Before you write an essay, it's important
to understand basic essay structure.
Now every essay has the same core
structure regardless of the kind of essay
you're writing. Now an opinion essay,
comparison and contrast essay, or
narrative essay will all have slight
differences, but the basic structure will
always be the same. It will consist of
three main parts. You have your introduction, body,
and conclusion.
The introduction and conclusion will each
be one paragraph, and the body can be any
number of paragraphs depending on the
length of the essay you're writing. Now the
introductory paragraph can be split into
three parts. The first part is what
we call the hook. And all that means is
the first sentence of your essay should
engage the reader, grab their attention,
and introduce the subject in an
interesting way. Students often think
that the best way to do this is to
ask a question at the beginning of their
essay, but that's overused and I
recommend that you do something else
instead. I would highly recommend a
strong statement or a surprising fact.
After you've engaged the reader with
with a good opening sentence, you want
to give some background information. Now
that just means any information that's
essential for the reader to have in order to
understand your main idea or to understand
the topic. So this could be context,
like where and when, it could be a brief
history of the topic, or it could be an
explanation of why the topic is
controversial to begin with, or why it's
important. Ok, now once you've given
the background information it's time
to give your thesis. Which is the
single most important sentence in
your entire essay. It is always the last
sentence of your introductory paragraph.
and it is the main idea of your entire
essay. After you've presented your thesis
you can then move on and write your body.
Now the body paragraph or paragraphs is meant to
support the thesis development, such as
arguments, details, examples, descriptions
narration, depending on the kind of
essay you are writing. Now a longer
essay may include expert opinion,
quotations, secondary sources, that kind
of thing. But obviously if you're writing
an essay for a test, or you're writing
a short 250 to 300 word essay in class
you probably won't need to include
secondary sources. After you've written
a strong body, it's time to write your
concluding paragraph. In the conclusion
you should summarize your main points.
and restate the thesis. It's important
to think of the reader as a person with
a very short memory. So at the end of
your essay you want to remind them what
is your main idea. And then at the end,
you also want to end your essay with as
strong a statement as you started. So you
want to make sure that the final comment
or statement of your concluding paragraph
is emphatic or interesting in some
way. And that's the basic structure of an
essay. If you want more practice with
essay structure, follow the link at the
end of this video.