Basic Essay Structure

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.