Essay structure
Easy to understand — in theory

All essays have a beginning, middle, and end, but knowing that isn’t going to help you teach writing, is it?

Essay structure actually depends on the type of essay. However, most of the time people use the term to refer to the organizational pattern of one type of essay: the expository essay, sometimes called the informative or persuasive essay.

Unfortunately, none those terms helps a writing teacher know how to teach essays, since all of them could apply to essays organized in very different ways.

Reasons support generalizations

I use the term thesis-and-support or persuasive essay pattern when I talk about what texts call essay format or structure. Thesis-and-support is the more descriptive term, but the persuasive essay is the place students are most likely to be able to see the organization clearly. The arrangement of reasons to support generalizations characterizes the persuasive essay.

Generalizations may be either facts or opinions. They don't have any single identifiable source. They can be information "everybody knows," or a summary of several specific facts or opinions from named sources.

People assess whether the generalization is true by examining the amount and quality of the evidence on which it is based. Evidence is information that can be attributed to a specific source, like Uncle Joe or Shakespeare.

Focus on body paragraphs

In discussing the organizational structure of an essay, we ignore the introduction and conclusion. Introductions and conclusions have no set pattern. They have functions they must perform, but writers are free to craft beginning and ending paragraphs however they wish.

The body section, however, has a very distinctive pattern: For every generalization, there are three supporting reasons. So, when we dicuss essay organization, we focus on the body paragraphs.

Thesis is a generalization

The biggest generalization in the essay is the thesis statement. It is supported by three reasons to believe it is true.

The supporting reasons are the topic sentences of the body paragraphs. Each of them is a generalization, or, if you prefer, a summary of evidence.

In the essay structure template, the body paragraphs are each supported by three pieces of evidence. They are each specific bits of information from an identified source.

Here is a visual representation of that structure. It represents the body of a five-paragraph essay, five paragraphs being the shortest piece of writing that can display all the features of the essay structure.

Note the repeated pattern of topic sentence and evidence. That pattern is the distinguishing feature of the expository paragraph. No matter how many paragraphs you have to write to complete an essay — two or 22 — each follows that pattern.

Once students understand how to link a thesis statement to a topic sentence, essay structure becomes a matter of repeating the expository paragraph format for each of the body paragraphs.

Sounds easy, right?

Getting all those easy parts together isn’t easy for students. They have to go through the essay writing process many times before they actually understand essay structure.