7.3: Structuring Your Essay- the Introduction, Body Paragraphs, and Conclusion

Starting with the ancient Greeks, most western cultures have conceptualized the world along a logical, linear path. We like stories that have a beginning (where everything is introduced), a middle (where most of the conflict and character development occurs), and an end (where everything is wrapped up). Essays follow the same basic path. The Introduction spells out the thesis, the Body of the essay elaborates and develops the ideas in the thesis, and the Conclusion wraps up the points covered, re-emphasizes the main idea, and concludes the essay. While this structure can seem a little mechanical, it’s patterned after the way most of us think. When that pattern is disrupted, we quickly become confused. If you’ve ever seen a movie or read a book with an unconventional structure—it begins in the middle or the whole story is told in flashback— you’re probably familiar with this. However, while those unique structures can be fascinating and create a unique experience, when writing an essay, clarity and purpose are much more important. Careful attention to structure and “what goes where” helps your reader follow along from the main idea to its supporting points to the conclusion, which can be especially helpful when dealing with unfamiliar concepts.

Basic Essay Structure

Once you have settled on your paper’s topic, narrowed that down and decided on your main points, pictured an audience, and decided on the rhetorical approach you want to take with your paper, you’ll need an overall idea of what a college paper should look like. In the broadest terms, it needs to have an Introduction, a Main Body, and a Conclusion. You may have heard the term “5-paragraph essay” in the past. This is a common structure in which the Introduction consists of one paragraph, the body has three paragraphs, and the conclusion takes up the final paragraph. There is nothing wrong with that structure, but you will often find that you need more than three body paragraphs (especially in longer or more complicated papers) and, sometimes, fewer than three paragraphs; thus, it’s a good idea not to fall into the habit of always imagining exactly three main points for every writing assignment. Depending on your topic, there may be two good main ideas, or there may be thirty.

Introductions

The Introduction is usually the first paragraph of your paper (although much longer papers may have longer introductions). Its purpose is to tell your readers the general subject of your paper and what you plan to say about that subject. It’s a preview of the rest of the paper, so it can give the reader a taste of the ideas you will explain in more detail in the main body. This is also the place for you to give readers a reason to care about your ideas. For instance, you can tell a story that illustrates some aspect of your paper—either from your own experience or from the text you plan to discuss. Or, you can provide the background of your topic: why does this situation exist? To whom does it matter?

A Fun Fact about Introductions: It’s easier if you write this part of your paper last. While it’s the first part your reader will see, it’s much easier to get it to say what you want if you have already written the main part of the paper. That way, there is no danger that the paper will not fulfill the promise of the thesis statement or lose its focus.

Body Paragraphs

Paragraphing is the art of creating, developing, and organizing related sentences into logical groupings. Paragraphs are much more than just a collection of sentences; they are a collection of sentences with a related theme, main idea, or purpose connected with transitions.The largest section of your paper will be the Main Body, which is made up of your body paragraphs. This section is made up of all the paragraphs that show why your thesis statement makes sense.

All body paragraphs should begin with a topic sentence or a sentence that directly states the main idea of the paragraph. In addition to a topic sentence, paragraphs should contain details or examples and explanations of ideas. In high school, students are sometimes taught that a paragraph is three or five sentences; neither of these is correct for a college level paragraph. Instead, we frequently emphasize that a college-level paragraph is at least half a page or about 9-12 sentences.

PEEL is a helpful acronym to remember the parts of a body paragraph:

P stands for the point you will make in the paragraph,

E is the evidence, 

The second E is the explanation of the evidence, and

L is the link to the next paragraph.

PEEL is a helpful acronym for helping you remember the vital parts of a complex paragraph. As you read through sources and other readings for the course this term, look for the parts of the PEEL paragraph as you read. You will notice that, no matter how complicated an author's ideas, they generally use these four elements to convey their points. PEEL is explained in-depth in Chapter 4 of this book if you want some review of the basic parts of a body paragraph. 

Here is a more in-depth checklist that builds on the ideas of PEEL if you need some thoughts to get you started. 

• Topic sentence: Begin the paragraph with a topic sentence that lets the reader know what the overall point of the paragraph is. Move past the topic of the paragraph to make a point about the topic.
• Evidence: Integrate the evidence that supports the topic sentence. This could include specific examples, source information, and/or personal experiences depending on the assignment. Evidence will often take up at least half of your paragraph in a college-level course, and a college-level paragraph never ends on evidence. 
• Address the evidence: After integrating your evidence, explain, analyze, argue with, comment on, or synthesize the evidence. Though the evidence is important in your paper, your thoughts on the evidence should be the centerpiece of college essay. You can mix up the evidence and explanation however it makes the most sense in your body paragraph. For example, you might summarize a source in-depth for four or five sentences of the body paragraph and then have a couple of sentences of explanation; conversely, you could have a sentence or two of evidence, then a sentence or two of explanation, and then some more evidence. The key is to make sure you always explain your evidence, no matter where you put it in. 
• Wrap up and transition: As you end the paragraph, end it on a general point instead of on a piece of evidence. Wrap up your point in the paragraph and link it back to the thesis; tell your reader why the ideas in the paragraph matter and/or how they relate to other ideas in the paper. This section should also help you begin to transition to the next paragraph through linking the ideas in this paragraph to the next paragraph.

 

Conclusions

The last section of your paper is the Conclusion. Here is where you wrap up your ideas. This is a good place to restate your thesis and remind your reader that you have shown what the paper set out to show. The Conclusion can be a mirror image of the Introduction, briefly restating the evidence the paper gives in proving its case, but it can also look to the future. How would your community be different if people agreed with your ideas? What benefits would they gain? Do not introduce new information in the Conclusion, but it is fine to ask your readers to imagine the results of your recommendations, if you have any.

It is a good idea to include a transition from the main body of the paper, and the most common transition is “In conclusion.” However, there are many, many more interesting ways to lead into this final paragraph. Try variations like these:

• “As should be clear by this point,”
• “Given these points,”
• “On the whole,”
• “By and large,”
• “In summary,”

For more help, see this video the basics of essay structure from Full Sail University.

Writing Purpose and Modes in EG 101

Beyond these grand purposes for essays, there are several structures you might choose to inform or persuade. We call these the “rhetorical modes,” and you’ll find a much more extensive discussion of them in Section II. For now, as you are just beginning to think about the structure of your paper, you just need to know the basics.

The most common rhetorical modes are these:

• Narration: A narrative is just a story, a way of telling “what happened.” Some ideas are easier to understand if you place them into a chronological order. Stories and films use this technique, of course, but so does historical writing. Narrative does not need to mean fiction; it can be a relating of a sequence of events.
• Description: This technique uses sensory details to create a picture in your reader’s mind. Use description to highlight a person, place, or event.
• Illustration: This word just means “example.” If you want to write about an abstract idea, sometimes it helps your readers understand you better if you give them concrete examples of that idea in action.
• Comparison/Contrast: Comparison shows how two items are similar to each other, whereas contrast shows how they differ from each other. A clear discussion of two items’ similarities or differences can be useful when you want to show that one is a better choice of action, or a superior product or idea.
• Cause/Effect: As opposed to narration, which merely shows the order of events of some situation, cause and effect can show why one happened after another.
• Classification/Division: This technique can take a broad concept and divide it into smaller parts that are easier to understand (division) or can take a lot of small items and show what they all have in common (classification).
• Process: A process essay looks at some complex system or sequence of events and breaks them down into clear steps. A set of instructions, such as a recipe, is a form of process essay.
• Definition: We often use terms, such as “person,” in ways that help us make arguments about them. The dictionary can help with very basic definitions, but a dictionary is a descriptive tool: it seeks to explain how a word is used in a linguistic community. It does not say everything that matters about those ideas, or even end arguments about them. The dictionary, for example, will tell you that a person is both a human being and a corporation; legally, this is true, but people still argue as to whether it should be true. Furthermore, dictionaries provide several possible definitions for words; your job is to choose the best one and then give examples to further explain how you want your audience to understand the term or concept.

In addition to the modes, there are two other kinds of essays that commonly appear as writing assignments. The first is called the persuasive (or argument) paper; as its name suggests, its chief purpose is to present and support a claim with the goal of persuading an audience to at least consider, if not accept, your point of view on the subject. These papers often incorporate information from outside sources in addition to your attentive thinking and reasoning. You will write at least one persuasion paper in your Comp I classes; just about everything you write in Comp II will be a paper of this nature.

The other kind is a synthesis paper. These papers require you to read two or more sources (and, often, think about your own life as its events might relate to what you find in those readings. Then, similar to a chemistry experiment when you combine two chemicals or heat up a liquid or a solid to see what happens, you will write a paper in which you make a new kind of knowledge by combining your insights about these readings with your own thinking. Some of our Comp I instructors will ask you to write this kind of paper; as for Comp II, a good way to think about the research project you’ll be required to write is that it is in its essence a big, relatively complex (because it will involve several sources) synthesis paper.

See the chapters in Section IV of this book for a more in-depth explanation of these types of papers and how to write them.