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“An appropriate use of paragraphs is an essential part of writing coherent and well-structured essays.” Don Shiach,   How to write essays

The main body of your essay is where you deliver your argument . Its building blocks are well structured, academic paragraphs. Each paragraph is in itself an  individual argument  and when put together they should form a clear narrative that leads the reader to the inevitability of your conclusion.

The importance of the paragraph

A good academic paragraph is a special thing. It makes a clear point, backed up by good quality academic evidence, with a clear explanation of how the evidence supports the point and why the point is relevant to your overall argument  which supports your position . When these paragraphs are put together with appropriate links, there is a logical flow that takes the reader naturally to your essay's conclusion. 

As a general rule there should be one clear key point per paragraph , otherwise your reader could become overwhelmed with evidence that supports different points and makes your argument harder to follow. If you follow the basic structure below, you will be able to build effective paragraphs and so make the main body of your essay deliver on what you say it will do in your introduction.

Paragraph structure

• A topic sentence – what is the overall point that the paragraph is making?
• Evidence that supports your point – this is usually your cited material.
• Explanation of why the point is important and how it helps with your overall argument.
• A link (if necessary) to the next paragraph (or to the previous one if coming at the beginning of the paragraph) or back to the essay question.

This is a good order to use when you are new to writing academic essays - but as you get more accomplished you can adapt it as necessary. The important thing is to make sure all of these elements are present within the paragraph.

The sections below explain more about each of these elements.

The topic sentence (Point)

This should appear early in the paragraph and is often, but not always, the first sentence.  It should clearly state the main point that you are making in the paragraph. When you are planning essays, writing down a list of your topic sentences is an excellent way to check that your argument flows well from one point to the next.

This is the evidence that backs up your topic sentence. Why do you believe what you have written in your topic sentence? The evidence is usually paraphrased or quoted material from your reading . Depending on the nature of the assignment, it could also include:

• Your own data (in a research project for example).
• Personal experiences from practice (especially for Social Care, Health Sciences and Education).
• Personal experiences from learning (in a reflective essay for example).

Any evidence from external sources should, of course, be referenced.

Explanation (analysis)

This is the part of your paragraph where you explain to your reader why the evidence supports the point and why that point is relevant to your overall argument. It is where you answer the question 'So what?'. Tell the reader how the information in the paragraph helps you answer the question and how it leads to your conclusion. Your analysis should attempt to persuade the reader that your conclusion is the correct one.

These are the parts of your paragraphs that will get you the higher marks in any marking scheme.

Links are optional but it will help your argument flow if you include them. They are sentences that help the reader understand how the parts of your argument are connected . Most commonly they come at the end of the paragraph but they can be equally effective at the beginning of the next one. Sometimes a link is split between the end of one paragraph and the beginning of the next (see the example paragraph below).

Paragraph structure video

Length of a paragraph

Academic paragraphs are usually between 200 and 300 words long (they vary more than this but it is a useful guide). The important thing is that they should be long enough to contain all the above material. Only move onto a new paragraph if you are making a new point. 

Many students make their paragraphs too short (because they are not including enough or any analysis) or too long (they are made up of several different points).

Example of an academic paragraph

Using storytelling in educational settings can enable educators to connect with their students because of inborn tendencies for humans to listen to stories.   Written languages have only existed for between 6,000 and 7,000 years (Daniels & Bright, 1995) before then, and continually ever since in many cultures, important lessons for life were passed on using the oral tradition of storytelling. These varied from simple informative tales, to help us learn how to find food or avoid danger, to more magical and miraculous stories designed to help us see how we can resolve conflict and find our place in society (Zipes, 2012). Oral storytelling traditions are still fundamental to native American culture and Rebecca Bishop, a native American public relations officer (quoted in Sorensen, 2012) believes that the physical act of storytelling is a special thing; children will automatically stop what they are doing and listen when a story is told. Professional communicators report that this continues to adulthood (Simmons, 2006; Stevenson, 2008).   This means that storytelling can be a powerful tool for connecting with students of all ages in a way that a list of bullet points in a PowerPoint presentation cannot. The emotional connection and innate, almost hardwired, need to listen when someone tells a story means that educators can teach memorable lessons in a uniquely engaging manner that is   common to all cultures. 

This cross-cultural element of storytelling can be seen when reading or listening to wisdom tales from around the world...

Key:   Topic sentence    Evidence (includes some analysis)    Analysis   Link (crosses into next paragraph)

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Topic sentences and signposts make an essay's claims clear to a reader. Good essays contain both.  Topic sentences   reveal the main point of a paragraph. They show the relationship of each paragraph to the essay's thesis, telegraph the point of a paragraph, and tell your reader what to expect in the paragraph that follows. Topic sentences also establish their relevance right away, making clear why the points they're making are important to the essay's main ideas. They argue rather than report.  Signposts , as their name suggests, prepare the reader for a change in the argument's direction. They show how far the essay's argument has progressed vis-ˆ-vis the claims of the thesis. 

Topic sentences and signposts occupy a middle ground in the writing process. They are neither the first thing a writer needs to address (thesis and the broad strokes of an essay's structure are); nor are they the last (that's when you attend to sentence-level editing and polishing). Topic sentences and signposts deliver an essay's structure and meaning to a reader, so they are useful diagnostic tools to the writer—they let you know if your thesis is arguable—and essential guides to the reader

Forms of Topic Sentences

 Sometimes topic sentences are actually two or even three sentences long. If the first makes a claim, the second might reflect on that claim, explaining it further. Think of these sentences as asking and answering two critical questions: How does the phenomenon you're discussing operate? Why does it operate as it does?

There's no set formula for writing a topic sentence. Rather, you should work to vary the form your topic sentences take. Repeated too often, any method grows wearisome. Here are a few approaches.

Complex sentences.   Topic sentences at the beginning of a paragraph frequently combine with a transition from the previous paragraph. This might be done by writing a sentence that contains both subordinate and independent clauses, as in the example below.

 Although  Young Woman with a Water Pitcher  depicts an unknown, middle-class woman at an ordinary task, the image is more than "realistic"; the painter [Vermeer] has imposed his own order upon it to strengthen it. 

This sentence employs a useful principle of transitions: always move from old to new information.  The subordinate clause (from "although" to "task") recaps information from previous paragraphs; the independent clauses (starting with "the image" and "the painter") introduce the new information—a claim about how the image works ("more than Ôrealistic'") and why it works as it does (Vermeer "strengthens" the image by "imposing order"). 

Questions.   Questions, sometimes in pairs, also make good topic sentences (and signposts).  Consider the following: "Does the promise of stability justify this unchanging hierarchy?" We may fairly assume that the paragraph or section that follows will answer the question. Questions are by definition a form of inquiry, and thus demand an answer. Good essays strive for this forward momentum.

Bridge sentences.   Like questions, "bridge sentences" (the term is John Trimble's) make an excellent substitute for more formal topic sentences. Bridge sentences indicate both what came before and what comes next (they "bridge" paragraphs) without the formal trappings of multiple clauses: "But there is a clue to this puzzle." 

Pivots.   Topic sentences don't always appear at the beginning of a paragraph. When they come in the middle, they indicate that the paragraph will change direction, or "pivot." This strategy is particularly useful for dealing with counter-evidence: a paragraph starts out conceding a point or stating a fact ("Psychologist Sharon Hymer uses the term Ônarcissistic friendship' to describe the early stage of a friendship like the one between Celie and Shug"); after following up on this initial statement with evidence, it then reverses direction and establishes a claim ("Yet ... this narcissistic stage of Celie and Shug's relationship is merely a transitory one. Hymer herself concedes . . . "). The pivot always needs a signal, a word like "but," "yet," or "however," or a longer phrase or sentence that indicates an about-face. It often needs more than one sentence to make its point.

Signposts operate as topic sentences for whole sections in an essay. (In longer essays, sections often contain more than a single paragraph.) They inform a reader that the essay is taking a turn in its argument: delving into a related topic such as a counter-argument, stepping up its claims with a complication, or pausing to give essential historical or scholarly background. Because they reveal the architecture of the essay itself, signposts remind readers of what the essay's stakes are: what it's about, and why it's being written. 

Signposting can be accomplished in a sentence or two at the beginning of a paragraph or in whole paragraphs that serve as transitions between one part of the argument and the next. The following example comes from an essay examining how a painting by Monet,  The Gare Saint-Lazare: Arrival of a Train,  challenges Zola's declarations about Impressionist art. The student writer wonders whether Monet's Impressionism is really as devoted to avoiding "ideas" in favor of direct sense impressions as Zola's claims would seem to suggest. This is the start of the essay's third section:

It is evident in this painting that Monet found his Gare Saint-Lazare motif fascinating at the most fundamental level of the play of light as well as the loftiest level of social relevance.  Arrival of a Train  explores both extremes of expression. At the fundamental extreme, Monet satisfies the Impressionist objective of capturing the full-spectrum effects of light on a scene.

 The writer signposts this section in the first sentence, reminding readers of the stakes of the essay itself with the simultaneous references to sense impression ("play of light") and intellectual content ("social relevance"). The second sentence follows up on this idea, while the third serves as a topic sentence for the paragraph. The paragraph after that starts off with a topic sentence about the "cultural message" of the painting, something that the signposting sentence predicts by not only reminding readers of the essay's stakes but also, and quite clearly, indicating what the section itself will contain. 

Copyright 2000, Elizabeth Abrams, for the Writing Center at Harvard University

Thesis Statements

What this handout is about.

This handout describes what a thesis statement is, how thesis statements work in your writing, and how you can craft or refine one for your draft.

Introduction

Writing in college often takes the form of persuasion—convincing others that you have an interesting, logical point of view on the subject you are studying. Persuasion is a skill you practice regularly in your daily life. You persuade your roommate to clean up, your parents to let you borrow the car, your friend to vote for your favorite candidate or policy. In college, course assignments often ask you to make a persuasive case in writing. You are asked to convince your reader of your point of view. This form of persuasion, often called academic argument, follows a predictable pattern in writing. After a brief introduction of your topic, you state your point of view on the topic directly and often in one sentence. This sentence is the thesis statement, and it serves as a summary of the argument you’ll make in the rest of your paper.

What is a thesis statement?

A thesis statement:

• tells the reader how you will interpret the significance of the subject matter under discussion.
• is a road map for the paper; in other words, it tells the reader what to expect from the rest of the paper.
• directly answers the question asked of you. A thesis is an interpretation of a question or subject, not the subject itself. The subject, or topic, of an essay might be World War II or Moby Dick; a thesis must then offer a way to understand the war or the novel.
• makes a claim that others might dispute.
• is usually a single sentence near the beginning of your paper (most often, at the end of the first paragraph) that presents your argument to the reader. The rest of the paper, the body of the essay, gathers and organizes evidence that will persuade the reader of the logic of your interpretation.

If your assignment asks you to take a position or develop a claim about a subject, you may need to convey that position or claim in a thesis statement near the beginning of your draft. The assignment may not explicitly state that you need a thesis statement because your instructor may assume you will include one. When in doubt, ask your instructor if the assignment requires a thesis statement. When an assignment asks you to analyze, to interpret, to compare and contrast, to demonstrate cause and effect, or to take a stand on an issue, it is likely that you are being asked to develop a thesis and to support it persuasively. (Check out our handout on understanding assignments for more information.)

How do I create a thesis?

A thesis is the result of a lengthy thinking process. Formulating a thesis is not the first thing you do after reading an essay assignment. Before you develop an argument on any topic, you have to collect and organize evidence, look for possible relationships between known facts (such as surprising contrasts or similarities), and think about the significance of these relationships. Once you do this thinking, you will probably have a “working thesis” that presents a basic or main idea and an argument that you think you can support with evidence. Both the argument and your thesis are likely to need adjustment along the way.

Writers use all kinds of techniques to stimulate their thinking and to help them clarify relationships or comprehend the broader significance of a topic and arrive at a thesis statement. For more ideas on how to get started, see our handout on brainstorming .

How do I know if my thesis is strong?

If there’s time, run it by your instructor or make an appointment at the Writing Center to get some feedback. Even if you do not have time to get advice elsewhere, you can do some thesis evaluation of your own. When reviewing your first draft and its working thesis, ask yourself the following :

• Do I answer the question? Re-reading the question prompt after constructing a working thesis can help you fix an argument that misses the focus of the question. If the prompt isn’t phrased as a question, try to rephrase it. For example, “Discuss the effect of X on Y” can be rephrased as “What is the effect of X on Y?”
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? If your thesis simply states facts that no one would, or even could, disagree with, it’s possible that you are simply providing a summary, rather than making an argument.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? Thesis statements that are too vague often do not have a strong argument. If your thesis contains words like “good” or “successful,” see if you could be more specific: why is something “good”; what specifically makes something “successful”?
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? If a reader’s first response is likely to  be “So what?” then you need to clarify, to forge a relationship, or to connect to a larger issue.
• Does my essay support my thesis specifically and without wandering? If your thesis and the body of your essay do not seem to go together, one of them has to change. It’s okay to change your working thesis to reflect things you have figured out in the course of writing your paper. Remember, always reassess and revise your writing as necessary.
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? If a reader’s first response is “how?” or “why?” your thesis may be too open-ended and lack guidance for the reader. See what you can add to give the reader a better take on your position right from the beginning.

Suppose you are taking a course on contemporary communication, and the instructor hands out the following essay assignment: “Discuss the impact of social media on public awareness.” Looking back at your notes, you might start with this working thesis:

Social media impacts public awareness in both positive and negative ways.

You can use the questions above to help you revise this general statement into a stronger thesis.

• Do I answer the question? You can analyze this if you rephrase “discuss the impact” as “what is the impact?” This way, you can see that you’ve answered the question only very generally with the vague “positive and negative ways.”
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Not likely. Only people who maintain that social media has a solely positive or solely negative impact could disagree.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? No. What are the positive effects? What are the negative effects?
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? No. Why are they positive? How are they positive? What are their causes? Why are they negative? How are they negative? What are their causes?
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? No. Why should anyone care about the positive and/or negative impact of social media?

After thinking about your answers to these questions, you decide to focus on the one impact you feel strongly about and have strong evidence for:

Because not every voice on social media is reliable, people have become much more critical consumers of information, and thus, more informed voters.

This version is a much stronger thesis! It answers the question, takes a specific position that others can challenge, and it gives a sense of why it matters.

Let’s try another. Suppose your literature professor hands out the following assignment in a class on the American novel: Write an analysis of some aspect of Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn. “This will be easy,” you think. “I loved Huckleberry Finn!” You grab a pad of paper and write:

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a great American novel.

You begin to analyze your thesis:

• Do I answer the question? No. The prompt asks you to analyze some aspect of the novel. Your working thesis is a statement of general appreciation for the entire novel.

Think about aspects of the novel that are important to its structure or meaning—for example, the role of storytelling, the contrasting scenes between the shore and the river, or the relationships between adults and children. Now you write:

In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain develops a contrast between life on the river and life on the shore.

• Do I answer the question? Yes!
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Not really. This contrast is well-known and accepted.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? It’s getting there–you have highlighted an important aspect of the novel for investigation. However, it’s still not clear what your analysis will reveal.
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? Not yet. Compare scenes from the book and see what you discover. Free write, make lists, jot down Huck’s actions and reactions and anything else that seems interesting.
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? What’s the point of this contrast? What does it signify?”

After examining the evidence and considering your own insights, you write:

Through its contrasting river and shore scenes, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn suggests that to find the true expression of American democratic ideals, one must leave “civilized” society and go back to nature.

This final thesis statement presents an interpretation of a literary work based on an analysis of its content. Of course, for the essay itself to be successful, you must now present evidence from the novel that will convince the reader of your interpretation.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. 2010. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers , 6th ed. New York: Longman.

Lunsford, Andrea A. 2015. The St. Martin’s Handbook , 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Ramage, John D., John C. Bean, and June Johnson. 2018. The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing , 8th ed. New York: Pearson.

Ruszkiewicz, John J., Christy Friend, Daniel Seward, and Maxine Hairston. 2010. The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers , 9th ed. Boston: Pearson Education.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Evaluating a Text

Main idea, purpose, & audience.

Text evaluation and analysis usually start with the core elements of that text: main idea, purpose, and audience.  An author needs to consider all three of these elements before writing, as they help determine the author’s content and language.  As a reader, it’s important to ascertain these aspects of a text which exist as a foundation for the author’s content and language.

Always start with the main idea.  Main ideas may be stated directly in the text or implied; you need to read a text carefully in order to determine the main idea. Put the main idea into your own words, so that it’s expressed in a way that makes sense to you.  Then ask and answer the following basic questions about that main idea:

• Is the main idea reasonable/believable to most readers?
• Is the main idea clear and if not, why do you think the author embedded it?
• Is the main idea the author’s opinion, or is it something that the author asserts about an issue?

Asking and answering these questions should help you get a sense of the author’s intention in the text, and lead into considering the author’s purpose.

Main idea and purpose are intricately linked. There are a few basic purposes for texts; figuring out the basic purpose leads to more nuanced text analysis based on its purpose. Basic purposes of a text include:

• to inform – to describe, explain, or teach something to your audience
• to persuade/argue – to get your audience to do something, to take a particular action, or to think in a certain way
• to entertain – to provide your audience with insight into a different reality, distraction, and/or enjoyment

The following video more fully explains these different purposes of a text, and adds a fourth, to share insights or feelings.

Main Idea & Purpose Determine Analysis

The author’s main idea and purpose in writing a text determine whether you need to analyze and evaluate the text.  They also determine the pieces of the text you should analyze—content or language or both.

If the purpose is to persuade or argue

You always need to analyze the text to see if the main idea is justified.  Do the supporting ideas relate to and develop the main idea? Is the supporting evidence taken from recognized, valid sources?  Is the author arguing via language instead of evidence or facts?  Persuasion and argument need to present logically valid information to make the reader agree intellectually (not emotionally) with the main idea.

If the purpose is to inform

You usually need to analyze the text, since the text needs to present valid information in as objective a way as possible, in order to meet its purpose of explaining concepts so a reader understands.

If the purpose is to entertain

You may or may not need to analyze the text. Writing that entertains does not necessarily have to be either logical or complete in order to accomplish its purpose. You may want to analyze the text for language, though, to see how the author manipulates language to accomplish their purpose.

Who are the author’s intended readers?  Figuring out this will help you understand an author’s approach to providing the main idea with a particular purpose. Does the audience know little or nothing about the topic, or are they already knowledgeable?  Is the audience’s knowledge at beginner or expert level, somewhere in between, or mixed? Does the audience include people who may be skeptical of the author’s ideas?  Does the audience include people who outright oppose the author’s ideas? As you can see, asking and answering questions about audience can help an author determine the type and amount of content to include in a text. As a reader, it’s important to figure out the author’s intended audience, to help you analyze the type, amount, and appropriateness of the text’s information.

The following video presents the concept of audience from a writer’s perspective, but the concepts are applicable to you as a reader who needs to consider audience as a foundation for evaluating a text.

You may also want to link to one of Purdue’s Online Writing Lab’s page on Author and Audience to get a sense of the wide array of variables that can influence an author’s purpose, and that an author may consider about an audience.

Read the article “ Forget Shorter Showers ” by Derrick Jensen.

Note that most of the Try It exercises in this section of the text will be based on this article, so you should read carefully, annotate, take notes, and apply appropriate strategies for reading to understand a text.

Then answer the following questions about the article’s main idea, purpose, and audience.

Which selection best represents the author’s main idea?

• We have it in our power and right to take action to stop the industrial economy over-using and wasting our natural resources.
• We are victims of a campaign of misdirection, being told and accepting that our personal use of natural resources is both the cause of scarcity and the solution to preservation.
• Because we have accepted our identities as consumers, we reduce our forms of political existence to consuming and not consuming.
• Simple living is better for the planet than over-consumption.

Sentence 1 is the best answer. Although sentences 2 and 3 extract main ideas from the text, they are key supporting points that help lead to the author’s conclusion and main idea.

Which selection best represents the author’s purpose?

• to inform readers about the actual use of resources by individuals vs. the industrial economy
• to persuade readers to consider taking action against an unjust situation that assigns blame to individuals instead of big business in regard to the depletion of natural resources
• to persuade readers to re-think their personal attempts to live more simply and more “green”
• to entertain readers interested in nature with accusations against the industrial economy

Selection 2 best represents the author’s purpose. The author’s purpose is to get readers thinking about conservation of resources in order to spur them to action against a system that, in his opinion, exploits those resources as well as individuals. His purpose is both to inform and persuade, but persuasion seems to take precedence, as he both starts and ends with a reminder about historically justified instances of activism.

Who comprises the author’s audience and what cues can you use to determine that audience?

The author is writing to an audience of readers who are interested in nature and conservation. If you look on the Orion website and read the “About” section on Mission and History, you’ll see that this publication started as a magazine about nature and grew from there. Based on reading the text, the author’s intended audience has the following characteristics:

• Educated – The author assumes that readers know about WWII, the Civil Rights Act of 1974, and other historic events.  The author also uses language such as “systematic misdirection,” “solar photovoltaics,” and even “consensus” (instead of agreement).
• Concerned about the environment – because they are reading this magazine in the first place
• Willing to entertain the idea of taking action to improve quality of life and preserve resources
• Comfortable enough (with themselves? with their social status? with their personal philosophies?) to feel that their voices might make a difference if they choose to protest the current use of natural resources
• Purpose & Audience. Authored by : Susan Oaks. Project : Introduction to College Reading & Writing. License : CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial
• video The Author's Purpose. Authored by : Marc Franco. Provided by : Snap Language. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6H2NLPqWtI . License : Other . License Terms : YouTube video
• video Audience: Introduction & Overview. Authored by : Gracemarie Mike and Daniel Liddle. Provided by : The Purdue Online Writing Lab. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ypxLRYsrE . License : Other . License Terms : YouTube video
• image of woman with a stack of books instead of a head, facing shelves of books. Authored by : Gerd Altmann. Provided by : Pixabay. Located at : https://pixabay.com/photos/books-question-mark-student-stack-4158244/ . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved
• image of the word Evaluation. Authored by : Gerd Altmann. Provided by : Pixabay. Located at : https://pixabay.com/illustrations/district-evaluation-assessment-1264717/ . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved

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How to write a thesis statement, what is a thesis statement.

Almost all of us—even if we don’t do it consciously—look early in an essay for a one- or two-sentence condensation of the argument or analysis that is to follow. We refer to that condensation as a thesis statement.

Why Should Your Essay Contain a Thesis Statement?

• to test your ideas by distilling them into a sentence or two
• to better organize and develop your argument
• to provide your reader with a “guide” to your argument

In general, your thesis statement will accomplish these goals if you think of the thesis as the answer to the question your paper explores.

How Can You Write a Good Thesis Statement?

Here are some helpful hints to get you started. You can either scroll down or select a link to a specific topic.

How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is Assigned How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is not Assigned How to Tell a Strong Thesis Statement from a Weak One

How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is Assigned

Almost all assignments, no matter how complicated, can be reduced to a single question. Your first step, then, is to distill the assignment into a specific question. For example, if your assignment is, “Write a report to the local school board explaining the potential benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade class,” turn the request into a question like, “What are the potential benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade class?” After you’ve chosen the question your essay will answer, compose one or two complete sentences answering that question.

Q: “What are the potential benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade class?” A: “The potential benefits of using computers in a fourth-grade class are . . .”

A: “Using computers in a fourth-grade class promises to improve . . .”

The answer to the question is the thesis statement for the essay.

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How to Generate a Thesis Statement if the Topic is not Assigned

Even if your assignment doesn’t ask a specific question, your thesis statement still needs to answer a question about the issue you’d like to explore. In this situation, your job is to figure out what question you’d like to write about.

A good thesis statement will usually include the following four attributes:

• take on a subject upon which reasonable people could disagree
• deal with a subject that can be adequately treated given the nature of the assignment
• express one main idea
• assert your conclusions about a subject

Let’s see how to generate a thesis statement for a social policy paper.

Brainstorm the topic . Let’s say that your class focuses upon the problems posed by changes in the dietary habits of Americans. You find that you are interested in the amount of sugar Americans consume.

You start out with a thesis statement like this:

Sugar consumption.

This fragment isn’t a thesis statement. Instead, it simply indicates a general subject. Furthermore, your reader doesn’t know what you want to say about sugar consumption.

Narrow the topic . Your readings about the topic, however, have led you to the conclusion that elementary school children are consuming far more sugar than is healthy.

You change your thesis to look like this:

Reducing sugar consumption by elementary school children.

This fragment not only announces your subject, but it focuses on one segment of the population: elementary school children. Furthermore, it raises a subject upon which reasonable people could disagree, because while most people might agree that children consume more sugar than they used to, not everyone would agree on what should be done or who should do it. You should note that this fragment is not a thesis statement because your reader doesn’t know your conclusions on the topic.

Take a position on the topic. After reflecting on the topic a little while longer, you decide that what you really want to say about this topic is that something should be done to reduce the amount of sugar these children consume.

You revise your thesis statement to look like this:

More attention should be paid to the food and beverage choices available to elementary school children.

This statement asserts your position, but the terms more attention and food and beverage choices are vague.

Use specific language . You decide to explain what you mean about food and beverage choices , so you write:

Experts estimate that half of elementary school children consume nine times the recommended daily allowance of sugar.

This statement is specific, but it isn’t a thesis. It merely reports a statistic instead of making an assertion.

Make an assertion based on clearly stated support. You finally revise your thesis statement one more time to look like this:

Because half of all American elementary school children consume nine times the recommended daily allowance of sugar, schools should be required to replace the beverages in soda machines with healthy alternatives.

Notice how the thesis answers the question, “What should be done to reduce sugar consumption by children, and who should do it?” When you started thinking about the paper, you may not have had a specific question in mind, but as you became more involved in the topic, your ideas became more specific. Your thesis changed to reflect your new insights.

How to Tell a Strong Thesis Statement from a Weak One

1. a strong thesis statement takes some sort of stand..

Remember that your thesis needs to show your conclusions about a subject. For example, if you are writing a paper for a class on fitness, you might be asked to choose a popular weight-loss product to evaluate. Here are two thesis statements:

There are some negative and positive aspects to the Banana Herb Tea Supplement.

This is a weak thesis statement. First, it fails to take a stand. Second, the phrase negative and positive aspects is vague.

Because Banana Herb Tea Supplement promotes rapid weight loss that results in the loss of muscle and lean body mass, it poses a potential danger to customers.

This is a strong thesis because it takes a stand, and because it's specific.

2. A strong thesis statement justifies discussion.

Your thesis should indicate the point of the discussion. If your assignment is to write a paper on kinship systems, using your own family as an example, you might come up with either of these two thesis statements:

My family is an extended family.

This is a weak thesis because it merely states an observation. Your reader won’t be able to tell the point of the statement, and will probably stop reading.

While most American families would view consanguineal marriage as a threat to the nuclear family structure, many Iranian families, like my own, believe that these marriages help reinforce kinship ties in an extended family.

This is a strong thesis because it shows how your experience contradicts a widely-accepted view. A good strategy for creating a strong thesis is to show that the topic is controversial. Readers will be interested in reading the rest of the essay to see how you support your point.

3. A strong thesis statement expresses one main idea.

Readers need to be able to see that your paper has one main point. If your thesis statement expresses more than one idea, then you might confuse your readers about the subject of your paper. For example:

Companies need to exploit the marketing potential of the Internet, and Web pages can provide both advertising and customer support.

This is a weak thesis statement because the reader can’t decide whether the paper is about marketing on the Internet or Web pages. To revise the thesis, the relationship between the two ideas needs to become more clear. One way to revise the thesis would be to write:

Because the Internet is filled with tremendous marketing potential, companies should exploit this potential by using Web pages that offer both advertising and customer support.

This is a strong thesis because it shows that the two ideas are related. Hint: a great many clear and engaging thesis statements contain words like because , since , so , although , unless , and however .

4. A strong thesis statement is specific.

A thesis statement should show exactly what your paper will be about, and will help you keep your paper to a manageable topic. For example, if you're writing a seven-to-ten page paper on hunger, you might say:

World hunger has many causes and effects.

This is a weak thesis statement for two major reasons. First, world hunger can’t be discussed thoroughly in seven to ten pages. Second, many causes and effects is vague. You should be able to identify specific causes and effects. A revised thesis might look like this:

Hunger persists in Glandelinia because jobs are scarce and farming in the infertile soil is rarely profitable.

This is a strong thesis statement because it narrows the subject to a more specific and manageable topic, and it also identifies the specific causes for the existence of hunger.

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Finding the Main Point

No matter what you are reading or why you are reading it, you want to make sure that you understand the main point. The main point is the key idea that the author is trying to convey in the text.

The techniques in this section apply best to nonfiction work, including scholarly articles, informational texts, textbooks, and arguments. While they can also be used for fiction or creative nonfiction , strategies for reading literature often work better for these types of texts because literary texts don’t always have a clear main point. If you are reading fiction or creative nonfiction, I recommend asking your professor for guidance.

The techniques in this section can be used separately, but they can also be used together.

Break the Reading into Sections

Just like chapters in a novel, informative and other nonfiction texts are often made up of sections. A section of a text has a point of its own. You can think of sections in a text like building blocks, each adding to the structure and content of the whole. In this fashion, each section should contribute at least one key idea to the main point.

Keep in mind that it often takes several paragraphs to work through the explanation of a single point. A section might be as short as a single paragraph, but it also might be much longer—six, eight, ten paragraphs long.

You can treat each section as its own little mini-text and work to find the main point of that section. If you understand the point of each section, you can often piece together the main point by combining the points of the sections.

It is usually helpful to try to summarize each section of text in one or two sentences. When you read those sentences together, you can often more easily see the main point. This approach can also get you started on a full summary of the text.

Texts with Obvious Section Breaks

Sometimes sections will be obvious because they will be labeled with headings. You’ll see this in textbooks, for example. These headings work like titles in that they can give you clues about the contents of that section.

Sometimes, headings are conventional . For example, in scholarly research essays in many fields, headings such as “ method ,” “ results ,” and “ discussion ” tell an experienced reader what kind of information to expect in each of those sections.

Even if you don’t find any headings, sometimes you’ll see extra space between paragraphs, often with a decorative symbol (like ‡). Even though these dividers have no heading, you can still treat them as sections, but without the information that a heading would provide.

Texts Without Obvious Section Breaks

Sometimes, there are no headings or spacing to guide you in dividing up a text. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t sections. You just have to look harder for them.

Look first for changes in topics. In some texts, authors will talk about a series of topics that are related but are clearly distinct from one another. For example, a text that describes harms caused by climate change might discuss different kinds of harm—harm to plants, harm to animals, and harm to people—and each of those could be considered a different section.

Other times, however, the changes in topics aren’t obvious. In these cases, your best approach is to look at the opening sentences of paragraphs for the transitions :

• Transitions that show similarity (e.g., “also,” “likewise”) or example (e.g., “for instance,” “specifically”) usually do not indicate a section change. These signal that the author is continuing the same point.
• Transitions that show contrast (e.g., “however,” “on the other hand”) or sequence (e.g., “first,” “second,” “next”) frequently do indicate a section change. These signal a change in perspective or topic.
• Other types of transitions, such as those dealing with time (e.g., “before,” “recently”) or consequence (e.g., “therefore,” “accordingly”) may or may not signal a section change. You’ll have to read further or look for other clues.

Transitions are not always just single words, so you may have to look at the structure and meaning of those opening sentences to see how they are setting up the topic of the current paragraph.

Let’s take the following sentence and assume that it appears at the beginning of a paragraph: “While some may agree with Jones, others disagree.” Technically, there is no transition word in that sentence, but there is a transition idea. The first part of the sentence (“Some may agree with Jones”) gestures backward to what has already been discussed (Jones’s ideas). The second part (“others disagree”) signals that disagreement with Jones will be the subject of at least this paragraph, and maybe more.

Once you have identified sections, you can start working on understanding the point in each one and how that point contributes to the main point of the text.

A quick glance at Mitchell’s text shows three sections. Two of them have headings: “Segregated Coexistence” and “Living in Community.” The other section appears at the beginning of the article, so you could think of this one as “Introduction.” By the time I reached this point in the reading process, I’ve already read the article, so I should be able to identify the key ideas in each section.

Given these headings, I would expect that the introduction would set up the article as a whole and would introduce key terms and concepts—the kind of work that introductions do in just about any article. The introduction explains that diversity is not just demographics. It also explains that the “quality of diversity” is a term that Mitchell is using to think about how Americans live together and how we handle the fact that there are differences among us. He says that there are two “stances”: “segregated coexistence” and “living in community,” which are the other two headings in this article.

“Segregated Coexistence” is the state of affairs now. He points out statistics and census data that show that we live in enclaves, grouped by race and ethnicity. He claims that such segregation creates a base for racism since it places some people in worse conditions than others and grouping like this makes other kinds of discrimination easier.

“Living in Community” is integration. Mitchell says that this is hard because we will have to acknowledge genuinely the race-based harms that have been done, address those harms, and make real changes in our current society so that such harms are avoided. This will only happen if we want it to work.

The last few paragraphs of this section aren’t describing “living in community.” Instead, they are doing some conclusion work, and I’ll talk about this in the next section.

Because I believe that I’ll need the points in those last four paragraphs to explain the main point, I’ll save my thoughts about the main point for the next section. However, notice that my division between this section “Breaking the Reading into Sections” and the next “Focusing on the Ending and the Beginning” is artificial. That is, you would look at the ending and beginning of Mitchell’s article as part of breaking the reading into sections.

If I’m taking notes on the sections, I would almost certainly see that the last four paragraphs are really a separate section, just without a section break. Why do I see it as a separate section? At the paragraph beginning with “Doing that work,” Mitchell changes topics from explaining the work of living in community to talking about the foundational question we need to answer, “How should we treat those whom we see as different from us?”

Using the article that you’ve chosen from the example assignment , identify the sections, and write out notes on the key ideas in each one.

Compare your notes with those of a classmate working on the same article. Talk through any differences to help you understand the focus of each section and ultimately identify the main point of the article.

Focus on the Ending and the Beginning

When we read, we remember best what we read last. Authors know this, so they often make sure that they provide some kind of clarity about their main point at the end of a text. If a text is intended to be read through to the end, you are very likely to find the main point there.

Not all genres put their main points at the end.

Some, like newspaper articles, put their main point up front—usually in the first sentence. Newspaper articles are written with the expectation that most readers will read the headline and a few paragraphs of the story, so the main point is put right at the beginning (in what is called the “lead”).

This is also true for articles that use IMRD structure. IMRD stands for Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion, and this structure is very common in scholarly research articles in the natural and social sciences. In those articles, the main point can be found in the abstract, within the first couple of paragraphs of the discussion section, and sometimes in the introduction.

If you aren’t sure whether you are reading something that places the main point in an unusual place, you should ask your professor for more guidance.

We remember best what we read last, but we also tend to remember what we read first. If you don’t see a main point at the end of a text, look back at the beginning to see if it’s there. It may also be in both places and a repeated idea is usually a pretty big signal that you have found the central idea.

In my example set of notes in the last section, I noted that the last few paragraphs of Mitchell’s article aren’t really focused on “living in community.” In the last four paragraphs, he talks mostly about the debates in our society about how we should treat people from races and ethnicities that are not our own. He says that we should figure out what we want our real-world lives to be like when we think about diversity and that diversity is not just a theoretical issue for debate.

He doesn’t give us an answer directly, but it’s pretty clear that he thinks living in community is a better option than segregated coexistence. First, he puts living in community last, which is a signal that he thinks it’s more important. Second, he talks about things like “domestic stability” in ways that imply that we’ll be more stable if we were integrated rather than segregated.

Even though I was pretty sure I had found his main point, I checked the beginning, too, just to be thorough. The beginning focuses on the idea of the quality of diversity in America and how that concept is central to the debates about race relations happening at the time. In other words, he thinks we need to deal with this choice if we want our circumstances to get better.

So, when I put the beginning together with the ending, I see him focused on this central point: that Americans need to think actively about the real-world effects of choosing segregation (our current situation) over integration, which has a much better chance of providing stability in our society. He also suggests that we’ll be better people for choosing living in community.

Using the article that you’ve chosen from the example assignment , examine the ending and then the beginning, and write out notes on the key ideas in each one. Coupled with your notes from the sections, you should be able to write a sentence or two that explains the main point of your article.

Compare your notes and your sense of the main point with those of a classmate working on the same article. Talk through any differences that will help you strengthen your understanding of the main point.

Follow the Topic Sentences

Topic sentences are the sentences that sum up the main idea in a paragraph. In longer paragraphs, they help readers (and writers) remain focused on the key point. But topic sentences can also be read together to get a clearer idea of the main point of an article or chapter or even a section of a text.

Topic sentences are often, though not always, the first sentence in a paragraph, but they can appear anywhere. Since there is no hard and fast rule about their location, you want to watch for them. After you read a paragraph, go back and look specifically for that summary idea, the one that pulls together the specific information in a paragraph.

When you string topic sentences together, you get the gist of the author’s point in a text. You can highlight those sentences in your text, but it might also help to copy those sentences into a separate document and read them together. They won’t sound coherent, but if you focus on the ways in which the ideas develop, you should be able to identify the main point of the article.

This approach doesn’t work with Mitchell’s text. None of his paragraphs are longer than two sentences, so I wouldn’t bother trying to identify the main point this way.

Just to show you what this approach looks like, though, let’s take the introduction to the book To Be An American: Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation by Bill Ong Hing, one of the titles I used to discuss subtitles.

The introduction is made up of fourteen paragraphs, averaging just under five sentences per paragraph. Here, I have copied those topic sentences, including information after each about which sentence number it is (the first number) and how many sentences there are in the paragraph (the number after the slash).

¶1 This paragraph has no topic sentence. Instead, there are three sentences of examples of proposals and legislation that would limit immigration and services for immigrants and undocumented residents.

¶2 “Is there any doubt that we are experiencing one of the most potent periods of anti-immigrant fervor in the United States?” (1/6)

¶3 “Much of America is hurting economically, insecure about its economic future…. To many who make up this part of America, the explanation that restrictionists (those who would severely reduce immigrant visas) offer up—the immigrant as culprit—makes sense.” (1/7 and 4/7)

¶4 “Since 1965, America has experienced significant demographic changes.” (1/5)

¶5 “Not since the first decade of the twentieth century—when southern and eastern Europeans entered in large numbers for the first time—has there been such a dramatic change in the ethnic composition of the nation.” (7/7)

¶6 “These demographic trends, altering the ethnic composition of America, have defined the debate for many modern-day restrictionists on what it means to become an American.” (1/5)

¶7 “Underlying the debate over immigrants and American identity is a concern about the interaction, or lack of interaction, among different racial groups.” (3/3)

¶8 “The current level of anti-immigrant rhetoric is simply not justified on economic grounds.” (3/3)

¶9 “Until we can understand the real causes of our fears about job loss and public bankruptcy, we cannot evaluate immigrants’ actual collective role in our economy.” (2/7)

¶10 “Because the principal complaint of restrictionists today is culturally and socially premised, the primary purpose of my efforts here is to analyze the positions of two broad groups: first, the assimilationists, whose opposition to current immigration is chiefly grounded in cultural or social complaints, and second, the cultural pluralists, the counterpart to the assimilationists, who promote diversity or multiculturalism…. We must all be encouraged to consider a new approach to cultural pluralism which respects diverse views and cultures, which is constantly attentive to race relations, and which shares a common core set of values.” (1/7 and 6/7)

¶11 “In their current attack on the influx of Asian and Latino immigrants and criticism of interethnic group conflict and separatism, assimilationists essentially posit two solutions: terminate or drastically curtail immigration; and Americanize those who are here. In response to these proposals that are couched in a rhetoric of culture, I set forth my own constantly evolving notions of cultural pluralism and what it means to be an American.” (1/2 and 2/2)

¶12 “Immigrant adaptation, and the creation of a common core, must be viewed as the dual responsibility of the immigrant and the mainstream.” (8/8)

¶13 “As I consider these issues, my experiences growing up in a multicultural community and working with immigrants seem relevant.” (1/4)

¶14 “Restrictionists and pro-immigrant advocates do agree on one critical point: we face a defining moment in the nation’s history. The course we choose will tell us much about ourselves.” (1/2 and 2/2)

Notice that sometimes I need to identify more than one sentence to get the point of a paragraph, and when there are two-sentence paragraphs, I really need both of them to be sure about the point.

It also helps to think about where in this book this part of the text appears. The introduction to a book, much like the introduction of an article, should give an overview of the text and lay out the central terms or concepts.

From reading these sentences, especially after reading the full introduction, I can see that the book is going to focus on the positions of “restrictionists” (defined by Hing as “those who would severely reduce immigrant visas” ¶3; a group which includes those who believe that anyone who immigrates here should assimilate with American culture) and cultural pluralists (“who promote diversity or multiculturalism” ¶10). According to this introduction, Hing’s book will be examining these positions in light of his own experiences and in relation to the idea that there are (or should be) a set of core values that define what it means to be American. Hing plans to argue the need for immigrants to be involved in defining that set of core values.

Using the article that you’ve chosen from the example assignment , or another text you’re working on, first decide whether this approach will help. Remember that it really only works when you have long-ish paragraphs with topic sentences.

If your article has this kind of paragraph structure, copy out the topic sentences into a new document. Using these sentences as a guide, explain the main idea of that article.

If your article does not, locate another reading that you are working on, perhaps for another class, and try this approach. Again, using the sentences that you copy out, explain the main idea of the text.

Compare your notes and your sense of the main point with those of a classmate working on the same text, even if it’s not one of the texts here. Talk through any differences that will help you strengthen your understanding of the main point.

Eliminate the Examples

Some texts use a lot of examples. While examples help us understand the point, just like the voices of others in a text, they will never actually contain the main point of a text. If you find yourself getting caught up in the details or the stories in an article, you can temporarily get those out of the way.

Try printing out a hard copy or copying the article (or the difficult part of it) into a word processor. Then cross or black out everything that is an example. What you are left with will be the author’s explanations, and while what’s left won’t give you a coherent explanation, it should help you find the main point.

Here’s what happens when I remove the examples from Mitchell’s “Segregated Coexistence” section:

Working on a copy of one section from the article that you have chosen, eliminate the examples. Using a black pen or highlighter, cross out or cover over everything that is an example, whether it’s a complete paragraph, a sentence, or part of a sentence. Read what’s left, and write a brief description of the main point of that section.

Identify Who Is Talking

Most authors include viewpoints other than their own in their writing, and if you are going to understand an author’s point, you must know when the author is speaking in their own voice and when they are using the words and ideas of others. Most of the time this can be seen through citation or attribution, which is when credit is given to a source even when no citation is provided.

To determine when the author is speaking and when the author is using the voices of others, look for the following:

• Quotation marks and the attributive tags that go with them: Jones says, “The sky is gray today.”
• References to specific people or organizations in the same sentence or in the sentences immediately around the point, even without the quotation marks: United Airlines has made a point of saying that the sky is gray.
• Vague references to groups of people, with or without sources provided: Some say that the gray has a yellow tint.
• Citations or links to other sources for the information: The yellow tint to the gray can be caused by the sun (Jones and Smith, 2016).

You might find it helpful to identify in your annotations or notes how the author is using these voices, either as supporting or opposing voices.

Supporting Voices

Frequently, these viewpoints are supporting the author’s position or providing authority for their claims. In effect, the author is saying, “See? These other important and knowledgeable people agree with me!”

While these supporting viewpoints are helpful and even necessary, they are not the same as the author’s viewpoint, and so you won’t find the main point in these supporting voices.

Mitchell uses a number of sources to support the ideas he is presenting. Here are a couple of examples:

• He quotes the Othering and Belonging Institute report on the ways that most people living in metropolitan areas feel they are more segregated now than in 1990 and how the legacy of the redlining practices of the 1930s can be seen in present-day segregation. This supports his claim that we currently live in segregated coexistence.
• He paraphrases Eric Yamamoto to explain what would be involved in the process of interracial justice that would lead to racial reconciliation. This supports his point that a change to living in community would be difficult.

Notice that in both of these, Mitchell himself still has to make his own points. In other words, the Othering and Belonging Institute isn’t making a specific claim about segregated coexistence—that’s Mitchell’s claim. And Yamamoto is not explaining living in community. Again, that’s Mitchell’s point. The sources just provide support for the point that Mitchell wants to make.

Opposing Voices

Sometimes it can seem like an author is contradicting themselves. While sometimes this is true, usually, the author is presenting someone else’s viewpoint as part of their argument. This is called a counterargument .

In a counterargument, an author will present an opposing idea in order to respond, usually in a way that explains why the author’s idea is better. For example, an author who wants to argue against the use of facial recognition technology might explain what others see as the benefits before making the case that this technology is too racially biased. You want to make sure that you understand when you are reading the author’s point and when you are reading the point of a source.

Mitchell does not directly cite or attribute any opposing arguments. There are no quotations or paraphrases from people who oppose his position. However, the opposing positions are still there. Here are a couple of examples:

• “We tend to think of diversity in demographic terms….” That “we tend” is vague, and it becomes more clearly a point Mitchell opposes when in that same sentence he writes “but that’s an incomplete take.” By offering a contrasting position immediately, we know that Mitchell doesn’t think that it’s enough to use demography to determine diversity.
• At the beginning of the “Segregated Coexistence” section, he writes, “Segregated coexistence is a standard of diversity that relies on a surface-level demography that you could call ‘diverse’ because different races all live in one geographic region….” We know that this isn’t his position, even though there isn’t a citation or attribution because he says, “that you could call ‘diverse.’” This phrasing, plus the use of the scare quotes around “diverse,” tell us that he doesn’t buy that position, even though some people do.

There could be several reasons why Mitchell chooses not to identify specific sources for opposing positions in his article. He might, for example, prefer to focus on the alternative he proposes instead of getting caught up in the specific arguments around segregation. Or he might want to imply that these beliefs are vague, something we all seem to “know” without really knowing where the ideas come from. There could be other reasons, too.

Finding the Main Point in the Author’s Voice

Authors bring in other voices to support their ideas or to explain where their ideas are preferable. These supporting voices serve as evidence in their writing, but just like examples, the evidence cannot speak on behalf of the author. The author must do their own speaking, particularly on their main points.

Keep this in mind as you read and make note of who is speaking at any given point in a text. The voices of others are not the author’s voice—and thus will not contain the author’s main point. These voices will be support and evidence, and they can help you identify the main point, but they cannot be the main point.

• The main point in a text is the key idea that the author is trying to convey.
• Break the reading into sections, and identify the main point of each section. Put those together to figure out the main point of the entire piece.
• Look at the ending and beginning of the text, especially the ending.
• Examine the topic sentences of each paragraph, particularly when the paragraphs are long.
• Eliminate the examples.
• Be sure that you locate the main point in a section where the author is making their own point—not where the author is using a source or making a vague point about what some people know or believe.

Text Attribution

This section of this chapter headed “Follow the Topic Sentences” contains material taken from the chapter “Paragraph Analysis” from The Word on College Reading and Writing by Carol Burnell, Jaime Wood, Monique Babin, Susan Pesznecker, and Nicole Rosevear and is used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

Storytelling about real-life people or events.

Normal or usual for a given field or community. See also "convention."

The section of a research article describing the materials and procedures of the study at hand.

The section of a research article describing the findings of the study.

The section of a research article describing the most important results and what those results mean.

A word or group of words that guide the reader logically from one idea to the next in a text.

A phrase embedded in a sentence that indicates the source of the information in that sentence. Sometimes these tags can serve as citations, particularly when there are no page numbers to reference.

An argument that opposes the argument that an author is making; also used to describe an author's response to that opposing argument.

Reading and Writing Successfully in College: A Guide for Students Copyright © 2023 by Patricia Lynne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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How to Write an Essay Introduction (with Examples)   

The introduction of an essay plays a critical role in engaging the reader and providing contextual information about the topic. It sets the stage for the rest of the essay, establishes the tone and style, and motivates the reader to continue reading. 

Table of Contents

What is an essay introduction , what to include in an essay introduction, how to create an essay structure , step-by-step process for writing an essay introduction , how to write an introduction paragraph , how to write a hook for your essay , how to include background information , how to write a thesis statement .

• Argumentative Essay Introduction Example: 
• Expository Essay Introduction Example 

Literary Analysis Essay Introduction Example

Check and revise – checklist for essay introduction , key takeaways , frequently asked questions .

An introduction is the opening section of an essay, paper, or other written work. It introduces the topic and provides background information, context, and an overview of what the reader can expect from the rest of the work. 1 The key is to be concise and to the point, providing enough information to engage the reader without delving into excessive detail. 

The essay introduction is crucial as it sets the tone for the entire piece and provides the reader with a roadmap of what to expect. Here are key elements to include in your essay introduction: 

• Hook : Start with an attention-grabbing statement or question to engage the reader. This could be a surprising fact, a relevant quote, or a compelling anecdote. 
• Background information : Provide context and background information to help the reader understand the topic. This can include historical information, definitions of key terms, or an overview of the current state of affairs related to your topic. 
• Thesis statement : Clearly state your main argument or position on the topic. Your thesis should be concise and specific, providing a clear direction for your essay. 

Before we get into how to write an essay introduction, we need to know how it is structured. The structure of an essay is crucial for organizing your thoughts and presenting them clearly and logically. It is divided as follows: 2  

• Introduction:  The introduction should grab the reader’s attention with a hook, provide context, and include a thesis statement that presents the main argument or purpose of the essay.  
• Body:  The body should consist of focused paragraphs that support your thesis statement using evidence and analysis. Each paragraph should concentrate on a single central idea or argument and provide evidence, examples, or analysis to back it up.  
• Conclusion:  The conclusion should summarize the main points and restate the thesis differently. End with a final statement that leaves a lasting impression on the reader. Avoid new information or arguments. 

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to write an essay introduction: 

• Start with a Hook : Begin your introduction paragraph with an attention-grabbing statement, question, quote, or anecdote related to your topic. The hook should pique the reader’s interest and encourage them to continue reading. 
• Provide Background Information : This helps the reader understand the relevance and importance of the topic. 
• State Your Thesis Statement : The last sentence is the main argument or point of your essay. It should be clear, concise, and directly address the topic of your essay. 
• Preview the Main Points : This gives the reader an idea of what to expect and how you will support your thesis. 
• Keep it Concise and Clear : Avoid going into too much detail or including information not directly relevant to your topic. 
• Revise : Revise your introduction after you’ve written the rest of your essay to ensure it aligns with your final argument. 

Here’s an example of an essay introduction paragraph about the importance of education: 

Education is often viewed as a fundamental human right and a key social and economic development driver. As Nelson Mandela once famously said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” It is the key to unlocking a wide range of opportunities and benefits for individuals, societies, and nations. In today’s constantly evolving world, education has become even more critical. It has expanded beyond traditional classroom learning to include digital and remote learning, making education more accessible and convenient. This essay will delve into the importance of education in empowering individuals to achieve their dreams, improving societies by promoting social justice and equality, and driving economic growth by developing a skilled workforce and promoting innovation. 

This introduction paragraph example includes a hook (the quote by Nelson Mandela), provides some background information on education, and states the thesis statement (the importance of education). 

This is one of the key steps in how to write an essay introduction. Crafting a compelling hook is vital because it sets the tone for your entire essay and determines whether your readers will stay interested. A good hook draws the reader in and sets the stage for the rest of your essay.  

• Avoid Dry Fact : Instead of simply stating a bland fact, try to make it engaging and relevant to your topic. For example, if you’re writing about the benefits of exercise, you could start with a startling statistic like, “Did you know that regular exercise can increase your lifespan by up to seven years?” 
• Avoid Using a Dictionary Definition : While definitions can be informative, they’re not always the most captivating way to start an essay. Instead, try to use a quote, anecdote, or provocative question to pique the reader’s interest. For instance, if you’re writing about freedom, you could begin with a quote from a famous freedom fighter or philosopher. 
• Do Not Just State a Fact That the Reader Already Knows : This ties back to the first point—your hook should surprise or intrigue the reader. For Here’s an introduction paragraph example, if you’re writing about climate change, you could start with a thought-provoking statement like, “Despite overwhelming evidence, many people still refuse to believe in the reality of climate change.” 

Including background information in the introduction section of your essay is important to provide context and establish the relevance of your topic. When writing the background information, you can follow these steps: 

• Start with a General Statement:  Begin with a general statement about the topic and gradually narrow it down to your specific focus. For example, when discussing the impact of social media, you can begin by making a broad statement about social media and its widespread use in today’s society, as follows: “Social media has become an integral part of modern life, with billions of users worldwide.” 
• Define Key Terms : Define any key terms or concepts that may be unfamiliar to your readers but are essential for understanding your argument. 
• Provide Relevant Statistics:  Use statistics or facts to highlight the significance of the issue you’re discussing. For instance, “According to a report by Statista, the number of social media users is expected to reach 4.41 billion by 2025.” 
• Discuss the Evolution:  Mention previous research or studies that have been conducted on the topic, especially those that are relevant to your argument. Mention key milestones or developments that have shaped its current impact. You can also outline some of the major effects of social media. For example, you can briefly describe how social media has evolved, including positives such as increased connectivity and issues like cyberbullying and privacy concerns. 
• Transition to Your Thesis:  Use the background information to lead into your thesis statement, which should clearly state the main argument or purpose of your essay. For example, “Given its pervasive influence, it is crucial to examine the impact of social media on mental health.” 

A thesis statement is a concise summary of the main point or claim of an essay, research paper, or other type of academic writing. It appears near the end of the introduction. Here’s how to write a thesis statement: 

• Identify the topic:  Start by identifying the topic of your essay. For example, if your essay is about the importance of exercise for overall health, your topic is “exercise.” 
• State your position:  Next, state your position or claim about the topic. This is the main argument or point you want to make. For example, if you believe that regular exercise is crucial for maintaining good health, your position could be: “Regular exercise is essential for maintaining good health.” 
• Support your position:  Provide a brief overview of the reasons or evidence that support your position. These will be the main points of your essay. For example, if you’re writing an essay about the importance of exercise, you could mention the physical health benefits, mental health benefits, and the role of exercise in disease prevention. 
• Make it specific:  Ensure your thesis statement clearly states what you will discuss in your essay. For example, instead of saying, “Exercise is good for you,” you could say, “Regular exercise, including cardiovascular and strength training, can improve overall health and reduce the risk of chronic diseases.” 

Examples of essay introduction 

Here are examples of essay introductions for different types of essays: 

Argumentative Essay Introduction Example:  

Topic: Should the voting age be lowered to 16? 

“The question of whether the voting age should be lowered to 16 has sparked nationwide debate. While some argue that 16-year-olds lack the requisite maturity and knowledge to make informed decisions, others argue that doing so would imbue young people with agency and give them a voice in shaping their future.” 

Expository Essay Introduction Example  

Topic: The benefits of regular exercise 

“In today’s fast-paced world, the importance of regular exercise cannot be overstated. From improving physical health to boosting mental well-being, the benefits of exercise are numerous and far-reaching. This essay will examine the various advantages of regular exercise and provide tips on incorporating it into your daily routine.” 

Text: “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee 

“Harper Lee’s novel, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ is a timeless classic that explores themes of racism, injustice, and morality in the American South. Through the eyes of young Scout Finch, the reader is taken on a journey that challenges societal norms and forces characters to confront their prejudices. This essay will analyze the novel’s use of symbolism, character development, and narrative structure to uncover its deeper meaning and relevance to contemporary society.” 

• Engaging and Relevant First Sentence : The opening sentence captures the reader’s attention and relates directly to the topic. 
• Background Information : Enough background information is introduced to provide context for the thesis statement. 
• Definition of Important Terms : Key terms or concepts that might be unfamiliar to the audience or are central to the argument are defined. 
• Clear Thesis Statement : The thesis statement presents the main point or argument of the essay. 
• Relevance to Main Body : Everything in the introduction directly relates to and sets up the discussion in the main body of the essay. 

Writing a strong introduction is crucial for setting the tone and context of your essay. Here are the key takeaways for how to write essay introduction: 3  

• Hook the Reader : Start with an engaging hook to grab the reader’s attention. This could be a compelling question, a surprising fact, a relevant quote, or an anecdote. 
• Provide Background : Give a brief overview of the topic, setting the context and stage for the discussion. 
• Thesis Statement : State your thesis, which is the main argument or point of your essay. It should be concise, clear, and specific. 
• Preview the Structure : Outline the main points or arguments to help the reader understand the organization of your essay. 
• Keep it Concise : Avoid including unnecessary details or information not directly related to your thesis. 
• Revise and Edit : Revise your introduction to ensure clarity, coherence, and relevance. Check for grammar and spelling errors. 
• Seek Feedback : Get feedback from peers or instructors to improve your introduction further. 

The purpose of an essay introduction is to give an overview of the topic, context, and main ideas of the essay. It is meant to engage the reader, establish the tone for the rest of the essay, and introduce the thesis statement or central argument.  

An essay introduction typically ranges from 5-10% of the total word count. For example, in a 1,000-word essay, the introduction would be roughly 50-100 words. However, the length can vary depending on the complexity of the topic and the overall length of the essay.

An essay introduction is critical in engaging the reader and providing contextual information about the topic. To ensure its effectiveness, consider incorporating these key elements: a compelling hook, background information, a clear thesis statement, an outline of the essay’s scope, a smooth transition to the body, and optional signposting sentences.  

The process of writing an essay introduction is not necessarily straightforward, but there are several strategies that can be employed to achieve this end. When experiencing difficulty initiating the process, consider the following techniques: begin with an anecdote, a quotation, an image, a question, or a startling fact to pique the reader’s interest. It may also be helpful to consider the five W’s of journalism: who, what, when, where, why, and how.   For instance, an anecdotal opening could be structured as follows: “As I ascended the stage, momentarily blinded by the intense lights, I could sense the weight of a hundred eyes upon me, anticipating my next move. The topic of discussion was climate change, a subject I was passionate about, and it was my first public speaking event. Little did I know , that pivotal moment would not only alter my perspective but also chart my life’s course.” 

Crafting a compelling thesis statement for your introduction paragraph is crucial to grab your reader’s attention. To achieve this, avoid using overused phrases such as “In this paper, I will write about” or “I will focus on” as they lack originality. Instead, strive to engage your reader by substantiating your stance or proposition with a “so what” clause. While writing your thesis statement, aim to be precise, succinct, and clear in conveying your main argument.  

To create an effective essay introduction, ensure it is clear, engaging, relevant, and contains a concise thesis statement. It should transition smoothly into the essay and be long enough to cover necessary points but not become overwhelming. Seek feedback from peers or instructors to assess its effectiveness. 

References  

• Cui, L. (2022). Unit 6 Essay Introduction.  Building Academic Writing Skills . 
• West, H., Malcolm, G., Keywood, S., & Hill, J. (2019). Writing a successful essay.  Journal of Geography in Higher Education ,  43 (4), 609-617. 
• Beavers, M. E., Thoune, D. L., & McBeth, M. (2023). Bibliographic Essay: Reading, Researching, Teaching, and Writing with Hooks: A Queer Literacy Sponsorship. College English, 85(3), 230-242. 

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How to Write a Perfect Narrative Essay (Step-by-Step)

By Status.net Editorial Team on October 17, 2023 — 10 minutes to read

• Understanding a Narrative Essay Part 1
• Typical Narrative Essay Structure Part 2
• Narrative Essay Template Part 3
• Step 1. How to Choose Your Narrative Essay Topic Part 4
• Step 2. Planning the Structure Part 5
• Step 3. Crafting an Intriguing Introduction Part 6
• Step 4. Weaving the Narrative Body Part 7
• Step 5. Creating a Conclusion Part 8
• Step 6. Polishing the Essay Part 9
• Step 7. Feedback and Revision Part 10

Part 1 Understanding a Narrative Essay

A narrative essay is a form of writing where you share a personal experience or tell a story to make a point or convey a lesson. Unlike other types of essays, a narrative essay aims to engage your audience by sharing your perspective and taking them on an emotional journey.

• To begin, choose a meaningful topic . Pick a story or experience that had a significant impact on your life, taught you something valuable, or made you see the world differently. You want your readers to learn from your experiences, so choose something that will resonate with others.
• Next, create an outline . Although narrative essays allow for creative storytelling, it’s still helpful to have a roadmap to guide your writing. List the main events, the characters involved, and the settings where the events took place. This will help you ensure that your essay is well-structured and easy to follow.
• When writing your narrative essay, focus on showing, not telling . This means that you should use descriptive language and vivid details to paint a picture in your reader’s mind. For example, instead of stating that it was a rainy day, describe the sound of rain hitting your window, the feeling of cold wetness around you, and the sight of puddles forming around your feet. These sensory details will make your essay more engaging and immersive.
• Another key aspect is developing your characters . Give your readers an insight into the thoughts and emotions of the people in your story. This helps them connect with the story, empathize with the characters, and understand their actions. For instance, if your essay is about a challenging hike you took with a friend, spend some time describing your friend’s personality and how the experience impacted their attitude or feelings.
• Keep the pace interesting . Vary your sentence lengths and structures, and don’t be afraid to use some stylistic devices like dialogue, flashbacks, and metaphors. This adds more depth and dimension to your story, keeping your readers engaged from beginning to end.

Part 2 Typical Narrative Essay Structure

A narrative essay typically follows a three-part structure: introduction, body, and conclusion.

• Introduction: Start with a hook to grab attention and introduce your story. Provide some background to set the stage for the main events.
• Body: Develop your story in detail. Describe scenes, characters, and emotions. Use dialogue when necessary to provide conversational elements.
• Conclusion: Sum up your story, revealing the lesson learned or the moral of the story. Leave your audience with a lasting impression.

Part 3 Narrative Essay Template

• 1. Introduction : Set the scene and introduce the main characters and setting of your story. Use descriptive language to paint a vivid picture for your reader and capture their attention.
• Body 2. Rising Action : Develop the plot by introducing a conflict or challenge that the main character must face. This could be a personal struggle, a difficult decision, or an external obstacle. 3. Climax : This is the turning point of the story, where the conflict reaches its peak and the main character must make a critical decision or take action. 4. Falling Action : Show the consequences of the main character’s decision or action, and how it affects the rest of the story. 5. Resolution : Bring the story to a satisfying conclusion by resolving the conflict and showing how the main character has grown or changed as a result of their experiences.
• 6. Reflection/Conclusion : Reflect on the events of the story and what they mean to you as the writer. This could be a lesson learned, a personal realization, or a message you want to convey to your reader.

Part 4 Step 1. How to Choose Your Narrative Essay Topic

Brainstorming ideas.

Start by jotting down any ideas that pop into your mind. Think about experiences you’ve had, stories you’ve heard, or even books and movies that have resonated with you. Write these ideas down and don’t worry too much about organization yet. It’s all about getting your thoughts on paper.

Once you have a list, review your ideas and identify common themes or connections between them. This process should help you discover potential topics for your narrative essay.

Narrowing Down the Choices

After brainstorming, you’ll likely end up with a few strong contenders for your essay topic. To decide which topic is best, consider the following:

• Relevance : Is the topic meaningful for your audience? Will they be able to connect with it on a personal level? Consider the purpose of your assignment and your audience when choosing your topic.
• Detail : Do you have enough specific details to craft a vivid story? The more detail you can recall about the event, the easier it’ll be to write a compelling narrative.
• Emotional impact : A strong narrative essay should evoke emotions in your readers. Choose a topic that has the potential to elicit some emotional response from your target audience.

After evaluating your potential topics based on these criteria, you can select the one that best fits the purpose of your narrative essay.

Part 5 Step 2. Planning the Structure

Creating an outline.

Before you start writing your narrative essay, it’s a great idea to plan out your story. Grab a piece of paper and sketch out a rough outline of the key points you want to cover. Begin with the introduction, where you’ll set the scene and introduce your characters. Then, list the major events of your story in chronological order, followed by the climax and resolution. Organizing your ideas in an outline will ensure your essay flows smoothly and makes sense to your readers.

Detailing Characters, Settings, and Events

Taking time to flesh out the characters, settings, and events in your story will make it more engaging and relatable. Think about your main character’s background, traits, and motivations. Describe their appearance, emotions, and behavior in detail. This personal touch will help your readers connect with them on a deeper level.

Also, give some thought to the setting – where does the story take place? Be sure to include sensory details that paint a vivid picture of the environment. Finally, focus on the series of events that make up your narrative. Are there any twists and turns, or surprising moments? Address these in your essay, using vivid language and engaging storytelling techniques to captivate your readers.

Writing the Narrative Essay

Part 6 step 3. crafting an intriguing introduction.

To start your narrative essay, you’ll want to hook your reader with an interesting and engaging opening. Begin with a captivating sentence or question that piques curiosity and captures attention. For example, “Did you ever think a simple bus ride could change your life forever?” This kind of opening sets the stage for a compelling, relatable story. Next, introduce your main characters and provide a bit of context to help your readers understand the setting and background of the story.

Part 7 Step 4. Weaving the Narrative Body

The body of your essay is where your story unfolds. Here’s where you’ll present a series of events, using descriptive language and vivid details.

Remember to maintain a strong focus on the central theme or main point of your narrative.

Organize your essay chronologically, guiding your reader through the timeline of events.

As you recount your experience, use a variety of sensory details, such as sounds, smells, and tastes, to immerse your reader in the moment. For instance, “The smell of freshly brewed coffee filled the room as my friends and I excitedly chattered about our upcoming adventure.”

Take advantage of dialogue to bring your characters to life and to reveal aspects of their personalities. Incorporate both internal and external conflicts, as conflict plays a crucial role in engaging your reader and enhancing the narrative’s momentum. Show the evolution of your characters and how they grow throughout the story.

Part 8 Step 5. Creating a Conclusion

Finally, to write a satisfying conclusion, reflect on the narrative’s impact and how the experience has affected you or your characters. Tie the narrative’s events together and highlight the lessons learned, providing closure for the reader.

Avoid abruptly ending your story, because that can leave the reader feeling unsatisfied. Instead, strive to create a sense of resolution and demonstrate how the events have changed the characters’ perspectives or how the story’s theme has developed.

For example, “Looking back, I realize that the bus ride not only changed my perspective on friendship, but also taught me valuable life lessons that I carry with me to this day.”

Part 9 Step 6. Polishing the Essay

Fine-tuning your language.

When writing a narrative essay, it’s key to choose words that convey the emotions and experiences you’re describing. Opt for specific, vivid language that creates a clear mental image for your reader. For instance, instead of saying “The weather was hot,” try “The sun scorched the pavement, causing the air to shimmer like a mirage.” This gives your essay a more engaging and immersive feeling.

Editing for Clarity and Concision

As you revise your essay, keep an eye out for redundancies and unnecessary words that might dilute the impact of your story. Getting to the point and using straightforward language can help your essay flow better. For example, instead of using “She was walking in a very slow manner,” you can say, “She strolled leisurely.” Eliminate filler words and phrases, keeping only the most pertinent information that moves your story forward.

Proofreading for Typos

Finally, proofread your essay carefully to catch any typos, grammatical errors, or punctuation mistakes. It’s always a good idea to have someone else read it as well, as they might catch errors you didn’t notice. Mistakes can be distracting and may undermine the credibility of your writing, so be thorough with your editing process.

Part 10 Step 7. Feedback and Revision

Gathering feedback.

After you’ve written the first draft of your narrative essay, it’s time to gather feedback from friends, family, or colleagues. Share your essay with a few trusted people who can provide insights and suggestions for improvement. Listen to their thoughts and be open to constructive criticism. You might be surprised by the different perspectives they offer, which can strengthen your essay.

Iterating on the Draft

Once you have collected feedback, it’s time to revise and refine your essay. Address any issues or concerns raised by your readers and incorporate their suggestions. Consider reorganizing your story’s structure, clarifying your descriptions, or adding more details based on the feedback you received.

As you make changes, continue to fine-tune your essay to ensure a smooth flow and a strong narrative. Don’t be afraid to cut out unnecessary elements or rework parts of your story until it’s polished and compelling.

Revision is a crucial part of the writing process, and taking the time to reflect on feedback and make improvements will help you create a more engaging and impactful narrative essay.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can i create an engaging introduction.

Craft an attention-grabbing hook with a thought-provoking question, an interesting fact, or a vivid description. Set the stage for your story by introducing the time, place, and context for the events. Creating tension or raising curiosity will make your readers eager to learn more.

What strategies help develop strong characters?

To develop strong characters, consider the following:

• Give your characters distinct traits, strengths, and weaknesses.
• Provide a backstory to explain their actions and motivations.
• Use dialogue to present their personality, emotions, and relationships.
• Show how they change or evolve throughout your story.

How can I make my story flow smoothly with transitions?

Smooth transitions between scenes or events can create a more coherent and easy-to-follow story. Consider the following tips to improve your transitions:

• Use words and phrases like “meanwhile,” “later that day,” or “afterward” to signify changes in time.
• Link scenes with a common theme or element.
• Revisit the main characters or setting to maintain continuity.
• Introduce a twist or an unexpected event that leads to the next scene.

What are some tips for choosing a great narrative essay topic?

To choose an engaging narrative essay topic, follow these tips:

• Pick a personal experience or story that holds significance for you.
• Consider a challenge or a turning point you’ve faced in your life.
• Opt for a topic that will allow you to share emotions and lessons learned.
• Think about what your audience would find relatable, intriguing, or inspiring.

How do I wrap up my narrative essay with a strong conclusion?

A compelling conclusion restates the main events and highlights any lessons learned or growth in your character. Try to end on a thought-provoking note or leave readers with some food for thought. Finally, make sure your conclusion wraps up your story neatly and reinforces its overall message.

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• The four main types of essay | Quick guide with examples

The Four Main Types of Essay | Quick Guide with Examples

Published on September 4, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

An essay is a focused piece of writing designed to inform or persuade. There are many different types of essay, but they are often defined in four categories: argumentative, expository, narrative, and descriptive essays.

Argumentative and expository essays are focused on conveying information and making clear points, while narrative and descriptive essays are about exercising creativity and writing in an interesting way. At university level, argumentative essays are the most common type. 

In high school and college, you will also often have to write textual analysis essays, which test your skills in close reading and interpretation.

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Table of contents

Argumentative essays, expository essays, narrative essays, descriptive essays, textual analysis essays, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about types of essays.

An argumentative essay presents an extended, evidence-based argument. It requires a strong thesis statement —a clearly defined stance on your topic. Your aim is to convince the reader of your thesis using evidence (such as quotations ) and analysis.

Argumentative essays test your ability to research and present your own position on a topic. This is the most common type of essay at college level—most papers you write will involve some kind of argumentation.

The essay is divided into an introduction, body, and conclusion:

• The introduction provides your topic and thesis statement
• The body presents your evidence and arguments
• The conclusion summarizes your argument and emphasizes its importance

The example below is a paragraph from the body of an argumentative essay about the effects of the internet on education. Mouse over it to learn more.

A common frustration for teachers is students’ use of Wikipedia as a source in their writing. Its prevalence among students is not exaggerated; a survey found that the vast majority of the students surveyed used Wikipedia (Head & Eisenberg, 2010). An article in The Guardian stresses a common objection to its use: “a reliance on Wikipedia can discourage students from engaging with genuine academic writing” (Coomer, 2013). Teachers are clearly not mistaken in viewing Wikipedia usage as ubiquitous among their students; but the claim that it discourages engagement with academic sources requires further investigation. This point is treated as self-evident by many teachers, but Wikipedia itself explicitly encourages students to look into other sources. Its articles often provide references to academic publications and include warning notes where citations are missing; the site’s own guidelines for research make clear that it should be used as a starting point, emphasizing that users should always “read the references and check whether they really do support what the article says” (“Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia,” 2020). Indeed, for many students, Wikipedia is their first encounter with the concepts of citation and referencing. The use of Wikipedia therefore has a positive side that merits deeper consideration than it often receives.

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An expository essay provides a clear, focused explanation of a topic. It doesn’t require an original argument, just a balanced and well-organized view of the topic.

Expository essays test your familiarity with a topic and your ability to organize and convey information. They are commonly assigned at high school or in exam questions at college level.

The introduction of an expository essay states your topic and provides some general background, the body presents the details, and the conclusion summarizes the information presented.

A typical body paragraph from an expository essay about the invention of the printing press is shown below. Mouse over it to learn more.

The invention of the printing press in 1440 changed this situation dramatically. Johannes Gutenberg, who had worked as a goldsmith, used his knowledge of metals in the design of the press. He made his type from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony, whose durability allowed for the reliable production of high-quality books. This new technology allowed texts to be reproduced and disseminated on a much larger scale than was previously possible. The Gutenberg Bible appeared in the 1450s, and a large number of printing presses sprang up across the continent in the following decades. Gutenberg’s invention rapidly transformed cultural production in Europe; among other things, it would lead to the Protestant Reformation.

A narrative essay is one that tells a story. This is usually a story about a personal experience you had, but it may also be an imaginative exploration of something you have not experienced.

Narrative essays test your ability to build up a narrative in an engaging, well-structured way. They are much more personal and creative than other kinds of academic writing . Writing a personal statement for an application requires the same skills as a narrative essay.

A narrative essay isn’t strictly divided into introduction, body, and conclusion, but it should still begin by setting up the narrative and finish by expressing the point of the story—what you learned from your experience, or why it made an impression on you.

Mouse over the example below, a short narrative essay responding to the prompt “Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself,” to explore its structure.

Since elementary school, I have always favored subjects like science and math over the humanities. My instinct was always to think of these subjects as more solid and serious than classes like English. If there was no right answer, I thought, why bother? But recently I had an experience that taught me my academic interests are more flexible than I had thought: I took my first philosophy class.

Before I entered the classroom, I was skeptical. I waited outside with the other students and wondered what exactly philosophy would involve—I really had no idea. I imagined something pretty abstract: long, stilted conversations pondering the meaning of life. But what I got was something quite different.

A young man in jeans, Mr. Jones—“but you can call me Rob”—was far from the white-haired, buttoned-up old man I had half-expected. And rather than pulling us into pedantic arguments about obscure philosophical points, Rob engaged us on our level. To talk free will, we looked at our own choices. To talk ethics, we looked at dilemmas we had faced ourselves. By the end of class, I’d discovered that questions with no right answer can turn out to be the most interesting ones.

The experience has taught me to look at things a little more “philosophically”—and not just because it was a philosophy class! I learned that if I let go of my preconceptions, I can actually get a lot out of subjects I was previously dismissive of. The class taught me—in more ways than one—to look at things with an open mind.

A descriptive essay provides a detailed sensory description of something. Like narrative essays, they allow you to be more creative than most academic writing, but they are more tightly focused than narrative essays. You might describe a specific place or object, rather than telling a whole story.

Descriptive essays test your ability to use language creatively, making striking word choices to convey a memorable picture of what you’re describing.

A descriptive essay can be quite loosely structured, though it should usually begin by introducing the object of your description and end by drawing an overall picture of it. The important thing is to use careful word choices and figurative language to create an original description of your object.

Mouse over the example below, a response to the prompt “Describe a place you love to spend time in,” to learn more about descriptive essays.

On Sunday afternoons I like to spend my time in the garden behind my house. The garden is narrow but long, a corridor of green extending from the back of the house, and I sit on a lawn chair at the far end to read and relax. I am in my small peaceful paradise: the shade of the tree, the feel of the grass on my feet, the gentle activity of the fish in the pond beside me.

My cat crosses the garden nimbly and leaps onto the fence to survey it from above. From his perch he can watch over his little kingdom and keep an eye on the neighbours. He does this until the barking of next door’s dog scares him from his post and he bolts for the cat flap to govern from the safety of the kitchen.

With that, I am left alone with the fish, whose whole world is the pond by my feet. The fish explore the pond every day as if for the first time, prodding and inspecting every stone. I sometimes feel the same about sitting here in the garden; I know the place better than anyone, but whenever I return I still feel compelled to pay attention to all its details and novelties—a new bird perched in the tree, the growth of the grass, and the movement of the insects it shelters…

Sitting out in the garden, I feel serene. I feel at home. And yet I always feel there is more to discover. The bounds of my garden may be small, but there is a whole world contained within it, and it is one I will never get tired of inhabiting.

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Though every essay type tests your writing skills, some essays also test your ability to read carefully and critically. In a textual analysis essay, you don’t just present information on a topic, but closely analyze a text to explain how it achieves certain effects.

Rhetorical analysis

A rhetorical analysis looks at a persuasive text (e.g. a speech, an essay, a political cartoon) in terms of the rhetorical devices it uses, and evaluates their effectiveness.

The goal is not to state whether you agree with the author’s argument but to look at how they have constructed it.

The introduction of a rhetorical analysis presents the text, some background information, and your thesis statement; the body comprises the analysis itself; and the conclusion wraps up your analysis of the text, emphasizing its relevance to broader concerns.

The example below is from a rhetorical analysis of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech . Mouse over it to learn more.

King’s speech is infused with prophetic language throughout. Even before the famous “dream” part of the speech, King’s language consistently strikes a prophetic tone. He refers to the Lincoln Memorial as a “hallowed spot” and speaks of rising “from the dark and desolate valley of segregation” to “make justice a reality for all of God’s children.” The assumption of this prophetic voice constitutes the text’s strongest ethical appeal; after linking himself with political figures like Lincoln and the Founding Fathers, King’s ethos adopts a distinctly religious tone, recalling Biblical prophets and preachers of change from across history. This adds significant force to his words; standing before an audience of hundreds of thousands, he states not just what the future should be, but what it will be: “The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.” This warning is almost apocalyptic in tone, though it concludes with the positive image of the “bright day of justice.” The power of King’s rhetoric thus stems not only from the pathos of his vision of a brighter future, but from the ethos of the prophetic voice he adopts in expressing this vision.

Literary analysis

A literary analysis essay presents a close reading of a work of literature—e.g. a poem or novel—to explore the choices made by the author and how they help to convey the text’s theme. It is not simply a book report or a review, but an in-depth interpretation of the text.

Literary analysis looks at things like setting, characters, themes, and figurative language. The goal is to closely analyze what the author conveys and how.

The introduction of a literary analysis essay presents the text and background, and provides your thesis statement; the body consists of close readings of the text with quotations and analysis in support of your argument; and the conclusion emphasizes what your approach tells us about the text.

Mouse over the example below, the introduction to a literary analysis essay on Frankenstein , to learn more.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel. This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as. This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature’s perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume’s narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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At high school and in composition classes at university, you’ll often be told to write a specific type of essay , but you might also just be given prompts.

Look for keywords in these prompts that suggest a certain approach: The word “explain” suggests you should write an expository essay , while the word “describe” implies a descriptive essay . An argumentative essay might be prompted with the word “assess” or “argue.”

The vast majority of essays written at university are some sort of argumentative essay . Almost all academic writing involves building up an argument, though other types of essay might be assigned in composition classes.

Essays can present arguments about all kinds of different topics. For example:

• In a literary analysis essay, you might make an argument for a specific interpretation of a text
• In a history essay, you might present an argument for the importance of a particular event
• In a politics essay, you might argue for the validity of a certain political theory

An argumentative essay tends to be a longer essay involving independent research, and aims to make an original argument about a topic. Its thesis statement makes a contentious claim that must be supported in an objective, evidence-based way.

An expository essay also aims to be objective, but it doesn’t have to make an original argument. Rather, it aims to explain something (e.g., a process or idea) in a clear, concise way. Expository essays are often shorter assignments and rely less on research.

The key difference is that a narrative essay is designed to tell a complete story, while a descriptive essay is meant to convey an intense description of a particular place, object, or concept.

Narrative and descriptive essays both allow you to write more personally and creatively than other kinds of essays , and similar writing skills can apply to both.

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