Essay Structure
Logical Structure - Title - Introduction - Body - Conclusion - Block & Splice- Hockey Night in the College
On the previous page, I noted that the academic essay has a super-logical structure. On this page I’ll give an overview of this structure, then present the main conventions and strategies of the essay.
Logical Structure
The title gives your reader a general idea about the topic, and the introduction takes your reader from a general state of awareness to your particular argument; the thesis statement tells the reader exactly what you’ll be arguing about your subject, and the topic sentences show your reader how each subsidiary point you are making advances your overall argument. The ideas that follow the topic sentences are the body of the essay. The body is extremely important since it is where the proof and development of the your ideas occurs. The conclusion highlights your overall point, and either completes any scenario you developed in your introduction or suggests further avenues of enquiry. The core of this structure is the thesis statement, the topic sentences, and the proof in the body paragraphs, yet the title, introduction, and conclusion are also important.
Title
Generally, the last thing to decide on is the title, as it often comes from the most insightful argument, angle, scenario, or analogy you come up with. Working titles, however, are a good idea, as they help to focus your thinking.
Find a title that’s creative, thought provoking, humorous, sums up your argument, or points your readers in the direction you want them to think.
A title can be straightforward or it can be ambiguous or obscure if your aim is to intrigue your reader. Once you get into your first sentence, however, you must eliminate ambiguity or obscurity.
Introduction
Find an interesting way to take your reader from the world around us to the specific focus of your topic. In your introduction, you want to do the following.
Make sure your argument is clearly stated in your thesis statement, which should be placed at the end of your introductory paragraph. Put your thesis statement in the second paragraph only if your first paragraph develops a context or analogy, the effect of which would be ruined if you tacked a thesis statement at the end.
The thesis statement should be detailed and should show the relation between the different aspects you'll be examining. For instance, instead of writing the author uses imagery and conflict, write the author uses nature imagery to suggest a tension that is then explored in terms of a conflict between lovers.
The main purpose of an introduction is to introduce the main elements of your essay, yet you can also use it to grab the reader’s attention. Try to find a challenging, provocative, informative, imaginative, or intriguing way of moving into your topic. You should also think about how you’ll return to your opening in your conclusion.
There are at least three ways of doing an introduction:
1) You can avoid a long introduction by writing one sentence on the background or nature of your topic, and then writing a more detailed thesis statement. Here’s an example from my sample essay on Attenborough’s film Gandhi (the complete essay is here):
In 1919 the British General Edward Dyer fired upon an unarmed crowd of protesters in Amritsar, India, killing 379 and wounding about 1,200. In his film Gandhi (1982), Richard Attenborough depicts the massacre and its immediate impact in a 10 minute sequence, in which he condemns British control of India by first providing physical evidence — in his shifting settings, with their emotionally-laden sounds, colours, images, and words — and then by disarming the British with his well-crafted, logical, and straightforward words.
2) You can start with the context in which the text is written. This could be historical, biographical, political, philosophical, etc. This way tends to be drier, yet it's very integrated with the analysis that follows. Be careful, however, not to go over information which is too basic or too easily accessible. Don't pad your introduction with historical or biographical information. For example, let’s say that you’re writing an essay on Queen’s lyric “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Avoid explaining that homosexuality was unacceptable to many in the 1970s (this is obvious) or that Freddie Mercury was gay (this is well-known). Also, if your argument is that the song is about him coming out of the closet, start with a rigorous contextualization, one that argues rather than merely asserts. For instance, note alternate interpretations of the lyric, and explain why your particular angle makes more sense in light of the given historical context. It’s fairly easy to repeat obvious facts, yet this doesn’t get you a good mark. Finding your own angle will require more thinking on your part, yet your argument will be more rigorous, interesting, and insightful.
3) You can start with a personal situation, movie or TV reference, analogy, quotation, popular theory, misconception, etc. This tends to be more interesting for general readers, yet is sometimes more difficult to integrate into the analysis that follows.
Often you’ll write your introduction after you have figured out your thesis statement and main points. This way, you can pick the type of introduction that works best with the final shape of your argument.
Body
Start each paragraph with a topic sentence that clearly connects to your thesis statement. The reader shouldn’t have to guess the relation of topic sentence to thesis statement.
It’s often helpful to use the same word or phrase (or a variant of the word or phrase) that you used in your thesis statement. For instance, the following topic sentences have clear links to the Gandhi thesis statement above (I’ve put in bold some of the more obvious linking parts).
Th. st. — Attenborough depicts the massacre and its immediate impact in a 10 minute sequence, in which he condemns British control of India by first providing physical evidence — in his shifting settings, with their emotionally-laden sounds, colours, images, and words — and then by disarming the British with his well-crafted, logical, and straightforward words.
Note the links between the th. st. above and the t.s. below. In addition to the more obvious links in bold, there is also the chronological linkage from scene to scene, an internal linkage using emotion (in italics), and a back and forth from scene to scene, explicit in the sentences but also implicit in the use of the words sequence and increasingly.
T.s. #1 — Each setting in the sequence increasingly suggests that the British either shouldn’t or don’t control India.
T.s. #2 — Attenborough uses sound, colour, and image in the first three scenes to give the audience strong emotional reasons to agree with Gandhi in the fourth.
T.s. #3 — Emotional words complement the non-verbal rhetoric in the first three scenes.
T.s. #4 — In this last scene, Gandhi not only interrupts the viceroy as he circles the table and 'lays down the law,' but also disarms the British with his well-crafted, logical, and straightforward words.
Don’t link paragraphs using the last sentence of the paragraph. Use the topic sentence to make that link—as in “Another example of ____,” or “Such ____ [use a word or phrase which sums up the last paragraph] stands in opposition to ____.”
Give the details of your argument in each paragraph. Your argument must contain proof in the form of logical arguments, textual references, illustrative examples, etc. Your argument must be rigorous. It must be a product of analytical thought, that is, of a process which has taken the components of the subject apart, analyzed them, and then configured them into a new, distanced, critical understanding.
Conclusion
Make your reader think about what you’ve argued. Don’t simply restate your introduction or your main ideas. Suggest a further direction or ask a provocative question. Or return to your opening by advancing or commenting on your initial position. For instance, if you started with a historical or biographical introduction, you might want to return to that, and expand on what happened afterwards — as in this conclusion of the Gandhi essay:
Gandhi's threat of non-violent non-cooperation takes us full circle, back to the protest leader who pleads for non-violence seconds before the noisy, bloody massacre starts. The ten minute sequence thus moves from the sacrifice of peaceful protesters, to a table at which the same ideals are espoused much higher up in the hierarchy of power -- a table at which top British administrators fail to justify their rule to Mohandas K. Gandhi, the spiritual leader of Indian Independence, or to the two other men who will play key roles in coming history: Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the future Governor-General of Pakistan, and Jawaharlal Nehru, the future Prime Minister of India, the world's largest democracy. Attenborough's film is of course about Gandhi, but Attenborough's point here is that the Amritsar Massacre has pushed him to speak forcefully for an entire subcontinent.
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Block & Splice
There are two basic ways of approaching a text in terms of its arrangement on the page. The first is the block method, where you deal with the text block by block, or section by section (a block or section is any number of consecutive words or paragraphs). The other is the slice method, where you analyze one aspect as it appears in different parts of the text, and then relate this to another aspect as it appears in different parts of the text.
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Hockey Night in the College
If you were to write a block essay about a hockey game, you would analyze how the teams played in each period, how the play changed from one period to the next, and what was the resulting overall pattern of play:
Period Paragraph Analysis
1 1 Goals, strengths, weaknesses, offence and defence, strategy, etc.
2 2 Goals, etc., plus how play compared to 1st period
3 3 Goals, etc., plus how play compared to 1st and 2nd periods
In a splice analysis, you’d compare different aspects — such as A) goalie performance throughout the game and B) defence performance throughout the game:
Period Paragraph Analysis
1-3 1 Goalie performance throughout game
1-3 2 Defence performance throughout game
1-3 3 Relation of goalie performance to defence performance