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What should you put into your essays?
What will make your essay comprehensive as opposed to an incomplete one? Let me help you figure that out.
Introduction
You must have a clear and logical introduction. You simply cannot go into the heart of your paper without first introducing your subject and setting out the purpose for the rest of your essay.
There are a variety of strategies and loads of information on writing introductions, but rest assured, that most basic English courses will cover this part of essay writing. You just need to get into the practice of first writing an introduction.
Thesis Statement
In your introduction you need to have a thesis statement. The thesis statement will cover the general purpose of what your essay is about. If you are writing a persuasive paper, your thesis statement will take the side that you are persuading towards. If you are writing an expository paper, than the thesis statement will inform the reader about what kind of information you are going to cover, and so on.
Body of the Paper
Most papers will have multiple paragraphs making up the body of the paper. This is where you will cover the majority of your information and support your thesis. Different sections should be divided into multiple paragraphs.
Supporting Evidence through Citations
In the body of your paper you cannot simply say whatever you want (unless you are a verified expert on a subject). Instead, though, you have to support your statements with information from other sources. This is especially important in college, as your professors will expect you to present information from verified and trustworthy sources. Without going into too much depth on sources, this means that you need to find relatively recent, valid sources, as in books, journals and newspapers. Always be careful about the validity of your source.
Caution on sources and plagiarism
Be wary on the Internet! There are plenty of sources on the Internet that will give you plenty of information, but it is not always information you want to use.
Also, be wary of how you quote and cite your sources. Obviously, you do not copy word for word for word unless you have used quotation marks and a citation to make it clear you are quoting another person.
Colleges take plagiarism very seriously and you do not want to get into trouble for plagiarizing on accident. Even more so, you do not want to get into trouble for plagiarizing on purpose. It may sound ridiculous, but don’t find papers on the Internet and use them. Professors are getting wiser and wiser about these things. Also, colleges are starting to use software to check papers to make sure they are not being plagiarized.
Conclusion
You should be able to finish your paper with a valid conclusion. One option is to restate your thesis here, however, there are a multitude of strategies for concluding a paper. I personally always struggle with the conclusion most of all. You just need to remember that you are not introducing new ideas here, you are just restating/summarizing/finishing.
Works Cited
If you are citing sources (which you should be), you must have a works cited page. This is what they used to call the bibliography. This is where you record all the relevant information on your sources so the person reading your paper could find the exact same part of the same source, should they desire. You can find more information on citing sources here. |
