An excellent essay isn’t in the writing – it’s all in the planning. 70% of your time should be spent planning and reading. After you have done your reading, you plan your content. Essay paragraphs don’t need to be long, around 200-400 words, but each must fulfil a purpose:
- The introduction (about 10-15% of your word count) helps your reader to understand the map of what is coming up.
- Each paragraph (75-80% of your essay length is from all your paragraphs) then adds just one point to your argument (in academic terms, ‘argument’ is the building of evidence to persuade your reader that you can justify your claims).
- The conclusion (about 10% of the length) should bring together your thoughts.
The introduction should have four main parts:
- HOOK– a sentence to get your audience engaged and interested in what they are about to read; a bit like my first sentence.
- You should then have the CONTEXT where you define the important terms in the question in your own words.
- The MAP – what journey are you going to take your reader on. This part should be the last thing you write in the whole essay.
- Finish with the THESIS – what are you going to prove in your essay?
An essay must build an argument point by point to convince the reader. Each paragraph you add must have just a single point that adds to this thread and must be supported with evidence.
A strong structure is PEEL:
POINT – what is it that you are trying to convince your reader to believe.
EVIDENCE – what external evidence from an acknowledged expert source can you provide that backs up your point? This is where you’ll need your in-text citation which should look something like this (Jones and Kumar, 2023).
EXPLANATION – you need to join together your point and evidence with an explanation of why the evidence supports your point.
LINK – to give your essay flow you can add a link to another part of the essay or the question. This is an optional part of the paragraph.
Another optional type of sentence is a FILLER. This is a sentence that adds to the flow of your essay but doesn’t add to building the story that is your argument.
Have a look at this paragraph in an essay comparing rowing to running. What purpose does each sentence (1-5) have? You will find the answer at the end of the article.
- 2000m row and 1500m run are both raced at similar speeds.
- “If you dream and want to work hard then you can achieve.” Mo Farah
- In Olympic final of 2020 Peter Piper won by running at 2.02 mins per 500m and Jack Horner rowed at 1.58 mins per 500m. (Nursery rhymes, 2021)
- These times are within 3% of each other showing a close similarity.
- The reasons for this will be covered in the following sections.
You might find you need more than one piece of evidence and explanation for your point but the paragraph should only have that one point.
The conclusion should be your grand FINALE where you join together the points you’ve made and your thesis/question. It should have NO NEW material in it and the thought you should have whilst writing it is: “What do I want my audience to REMEMBER?” as it will be the last thing they read.
You need a plan so that you can see the overview before you write. You could do a diagram. You’ll need a branch for the question analysis, the introduction, the conclusion and each paragraph. You might even need to do two diagrams to fit everything in. Another alternative is to make a table four columns wide and lots of rows long. The top four cells join to make one cell with the essay title, due date and number of words. The next row has your process words, topic words and criteria from the question. Then the next row is your header row, one for each column for essay part/content/number of words/source material. Then each row is one part of your essay. You can put both your in-text citation and reference in the fourth column so you can find them easily later.
Remember when you first write, it is not going to be seen by anyone else and you will polish it from this first draft to your final essay.
Good luck!
Dr Margaret Greenhall
Associate Lecturer in Science and Student Hub Live presenter
Answer to activity: 1. Point 2. Filler 3. Evidence 4. Explanation 5. Link
