Writing a good essay
IF your students are anything like mine, they lack excitement when it comes to writing essays. Luckily, here is how to write an essay that is deliciously irresistible! Each section of the essay can be broken down into a meal (appetiser, main course, dessert, etc.).
Writing an academic essay means fashioning a coherent set of ideas into an argument. Because essays are essentially linear — they offer one idea at a time — they must present their ideas in the order that makes most sense to a reader. Successfully structuring an essay means attending to a reader’s logic.
The focus of such an essay predicts its structure. It dictates the information readers need to know and the order in which they need to receive it.
Thus your essay’s structure is necessarily unique to the main claim you’re making. Although there are guidelines for constructing certain classic essay types (for example comparative analysis), there is no set formula.
A typical essay contains many different kinds of information, often located in specialized parts or sections. Even short essays perform several different operations - introducing the argument, analysing data, raising counter-arguments and concluding.
Introductions and conclusions have fixed places, but other parts don’t. The counter-argument, for example, may appear within a paragraph, as a free-standing section, as part of the beginning, or before the ending.
Background material (historical context or biographical information, a summary of relevant theory or criticism, the definition of a key term) often appears at the beginning of the essay, between the introduction and the first analytical section, but might also appear near the beginning of the specific section to which it’s relevant.
It’s helpful to think of the different essay sections as answering a series of questions your reader might ask when reading your essay. Readers should have questions. If they don’t, your essay is most likely simply an observation of fact, not an arguable claim.
Mapping an essay
Structuring your essay according to a reader’s logic means examining it and anticipating what a reader needs to know, and in what sequence, in order to grasp and be convinced by your argument as it unfolds.
The easiest way to do this is to map the essay’s ideas via a written narrative. Such an account will give you a preliminary record of your ideas, and will allow you to remind yourself at every turn of the reader’s needs in understanding your idea.
Essay maps ask you to predict where your reader will expect background information, the counter-argument, close analysis of a primary source, or a turn to secondary source material. They anticipate the major argumentative moves you expect your essay to make.
Your map should naturally take you through some preliminary answers to the basic questions of what, how, and why. It is not a contract, though—the order in which the ideas appear is not a rigid one. Essay maps are flexible; they evolve with your ideas.
Signs of trouble
A common structural flaw in college essays is the “walk-through” (also labelled “summary” or “description”). Walk-through essays follow the structure of their sources rather than establishing their own. Such essays generally have a descriptive thesis rather than an argumentative one. Be wary of paragraph openers that lead off with “time” words (“first,” “next,” “after,” “then”) or “listing” words (“also,” “another,” “in addition”).
Although they don’t always signal trouble, these paragraph openers often indicate that an essay’s structure need work: they suggest that the essay simply reproduces the chronology of the source text (in the case of time words: first this happens, then that, and afterwards another thing . . . )