Great Essay Writing In 8 Steps

Great Essay Writing In 8 Steps For a truly student-centered process to work, we can’t ask leading questions or make decisions for our students. Giving students the reading, writing and thinking skills required for a process like this is, to put it mildly, challenging -- for students and instructors alike. We’re asking students to give up certainties and formulae, to dive into the unknown. We’re taking away the safety of falling back on generalizations, personal experience and conventional wisdom. While your topic sentence should be limited to a single sentence, your elaboration can be longer. Together, these two or more sentences form your full statement of argument. Where you place your thesis in your introduction is up to you. Generally, I don't recommend placing it first, where context should go, nor in the last sentence. For example, if your topic is Star Wars, then your subject could be racial representations in Star Wars. If each separate argument fits tightly into an overall argument then attacking one idea means attacking them all. This is harder to do than criticizing discrete arguments that do not build on each other. Evidence â€" Again pretty self-explanatory, this is the stage in your paragraph where you provide evidence to back up your Point and Explanation. Now is the time to pull out your ammunition of carefully referenced sources to support your assertions that Your Point Is Important And Valid. Point â€" Present the main point of your paragraph. This will obviously vary in length, depending on the allocated word count of your essay, but should take between one and four sentences to introduce. As instructors, we also have to give up some control over our assignments. Based on your thesis, continue doing research, now with a focus on sources that support the thesis statement you have developed. Sites like JSTOR and Google Scholar are great places to find academic sources. Make sure that the sources you find support and develop your thesis statement. You may have to adjust how you convey those thoughts based on the length. Your essay should always have a beginning, middle, and end. 4-6 body paragraphs that provide evidence to back up your thesis. Each paragraph should be a cohesive element with an intro and conclusion. The body paragraphs should flow well from one point to the next. Once you provide your evidence, you need to discuss it. You must show how your evidence proves your argument. This means fully discussing the implications of your evidence and connecting it back to your topic sentence. Perhaps your paper exemplifies a larger thematic discussion or perhaps it should but that larger discussion doesn't exist yet. Either way, you can connect your discussion to others, demonstrating the larger importance of your specific argument. Conclusions need not be long arduous rearticulations of everything you've said. They can simply provide the final idea your paper leads up to . An essay built on such logic will be harder to attack. This part could take anywhere from hours to days. Background research is vital for the formulation of your thesis. Through background research, you can make connections between sources and discern which sources are most valuable to your topic. A transition sentence can conclude a paragraph in a number of ways. It can summarize the paragraph, connect the paragraph back to the thesis, or indicate how the next paragraph will follow. To eliminate redundancy, every paragraph should advance the essay further than the last. Organizing your essay means identifying the separate functions of each paragraph and understanding how each function fits into the essay overall. Each paragraph should have a separate purpose, just as each sentence has a separate function.