How To Write An Academic Essay

How To Write An Academic Essay This is because some ideas are more preliminary while others build on ideas that need to come before. 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. The importance of this is already implied by the transition sentenceâ€"an essay with a logical progression will make transitioning between ideas relatively simple. 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. Once you provide your evidence, you need to discuss it. 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. Each paragraph should be a cohesive element with an intro and conclusion. The body paragraphs should flow well from one point to the next. Evidence â€" Again pretty self-explanatory, this is the stage in your paragraph where you provide evidence to back up your Point and Explanation. Why do you think this way, and what evidence do you have to support those beliefs? The paragraphs should flow from one to the next like a constant stream of thought. Each paragraph should conclude the statement made at the beginning of the paragraph. Everything in your essay revolves around your thesis. This is the big point you are trying to make, which is usually an answer to a question in the essay prompt. 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. 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. You will use the rest of the essay to support this thesis. You should approach all essays with the same mentality, regardless of their length. Your goal is to compose a piece that clearly guides the reader through your thoughts and reasoning. You may have to adjust how you convey those thoughts based on the length. 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. Perhaps your paper exemplifies a larger thematic discussion or perhaps it should but that larger discussion doesn't exist yet. Your essay should always have a beginning, middle, and end. 4-6 body paragraphs that provide evidence to back up your thesis. 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. You'll find that having some paragraphs before others just makes sense. 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.