You will need to write dozens of essays of different types throughout your academic career. There are different types of essays for each essay topic and purpose. These essay types help writers streamline their work into a clearer, more focused, and well-organized form. Although there are different types of essays, the 5 most commonly used ones are argumentative, descriptive, narrative, expository, and persuasive. If you want to learn more about these essay types to streamline your workload, you are in the right place!

In this article, we will explore the 5 most common essay types you will encounter in academic life.

Ready? Let's dive in!

TL; DR

  • Essays are a type of academic writing that aims to inform or persuade the reader about a certain topic or thesis.
  • The five types of essays that you will encounter most frequently throughout your academic life are argumentative, descriptive, narrative, expository, and persuasive.
  • When writing an argumentative, persuasive essay or expository, you need to search the literature and use relevant peer-reviewed sources.
  • Descriptive and narrative essays allow the writer to use their creativity and play with sentences.
  • You can use AI as a text expander, grammar and plagiarism checker, or synonym tool in all types of essays.
  • If you are looking for an AI assistant that will support you at all stages from research to proofreading, TextCortex is designed for you.

Most Common 5 Essay Types

Essays are long-form written content that aim to inform the reader about a specific topic. It is essential to use the appropriate essay type to convey your topic and thesis to readers. If your assignment does not specify which type of essay you should write, you can find one that will ease your workload among the five most common essay types. Let's take a closer look at the most common essay types and their pros and cons.

Argumentative Essay

If you need to convince your readers of a particular side of a topic by convincing them with facts, an argumentative essay is the way to go. The most unique feature that distinguishes an argumentative essay from other types of essays is that it is evidence-based. In these types of essays, you prove the accuracy of your thesis to your readers by giving them information that you are sure is correct.

Argumentative essays measure the author's research and your ability to present your own thesis. An argumentative essay topic can be "Is there a fake news problem?" where different points of view are correct. These are the topics.

Pros

  • Forming an opinion via research
  • Building an evidence-based argument
  • Easy to outline

Cons

  • You cannot present your personal ideas
  • You should build your thesis on facts
  • Requires a long and in-depth research process

Descriptive Essay

If you need to explain a subject or topic in detail, a descriptive essay is the way to go. The topic of a descriptive essay can vary from person to place. Moreover, descriptive essays offer the writer the chance for a more creative approach. In other words, descriptive essays can be written with a creative, warm, or exciting tone of voice instead of formal. If you think your paragraphs do not have enough warm or creative tone, you can rewrite them using an AI tone changer.

Pros

  • You Can Use Your Own Toneof Voice
  • Topic Diversity is High
  • You Can Prefer a Non-formal Tone
  • You can Take a Creative Approach to Your Topic

Cons

  • You Should Use Strong Action Verbs
  • You Should Write Unique and Descriptive
  • You Should Convey Emotions to the Reader

Narrative Essay

Narrative essays are a type of essay used to tell a story, usually about an event that the author has experienced. Your goal in narrative essays is to convey an event or action to your reader in clear language. A narrative essay is often the easiest type of essay to write because it allows for creativity and flexibility. For your narrative essay topic, you can write about your first driving experience or how you learned to swim. If you are writing an essay of this type, you should not hesitate to use metaphors, analogies, alliterations, and dialogues.

Pros

  • It is a relatively easier essay type to write
  • Does not require a long and tedious research process
  • Topic diversity is high
  • You can use a creative and personal tone of voice

Cons

  • You should utilize metaphors, analogies and dialogues
  • You should choose an interesting topic

Expository Essay

If you are writing an essay where you can show your research skills and knowledge about a topic, an expository essay is the way to go. An expository essay is a type of essay in which the author gives neutral information about a topic and focuses on factual information, avoiding personal opinions and emotions. The purpose of exposure essays is to clearly inform the reader about a topic.

Pros

  • Allows you to prove your competence in a topic
  • You have no other duties than conveying information clearly
  • You must use a formal tone of voice

Cons

  • You cannot use personal opinion or emotion
  • You should use strict tone
  • You cannot use original argument

Persuasive Essay

If you want to convince your readers of your thesis on a topic and offer personal opinions in the process, a persuasive essay is the way to go. A persuasive essay, unlike an argumentative essay, allows for personal opinions and emotions. For example, you can use moral and emotional resonance to support your argument and capture the reader's attention. In this way, you can express your personal approach to topics that do not have a single correct answer and persuade the readers.

Pros

  • You can use personal opinions
  • You can add moral and emotional reasonings
  • Topic diversity is high

Cons

  • You need to rely on facts
  • Requires a long and tedious research process
  • You must double-check the accuracy of the information you provide.

How to Write Essays with AI?

We have introduced the five essay types that you will write and encounter most frequently throughout your academic life, along with their pros and cons. Now that we know about these five essay types, we can discuss how to reduce our workload when writing them. We have listed AI-powered solutions that will skyrocket your essay-writing process and boost your productivity!

Text Expander for Word Count

If you have written your entire essay and cannot reach the required word count, AI-powered text expanders can be your saviour. Text expanders read your paragraphs, understand the main points, and add sentences that will improve or not disrupt the flow of meaning. Thus, you can maintain your essay integrity while increasing your total word count.

For example, thanks to the TextCortex essay extender, you can increase the word count of your essays with one click. TextCortex analyses your essay using state-of-the-art large language models and gives you options to improve and expand each paragraph.

Grammar & Spelling & Plagiarism Checker

The final step in completing an essay is proofreading, where you check for grammar, spelling, and plagiarism. To ensure that your essay is error-free and original, you need to check all your sentences one by one.

Proofreading your essay can often be a time-consuming and tedious task. Fortunately, you can automate this repetitive process and complete the proofreading task, which would take hours manually, in just a few minutes by using AI tools. Moreover, you can be sure that the output is error-free as AI tools will not make errors due to distraction or lack of sleep, unlike humans.

AI Synonym Tool

If you want to enhance the originality of your essay and take your sentences to the next level, we recommend that you replace most of your words with synonyms. If you do not know the synonym of a word, you can use AI tools. For example, thanks to the TextCortex browser extension, it can list the synonyms of any word on 30,000+ websites and categorize these synonyms according to their meanings.

TextCortex AI: Your Writing Assistant

TextCortex is designed to support its users throughout the entire writing process, from research to plagiarism checking. With TextCortex, you can generate text from scratch, paraphrase your existing texts, or check their grammar & plagiarism. TextCortex is available as a web application and browser extension. The TextCortex browser extension is integrated with 30,000+ websites and apps. So, he can support you anywhere and anytime.

TextCortex comes with the conversational AI of your dreams, called ZenoChat. ZenoChat is a conversational AI that can generate output using the latest Google data with its web search feature and works with advanced LLMs. Moreover, by activating the "scholar" option of the ZenoChat web search feature, you can ensure that it uses only academic sources when generating output.