Knowing
essay format is simpler than writing essays. You can introduce essay
writing even if you know no more than is on this page.
Of course, you'll have to learn how to use the essay format right
along with your students, but you would have to do that no matter
how much you knew starting out.
The essay doesn't get much respect, but it is a powerful and
pervasive communications tool. It's also a tool that lends itself
to both teaching and learning.
The definition of essay
An essay is a type of short (less than book-length) expository
nonfiction built around a thesis
statement, which is simply an opinion or assertion about a
topic. The topic could be anything at all.
All essays have three parts — an introduction
(opening), a body, and a conclusion
(ending) — but two essays may look and sound nothing alike.
Classifications of essays
Essays can be classified two ways:
Persuasion and narrative are two ends of the essay
continuum. At either end of the continuum is an essay genre
with a distinctive essay format. Essays at other points along the
continuum contain varying amounts of the organizational structure
of the two anchor formats.
How essays are organized
What English teachers refer to as essay
format or essay structure is actually the organizational pattern
of the persuasive essay.
Its format consists of a thesis statement and support for
it. In the pattern, the middle section consists of three
reasons for believing the thesis to be true.
In turn, each body paragraph is supported by three pieces of
evidence. Such body paragraph organization referred to by
the misnomer “expository paragraph.”
The persuasive essay
In its purest form, the persuasive essay is developed in units
of three:
-
Three sections (beginning, middle, end).
-
Three points supporting the thesis statement.
-
Three pieces of evidence supporting each point.
Those nine pieces of evidence should be enough to persuade readers
to accept the thesis. At any rate, that was what the ancient Greeks
thought; the essay format came down to us from them.
The pattern of the essay format is highly repetitious,
which is what makes it so teachable. Students have only
a few things to learn, and every new essay is more or less like
the last one.
The narrative essay vs. narration
Instead of nine supporting pieces of evidence, the narrative
essay uses just one single true story, told either in
first-person or third person, to persuade readers to accept the
thesis.
Ordinary writers rarely have to write narrative
essays. On the other hand, writers often have to use narration
to present evidence in essays built on the persuasive essay pattern.
Writers may, for example, use anecdotes,
which are miniature stories, or describe the chronological
order in which some event occurred. In either case, they would
be using narrative within the framework of a paper structured
according to the thesis-and-support pattern chracteristic of persuasive
essays.
In this website, as in my teaching, I focus primarily on the
"pure" thesis-and-support pattern. Once students master it,
they have little difficulty figuring out how to adjust it for a
variety of other uses.
The 5-paragraph essay
The five-paragraph essay
is not limited to essays of five paragraphs. It's also not a single
format. (Are you confused yet?)
The shortest piece of writing that can display all the classical
components of that pattern is five paragraphs long, hence the name.
Students can learn most of how to write an essay by writing an
expository paragraph, which
is a body paragraph of a persuasive essay.
The writing process for essays
What is called the
writing process is really a hodgepodge of processes for a variety
of genres of writing.
For efficiency and fewer headaches, I teach
a process suited to the genre I teach. So when I talk about
the writing process, I mean the process for producing
the persuasive-pattern essay, which is the essay pattern I
teach because it is the one most needed at school and work.
The writing process for the persuasive essay is so important that
it rates its own thread on this website plus dozens of cross references.
One final teaching task
Students will need a little more information to use reference materials
and/or survive college English, specifically:
There's no need to make a big deal of teaching those topics. Students
will understand them best if you slip the information in as you
are teaching them how to write an essay.
One last comment.
You can teach students about how essays are put together in a single
period, but teaching
them to apply essay format in their work will take months.
created 11-Aug-2008; updated 31-Dec-2009
