief summaries of each of the ten steps to writing an essay.1. Research: Begin the essay writing process by researching your topic, becoming an expert. Use the Internet, academic databases and the library. Take notes and immerse yourself in the words of great thinkers.2. Analysis: Now that you have a good foundation of knowledge, start analyzing the topics of the essays you are reading. Clearly define the claims, write down the reasons, the evidence. Look for weaknesses in the logic as well as strengths. Learning to write an essay begins by learning to analyze essays written by others.3. Brainstorming: Your essay will require insight into your genuine brilliance in writing essays. Ask yourself a dozen questions and answer them. Meditate with a pen in your hand. Take walks and think and rethink until you find original ideas to write about.4. Thesis: Choose your best idea and nail it down into a clear statement that you can write the entire essay around. Your thesis is your main point, summarized in one concise sentence that lets the reader know where you're going and why. It is virtually impossible to write a good essay without a clear thesis.5. Description: Outline your essay before writing it right away. Use one-line sentences to describe paragraphs and bullet points to describe what each paragraph will contain. Play with the order of the essay. Outline the structure of your argument and make sure each paragraph is unified.6. Introduction: Now sit down and write the essay. The introduction should grab the reader's attention, set up the question, and lead to your thesis. Your introduction is simply an introduction to the issue, a step in which you involve the reader in the essay's argument. (Note: The title and first paragraph are probably the most important elements of your essay. This is a point of essay writing that doesn't always immerse you in the context of the class. In the first paragraph you either capture the reader's interest or you lose.