Structuring an essay

In a nutshell

An essay is a piece of non-fiction writing that can be used to present and explain arguments, opinions and ideas. In this summary, you will learn how to best structure an essay.

Structure

Essays have a clear structure and consist of three main stages: an introduction, where you introduce your topic of discussion and the big ideas of your essay; a main body, where you explain your points of view in more detail and a conclusion, in which you sum up the arguments made by your essay. Sometimes, an essay’s title will be a question and the essay will follow like a long answer to that question.

Introduction

The introduction is where the reader gets their first impression of what the essay will be about, and what kind of arguments it might make. As it is just an outline of arguments that will be explained in more detail further on, it is important that the introduction isn’t too long-winded. Instead, it should be short and informative.

Main body

The main body of the essay is where the ideas you mentioned in your introduction are explained in greater detail. This is the largest part of the essay, so it is important to split up separate ideas into blocks of writing, or paragraphs. By doing this, your writing becomes more clear and more organised, guiding your reader through each of your points. 

Conclusion

The final part of the essay, the conclusion, is where you neatly tie up the points you have made in the main body and introduction. Often, this means coming to a judgement about something that you have been discussing in the essay, and the conclusion can be seen as your opportunity to make your opinions clear for the final time, based on the evidence you have given in the main body of your essay. 

Supporting points with evidence

For your conclusion to have any effect on the reader, it is important to make points in the essay that you can support with evidence. This simply means that any opinions you give can be proven or at least backed up by something factual or true that the reader can trust. This allows you to make more believable, convincing points in the essay and eventually makes the conclusion more powerful.

Example

• Take the sentence about a book: 'I believe that the author wants the reader to dislike the main character'.
  This is purely an opinion, meaning there are no facts to back it up. If it were in an essay, it may not convince the reader.

• Now take this sentence: 'I believe that the author wants the reader to dislike the main character because of all the negative words he uses to describe such as 'gloomy' and 'miserable''. 
  This is now an opinion that is supported by evidence, which you can see in bold. Using quotations from the book, this sentence is more believable because it is a fact that those words are in the book. Thanks to this evidence, the argument is much more believable.