The paper highlights major challenges in writing academic essays. The article reveals the role of essay writing in studying, communication, creating and conveying information. The work on an academic essay requires development of three types of competences – metalinguistic, communicative and discourse competence. Difficulties in writing essays emerge when learners fail to recognize essential text properties – text cohesion and coherence, informativeness and modality. Lack of a deep analysis of the subject under study, superficial conclusions and poor analytical skills result in producing a one-dimensional, linear text. Insufficiently reasoned structure elements of the text can sometimes provoke learners to provide examples contrary to the topic sentence. The main way of solving this problem is making a logical and structural scheme, – an outline, before starting to write the text. It is equally important to follow the principle of ordering information, organizing the material in a certain succession, keeping the line of reasoning throughout the text. Learners can choose a relevant way of information organization – cause and effect, chronological, spacial and thematic. The article contains examples of exercises aimed at choosing an appropriate way of representing information and exercises for developing discourse competence. Another category of difficulties embraces lexical and stylistic, grammar and spelling mistakes. These errors deal with the operational dimension of the text and their prevention requires developing necessary competencies by doing special exercises to improve the technical aspects of writing. Writing an essay implies keeping to the language norms, grammar and stylistic accuracy. Scientific and research papers are characterized by developed syntactic constructions, complex sentences with clauses of cause and result, abstract vocabulary, while colloquial words and expressions must be omitted. Academic essay is viewed as a product of analytical research work, as a multidimensional text that integrates operational, cultural and critical components. The content of the academic text depends primarily on the depth of information analysis and its critical comprehension. The profound research work triggers the generation of new ideas. Regular and stage-by-stage work on writing the academic essay promotes the development of academic literacy skills. In addition, writing essays helps to train analytical and metalinguistic skills, shapes a personality, capable of thinking critically and articulating ideas.