Writing an essay about war is one of the most difficult artistic content to accomplish in high school. And this still remains one of the most difficult assignments both in college and university. Students today have almost no personal knowledge or experience interacting with people who lived through the struggles of the combat years. Generally, a war essay is not presented to students suddenly and without warning in the classroom. Typically, a considerable amount of time is allotted for preparation. For instance, even if you are assigned to write a war essay, it is set a week before the essay is due. Besides, there is no doubt that no student could write an essay on combat without assistance. With that being said, read the article below to learn how to write a war essay.
What are the Basic Steps of Writing an Essay – Beginners Guide
Types of Essay Best for a War Topic
Before we dug deep into how to write an effective war essay, let us first figure out what are the different types of essays that we can potentially use for this purpose.
- Informative Essay: It is a type of essay that describes what war is and other interpretations on a specific topic. Besides, it is the simplest form since it only requires dates and how a war happened. However, take care not to transform your essay into a dictionary.
- Persuasive Essay: In this type of essay, you must also make a particular assumption and persuade your reader that your viewpoint is accurate. This is how you can change people’s perceptions of the war. Besides, you can also implement a call for action strategy to remember and honor the military’s memory. However, the primary aim of this type of essay is to lead debates.
- The Cause and Effect Essay: The cause and effect strategy is the most prominent amongst students when writing an essay about combat. You can demonstrate the causes of war as well as the effects of conflict in this type of essay. The consequences could include data on how the war impacted the economy, people’s lives, industrial growth, science, international relations, and so on.
- Argumentative Essay: In an argumentative essay, you can present evidence to support your thesis. To determine which portion of the argument is appropriate, we recommend you create an argumentative essay outline. For instance, you could write about “Was the second World War pointless for the innocent citizens?” In the essay, you must either agree or disagree with the topic. However, choose strong evidence to support your point of view.
- Comparative Essay: You can make a comparison between two of the most memorable events from the war in this type of essay. Alternatively, you can also compare two very different wars too. Moreover, you can also try comparing the war leaders, such as Stalin and Hitler.
- DBQ: It is one of the more difficult types of essays. However, teachers still assign them. Instructors will give you some visual readings from a book about a war or a verse to analyze. After which you have to add more information about what you assume from the given passage.
How to Write a Persuasive Essay
How to Write a War Essay
The guidance for writing a war essay may seem to be very simple. But the most essential thing that remains is to think about the subject. High school students are already familiar with the essay form of writing. Furthermore, they have an adequate social experience. Therefore, it is best to construct an essay on national significance plots. You can begin with a concise description of the war’s events while emphasizing their formality.
The primary goal of this type of essay should be to find out why conflicts occur. Finally, it is essential to demonstrate the significance of conserving historical memory, ensuring the continuity of generation to generation, and emphasizing patriotism as a nationwide concept. Thus, follow the steps below to learn more about how to write a war essay.
Step 1: Decide on What You Can Possibly Write in a War Essay
Students comprehend historical events best when they can draw parallels with their own personal experiences. You could use the topic “My great-grandfather or great-grandmother while they were my age.” Because such an essay will show you your family members from a new perspective.
Besides, it makes you consider how brutally the war has invaded people’s lives, and force you to reconsider your life. Thus, a natural conclusion will be appreciation and gratitude for harmony and honor for the memory of those who were killed for the sake of triumph in the war.
Moreover, there are no rules that limit the length of a war essay. Such an essay, amongst other assignments, is an excellent preparation for your exams. The theme of war is consistently present in exam conceptual blocks.
We also recommend that you look into other persuasive essay topics to learn more about what you can potentially write in a war essay.
Furthermore, a typical war essay should consist of the following elements.
Strategy and Tactics
The central issue of strategy is the battle plan. The quantity of forces expected to participate in military operations is determined by the war strategy. Besides that, it aimed to identify the main grouping of the enemy’s forces, as well as the weaknesses and strengths of the character of his nation’s leaders.
The strategy individuals who consider the impact of the battle on other states and, based on all of these often contradictory factors, seek to identify the location in the hostile camp where the main blow should be delivered.
In addition to Strategy, tactics are an important part of combat preparation and execution. Tactics encompass both theoretical and practical combatant training. Militants study the nature and effects of combat, training techniques, and attack techniques.
So, you can write which of the war commanding officers was the best at developing strategies and tactics.
Causes of War
Due to the News streaming 24 hours a day, the internet, journalism, and traveling the world is helping our vast universe to become closer and more accessible than ever before. Wars and battles are also included in this context. Irrespective of whether the conflict involves your country, any confrontation, and battle affects everyone’s life in one way or the other.
So many wars in the world beg the question, “Why do these wars emerge?”
However, it will indeed help readers understand that while we can not always manage to avoid conflicts, we can manage to stop wars. Readers will discover how small differences of opinion escalate into huge and serious conflicts. Besides that, they can also learn more about what all disputes have in common, and the impact of historical, diplomatic, geographic, and economic prejudices on these events.
Furthermore, you can learn why there were disagreements and battles between nations by comparing conflicts around the world to disagreements in your own life.
Diplomacy
Army diplomacy is a collection of special military-diplomatic bodies and former army diplomats. Because specific nations are the targets of military diplomacy. To actually fix the challenges that have arisen, different components of the host country’s military, such as military-economic, military-political, and military-technical life are incorporated into their sphere of activity.
So, you can see how diplomacy works between nations even during battle by comparing the two nations’ military diplomacy.
Treatment of Prisoners
When we take into account battles 50 or 100 years ago, we will panic by knowing how the war prisoners ended up living after the war. The prisoners had to live in colonial possessions, where they went through the harshest living conditions.
Back then, the catholic priests of all denominations, members of the intellectual elite, former nobles, peasant farmers, and opponents of the new government were all arrested in large numbers.
Later, these prisoners labored in mines and fields, constructing dams, and had to dig canals by hand. Meanwhile, agronomical scientists were working on developing the agriculture sector. There are a lot of data available on this subject. Thus, you can easily compare prisoner behavior in modern and ancient times.
Lastly, Memories
The last element of your war essay is the memories section. We admit that there are very few combat vets today. However, we can still find those who participated in previous wars. For instance, let us consider the following example from a student:
In 1917, my great-grandfather was born. He was a hair stylist prior to the war. My great-grandfather joined the army when the Great Patriotic War broke out. By then, he was 23 years old. There was a big war in 1942. And there were very few of them left by the end of the battle. They ended up running out of cartridges and had nothing with which they could defend themselves.
The Germans encircled and managed to capture the remaining survivor soldiers. They began to split the troops into two “heaps.” They placed privates in one, and law enforcement agents in the other. None of them had any clue where they were going. They had carried them to Buchenwald.
Here people from 18 different countries and ethnicities lived, including children and the German communist party. Then, my great-grandfather and his friends worked at the production plant, carrying parts and assembling weapons as best they could.
They were hoping that the Americans would open an additional front and free them. However, the prisoners had already loaded themselves. They wanted to flee. However, one of the prisoners was a betrayer. Thus, he had to organize an insurgency. They had control of the camp for a week. My great-grandfather was only deported in 1946. He did his best to try and protect his motherland.
There are many interesting stories about the war. Take advantage of this opportunity to tell somebody a story. As a result, you might also be able to sway the opinions of many people.
Step 2: Select Your Focus
There are numerous dimensions to war that includes political, financial, cultural, scientific, philanthropic, and philosophical. It is far too large for only one essay or even a research project to cover.
As a result, if your essay somehow fails to specify a specific angle, your whole effort and time go to the vein. Therefore, we recommend that you should select only one angle.
For that purpose, you have numerous options. For instance, consider the reasons for war. Every war is a complicated collision of various values, concepts, and economic and political interests that become extremely radical until they erupt in dispute.
Then there is an official pretext, which is a trigger that initiates the war or a pretext that is discovered to justify it. You can investigate this complicated relationship. It can be difficult to unravel at times. For instance, explaining the causes of World War I would take more time, effort, and paper.
To put it another way, you can focus on one of the participating nations and how the war impacted it culturally, financially, and politically. Besides, you can investigate medicine or innovation and techs used in a specific war.
Thus, examine how they progressed through the war, what inventions were implemented, and with what influence. Moreover, concentrate on the lives of military men on the front lines or innocent citizens at home.
Besides, there is also a moral component. For instance, it can be challenging to distinguish between right and wrong during the war. For instance, “Flashes of War” is a short story collection by the author Katey Schultz. She dedicated her book to uncover the truth through stories.
She investigated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because on a human basic level, she was keen to know what all these battles were genuinely like. On the contrary hand, in some conflicts, one edge is clearly the oppressor, whereas the other side is only attempting to defend.
One of the clearly and unambiguously clear cases is currently unfolding in front of our own eyes. As the Russian Federation launched a massive attack on Ukraine on 24, Feb 2022, with no show of force.
Thus, no matter which war you have to write a war essay on, the most important thing that you need to do is find a specific angle of the war that you want to focus on. So that your essay only properly focuses on a single dimension. After all, the main purpose of this is to make sure that you end up with an effective and strong war essay.
Step 3: Find Reliable Resources
Let us assume that by now you have decided on your focus and dimension of the war for your essay. If so, you are ready to start researching. For that purpose, the best place to begin is with government stats and other historical documents.
For historical wars, you will require chronicles, archives, or reputed educational sources like monographs and participant research papers. Your references for current and ongoing conflicts will also be plentiful.
To choose reliable information, you will need to use all of your critical thinking skills. You will need to acknowledge valid information and comprehend academic research methodology. However, avoid using new, unattributed studies and public opinion surveys. All in all, begin with official and reliable resources.
Begin with official resources. Most countries, even the littlest and extremely poor, own official websites with data in English and a list of additional resources. Besides, Wikipedia is also a good place to start, and pay special attention to the footnotes.
Moreover, try to distinguish between reality, opinion, and publicity. For instance, calling somebody a Nazi without providing proof is nothing but propaganda. It is a viewpoint to make comparisons between historical Nazis and concepts prevalent in a specific society today.
Suppression of free speech, human rights violations, controlled media, corruption and violent repression of protest rallies, and demonization of dissidence, as a single unified cause are all hard-core facts.
Step 4: Stay Human
War is not ever merely numbers and factual information. Besides, we would all agree that I t is upsetting. So, do not just report bits of data, facts, and figures in your war essay. As essential as it is to remain objective, your readers will struggle to comprehend you if you seem like like a balance sheet.
Thus, use survivors of the war interviews and victim stories to start creating an approachable and human writing piece. Highlight the values in each war and battle. And connect them to something your audience can relate to, something familiar to them.
Moreover, remember that emotions like fear, failure, pride, and hope are powerful, timeless, and universal. Because they can easily find a way into the hearts of your readers. Thus, they are able to make your essay believable and interactive.
Even so, when trying to locate your voice, avoid allowing lightheartedness into your tone. Behind each casualty figure are a person and a bereaved family. Thus, always try to keep that in mind.
It is challenging but essential to write about war. It is completely up to you which angular position you take. When trying to cover this most sensitive and contentious of all topics, keep academic ethics in mind. Besides, make sure that strike your essay has the right balance of hard facts and human interest.
Step 5: Write
One of the longest and most essential steps of learning how to write a war essay is the writing process itself. By now, you might have learned what you need to include in your essay, how to start your research, and what type of essay format you should use. If so, you are good to start writing your war essay.
Besides, we believe that doing all the above steps might have exhausted you. Thus, you can choose to take some time and rest.
Moreover, a war essay has similar components as any other essay. It includes the following paragraphs.
- Introduction
- Body paragraphs
- Conclusion
The tone of your essay is established with in introduction of your essay. It really should help spark your reader’s interest while also informing them of what to anticipate. The introduction typically accounts for 10% to 20% of your essay. Moreover, the introductory paragraph has a thesis that presents the main idea of your essay.
And the body of your essay is where you present the evidence, make arguments in favor of your thesis, and establish your ideas. Its objective is to present, evaluate, and analyse the information and source materials that you have gathered to back up your claim.
Lastly, the closing paragraph of an essay is called the concluding paragraph. It should occupy no more than 15% of the your. A good war essay should have a concluding paragraph that does the following things.
- Restate your thesis statement
- Connect the main ideas and arguments
- Demonstrate why your argument is essential
Step 6: Proofread
The final step in our guide on how to write a war essay is to evaluate and edit your war essay. But, prior to doing so, we suggest taking a break and returning later with a clear mind.
Whilst also reviewing your essay, you may need to read it at least twice to ensure that every detail is correct. You must double-check your war essay both for grammar and content. You can use software resources like Grammarly to see if your paper is free of grammar and spelling errors.
Furthermore, you must read each piece of data at least twice to ensure that it is correct. You can also enlist the assistance of a friend in this endeavor.
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