The Essay

What is an essay?

An essay is an avenue to communicate or share knowledge, thoughts, feelings and ideas.

the core of an essay is for you, the author, to express an OPINION and then reveal the validity of your opinion with  knowledge and facts.

• the purpose of an essay is to
  • inform, explain, examine, discuss, illustrate, define, compare, persuade, argue, or analyze.
• Your opinion must be an informed opinion ( that is you have to back it up)     
• a RESEARCH paper is an extensive. carefully planned  essay that  shares information (discoveries, connects seeminly unrelated point) or proves a theory using well thought out ideas from relable sources recored in books, Web sties, articles, intervies or information gleaned through observation. 
•  Essays often require “research”. That is including various sources to inform, argue, persuade or reveal. Essays often do not have a Works Cited page like a research paper, but your teacher may ask for one. Usually in an essay, all information about a referenced work in included right in the text itself.

Five Principles of an Essay

1. Thesis
2. Focus
3. Concreteness
4. Organization
5. Mechanics

Thesis

A thesis is the main idea of an essay. It answers the “So What?” question.  The thesis statement will answer the question; "So, what’s the big deal about this topic?"  The subject should be something you feel passionate about. Avoid general topics such as “Life is rough” or “Skiing is fun”. These will not stand up to the “So What?” question.

The thesis statment is a sentence or group of sentences that presents the main idea, or focus, of an essay. It is an assertion or opinion in need of explanation, support, or development – a position about the world that readers are unlikely to accept without elaboration or proof.

Focus

Before you start writing, ask yourself, "What is my purpose for writing? What am I trying to prove, explain, reveal, compare, or persuade?"  Do some self-reflecting on the assignment before you begin writing. Read over the assignment the teacher gave you many times. Ask your teacher for clarification if you are unsure. Imagine opening a box of various sized poles, bolts and nuts and trying to assemble it without looking at least at the picture on the box. You will become confused and frustrated. Knowing what you want to accomplish before you start assembling the pieces will result in a solid, well-constructed object.

The second aspect of focus is to narrow down and specify your essay. If your teacher asks you to discuss a pivotal character in Romeo and Juliet and you pick Juliet you may have 300 pages of information to use. You may want to narrow it down to her relationship with her parents, or her nurse, or focus on a soliloquy, or just on the moment when she decides to take her life. Some topics may be too big to handle in a single essay. You may have enough wood to build a 100 foot yacht but you only have one week to do it. You may have to settle for a well-crafted row boat.

Concreteness

If you support your thesis with facts and examples, your essay will have concreteness, or to say it another way, it will be solid, like the house on a hill and not the one built on the sand. When the storm of criticism comes (usually from your teacher’s red pen) it will stand firm.

A good essay needs facts and information to prove concreteness. When your teacher writes “Prove it!” in the margin of your paper that means that you have stated an opinion or made a statement that was to general.

Here is another analogy to help you solidify your paper. Imagine that the reader of your essay is a juror. The juror has to make a decision about the case being presented in your essay. Vague statements won’t do much to persuade the juror. He’ll want facts, information, and evidence.

Organization  

We have now explained three of the necessary ingredients of an essay. Putting these ingredients together successfully is called ‘organization’.

You need to start with an outline. Begin by writing your thesis in a simple sentence at the top of your page

Canada should stand apart from the United States on immigration issues.

Then briefly mention each of the reasons that support it.

• Canada is a sovereign nation

• Canada has a unique immigration history, distinct from the US and it should be maintained

• American interest in Canadian protocol can only harm both nations.

Remember as you are writing to remind your reader of the sequence of events. Use signal cues such as firstly, next, moreover. 

Outline of a basic essay.

Introduction - Tell your reader what you are going to do.

1. Start off with a hook, something to grab the readers interest
   1. ask one or more questions about the topic
   2. provide an interesting story about the subject
   3. use an analogy or an anecdote
   4. present a significant fact or statistics
   5. quote an expert on the subject
   6. define an important term
2. Refer to the idea, book, article, film, event that you will discuss to put it in context
3. State your thesis. “So What?”
4. Briefly state how you will prove your thesis. Save the details for the body

Body - Do it.

Here you attempt to show your audience what the ‘big deal’ is.

The number of paragraphs in the body will depend on the number of facts, antidotes, or points you need to make to support your thesis.

Start each paragraph with a topic sentence to let your reader know where you are headed next.

After the topic sentence you must develop your point.

• By using facts to back up your point
• By giving a brief account of a real life experience
• By using logical deduction
• By using quotations from the text.

Knowing when to start a new paragraph is a key to writing a good essay. You should start a new paragraph whenever there is a shift or change in the essay. Such changes are called paragraph shifts and can take place for any of the following reasons: to introduce a new main point, to shift emphasis, or to indicate a change in time or place.

Organize your paragraphs in the best possible way- by order of importance, by classification, by time, and so on.

And these paragraphs should follow clearly and smoothly from one to the next. To achieve this flow, the first sentence in each new paragraph should somehow be linked to the preceding one.

Choose your signal word that will start your next paragraph

{ Read section on Expository Essay to get a more detailed outline of an essay}

Conclusion  - Tell them what you just did.

Use a concluding signal word

Sum up the big “So What?” question. You have answered the “so What” in the essay now you get to tell your audience, in a clear, and compact way what the “big deal” was all about (just in case they fell asleep during the essay!).

 Mechanics

An essay must have correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The spell check and grammar check on your computer should eliminate most errors. Be careful however, the spell check will usually miss words like: being, begin; check, cheque; their, there; etc.

Once you have the basics down, your next step is to work on sentence structure. Use a grammar book to help determin if there are any incomplete sentences, sentence fragments, run on sentences, fused sentences etc.

There should be NO excuse for spelling and punctuation errors on a word processed document.

 Different types of essays:

• Expository
• Persuasive
• Personal Essay
• Personal Narrative
• Process Essay
• Compare and Contrast 
• Definition
• Literary Analysis: Novel
• Analytical Essay   

 Expository

Expository essays are the most common form of essay you will write in school. You will usually be asked to write about your course work. Any time you are asked to inform, explain, examine, discuss, or illustrate in your writing, you are developing an expository essay. You are not arguing for or against the subject or reflecting upon its value or worth. Your main purpose is to convey a certain amount of information clearly and completely.

 A successful expository essay includes a clear thesis statement with effective supporting ideas.  The best essays begin and end with good information, so the key is to work with solid information right from the start.

The Importance of Support

Without adequate support of evidence, you cannot effectively develop an expository essay. Here are three ways to support your thesis.

1. Include Facts

Facts are statements and statistics that add support and validity to your essays; they help you to prove your main points. In the sample essay provided, the author claims that childhood malnutrition is a tremendous problem. Here are two facts she presents to support this claim.

About 18 million people, mostly children, die each year from starvation, malnutrition, and related causes.

Nearly 200 million children under the age of five – 40 percent of all of the children this age – lack sufficient nutrition to develop properly.

2.  Give examples

Examples are way of ‘showing’ your ideas to readers. In the sample expository essay, the writer discusses the general problems resulting from malnutrition. She then gives two examples of malnutrition and the specific problems of each:

Marasmus is a form of malnutrition occurring when children are weaned too soon and receive very few nutrients.

Kwashiorkor is another from of malnutrition occurring when children are weaned later than normal and do not receive the necessary protein and nutrients.

3. Add Quotations

Quotations from experts add authority to your writing. In the sample essay, the writer quotes an authority on malnutrition:

According to Dr. Hiroshi Nakajima, Director of the World Health Organization, “Much of the sickness and death attributed to major communicable diseases is, in fact, caused by malnutrition.”

Read this sample Expository Essay

“No Escape for Malnurished Children”

Sebranek, Patrick, Dave Kemper, Verne Meyer. Writers INC.: A Student Handbbok for Writing and Learning. Wilmington: Houghton Miffin Company,  p.  112-113.

 Opinion Essays

Persuasive

The primary purpose of a persuasive essay is to convince readers to think the way that you do about a subject. To accomplish this goal, you will have to establish a reasonable and thoughtful argument supporting a subject or a position you have strong feelings about.

Subjects for an Expository Esssay	Subjects for a Persuasive Essay
How creatine works as a diet supplement.	High school athletes should avoid creatine
How barbless fishing hooks work.	Only barbless fishing hooks should be used in recreational fishing.

Organization

Opening Paragraph: State your Opinion (thesis)

You may want to lead off with your most significant argument to get your reader’s attention. Or you may want to save your best arguments for last to solidify your opinion. Then again, your supporting points may fall into a logical order in which one main point naturally leads to then next and so on.

Paragraph 1:  Explain the details that support your opinion e.g second  most important

Paragraph 2: Explain the details that support your opinion e.g weakest argument

Paragraph 3: Explain the details the suppport your opinion e.g strongest argument

Concluding Paragraph: Restate your opinion and summarize your ideas. 

Stating an Opinion.

A reasonable and logical opinion statement is at the core of an effective persuasive essay. Opinion statements fall into three main categories: statements of fact, statements of value, and statements of policy.

Statements of fact claim that something is true or not true.

• Athletes who take supplemental creatine can weight-train longer and harder than athletes who rely on natural sources on the nutrient.

Statements of value claim that something does or not have worth.

• In the long run, creatine really isn’t worth the risk to athletes’ health.

Statements of policy claim that something should or should not be done.

• Adults responsible for young athletes should forbid the use of creatine.

Using Qualifiers.

• Qualifiers are terms that make an opinion easier to support. Note the difference between the two opinions below:

Creatine makes athletes stronger, but it won’t make them better.

Creatine may make athletes stronger, but it won’t necessarily make them better.

• “May” and “necessarily” quality the above opinion statement, changing it from an all-or-nothing claim to one that can more effectively be defended. Here are some other useful qualifiers:

almost                         usually                         maybe                    probably

often                            some                          most                        in most cases

if….then…                  likely                           many                       frequently

 

Avoid using words that make your opinions hard to support – such as all, best, every, never, none, or worst.

For example, an exaggerated opinion statement like; “Creatine is the worst supplement on the market today” would certainly be impossible to support

Read the sample Persuasive essay .

"Creatine Crazy"

Sebranek, Patrick, Dave Kemper, Verne Meyer. Writers INC.: A Student Handbbok for Writing and Learning. Wilmington: Houghton Miffin Company,  p 121-122 

  (NTS - Barnett and stubbs)

Personal Essays

Personal

The purpose of the personal essay is to show your experiences, thoughts, feelings, realizations, and sensibilities. Further,  a personal essay is used to share the details of a specific event or time in your life, and to emphasis what you have learned from the experience. In this way the personal essay is part recollection and part reflection. It entertains or informs plus it gets your readers thinking. An effective personal essay leaves readers with something to talk about.

A personal essay takes the tone and style of a diary or journal. The voice is personal and revealing.

Reasons for writing

1. To get something out of your system that’s been bothering you, or about which you feel incomplete.
2. To share something special that happened to you
3. To tell a good story
4. To make sense of something that happened to you
5. To share an insight you had about something in your experience
6. To put down words that will remain after your death
7. To use your personal experiences to suggest some truth about life.

Read a sample Personal Essay.

"Stronger at the Broken Places"

Sebranek, Patrick, Dave Kemper, Verne Meyer. Writers INC.: A Student Handbbok for Writing and Learning. Wilmington: Houghton Miffin Company,  p 153-154

Personal Narrative

A personal narrative is a personal essay that takes on less of a diary feel and more of a 'short story' feel. When you write a narrative essay, you are telling a story. The narrative essay allows the writer a chance to think and write about themselves, to explain how their experiences lead to some important realization or conclusion about their lives or about the world in general. Each of us has memories of times that have been meaningful, of times that have taught us lessons about ourselves or others. Through the narrative essay, we have the chance to record those experiences as the supporting evidence to substantiate our new understanding.

Two crucial first steps in planning a narrative essay are selecting an incident worthy of writing about and finding the central, relevant, salient point in that incident. To do this, writers might ask themselves what about the incident provided new insights or awareness primarily for themselves (but possibly for others too). Finally, writers incorporate details which will make the incident real for readers

To summarize, the narrative essay

• makes and supports a point
• uses vivid verbs and modifiers
• may use dialogue
•  is told from a particular point of view – usually the author’s written in first person singular, i.e., I However, third person (he, she, or it) can also be used. Authors sometimes write in the first person plural, using we to refer to themselves. (This is a device often called the "royal we" since a former British monarch had a propensity for referring to herself in the first person plural, as in "We are not amused."
• is filled with precise detail - Narratives rely on concrete, specific details to make their point. These details should create a unified, dominant impression.
• uses plot, conflict, setting, character and climax as does any story

Thesis

Just as in writing any essay, a narrative essay must have a point. You never want your readers to ask So what? at the end of your essay and hear a hollow response. What is the point of your essay? The thesis of a narrative essay does not have to capture a truth about humanity as a whole or about the essence of the human condition. It simply needs to capture a truth about your life and use the story, the narrative experience, to illustrate its importance to you. In this way, it then has meaning to the readers as well.

Remember that ultimately you are writing an essay, not simply telling a story.

Dialogue

Often a narrative essay will employ dialogue. You may be recounting an anecdote where charaters are having a conversation. When using quoted speech, don't let a voice talk for very long in your essay; it will take over and start to sound weird. Only the greatest writers can handle speech effectively over a long period of time. Keep the speech elements brief — which is how speech is in real life, after all. We're not allowed to say much before we're interrupted by others or by something else going on. Also, don't try to duplicate the speech of real life, the way people really talk. Tape record a dinner conversation some evening, when people don't know you're doing it, and you'll probably hear something quite unpleasant, something that should never be written down. Use conventional spelling, and don't leave out letters or try to recreate in spelling what you hear people say (He dozn't do nuthin'!); your readers will become more aware of your clever spelling than they are of what's going on in your essay.

Descriptive Elements  - Show not Tell

The ability to describe something convincingly will serve a writer well in any kind of essay situation. The most important thing to remember is that your job as writer is to show, not tell. If you say that the tree is beautiful, your readers are put on the defensive: "Wait a minute," they think. "We'll be the judge of that! Show us a beautiful tree and we'll believe." Do not rely, then, on adjectives that attempt to characterize a thing's attributes. Lovely, exciting, interesting – these are all useful adjectives in casual speech or when we're pointing to something that is lovely, etc., but in careful writing they don't do much for us; in fact, they sound hollow.

Let nouns and verbs do the work of description for you. With nouns, your readers will see; with verbs, they will feel. In the following paragraph, taken from George Orwell's famous anti-imperialist essay, "Shooting an Elephant," see how the act of shooting the elephant delivers immense emotional impact. What adjectives would you expect to find in a paragraph about an elephant? big? grey? loud? enormous? Do you find them here? Watch the verbs, instead. Notice, too, another truth about description: when time is fleeting, slow down the prose. See how long the few seconds of the shooting can take in this paragraph.

When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick–one never does when a shot goes home–but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time–it might have been five seconds, I dare say–he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

Do not forget that the business of the essay is to make a point. In his essay, Orwell succeeds in portraying the horrors of an imperialist state, showing how the relationship between the oppressed Burmese and the British oppressor is dehumanizing to both. When writing a narrative, it is easy to get caught up in the telling of the story and forget that, eventually, our reader is going to ask So What? — and there had better be an answer.

Example of a Narrative Essay

"My Watch" Mark Twain

"Shooting an Elephant"  George Orwell

(NTS : Shame , The Ambivalence of Abortion,  Salvation ,   A Kite,    A Hanging)                                                                         

Essays of Organization

Process Essay

In a process essay, you explain how something works or how to do or make something. Your challenge is to write clearly and completely so that readers can easily follow the explanation. To do that, you must have a throuough understanding of your subject.

Read a sample Process Essay

“The Gift of Life” 

Sebranek, Patrick, Dave Kemper, Verne Meyer. Writers INC.: A Student Handbbok for Writing and Learning. Wilmington: Houghton Miffin Company,  p 201-201

Compare and Contrast Essay

In a compare and contrast essay, you examine the similarities and differences between two or more subjects. Your subjects can come from any number of categories, including people, books, movies, events, experiments, feelings and products.

Introduction

Body

I. Likeness or feature in common of A and B

II. Difference or special features of A

III. Differences of special features of B

Conclusion

Read a sample of a Compare and Contrast Essay

"If only they Knew" Writers INC p 203-204

The Ambivalence of Abortion    (Langan)

Ratings – good and bad                  (Langan)

A Hanging                                          (Langan)

A Fable for Tomorrow                      (Langan)

Essay of Definition

In this type of essay, you explain a commonly used term or concept that is not easy to define. If may be that the term is complicated (inflation, cancer, democracy) or that it means different things to different people (love, courage, fairness). Consider included the following elements in your essay: dictionary definitions, personal definitions, negative definitions (telling what it is not), comparisons, quotations, and anecdotes (stories).

Read a sample of a Definition essay

"Break it to 'em gently" Writers INC 209 210. 

Essays of Analysis 

The purpose of an analytical essay is to analyze - that is to separate a whole into its various parts for study or interpretation.

You may be asked to analyze a novel, short story, play, poem, or an idea, theory, or perhaps analyze a speech, or a governmental policy.

Literary Analysis: Novel

In a literary analysis, you examine or interpret an important feature in a novel, a short story, poem, play or an essay. For example, you might examine the forces affecting the main character in a novel or short story, focus on the imagery in a poem, or evaluate the strength of the main point or thesis in an essay.

 Example Analytical Essay Topic - Orwell wrote that " ...good prose is like a window pane." He aimed to write in clear , uncluttered prose so that people could see through systems and rhetoric to the truth that he was writing. How successful is he in achieving this aim in Animal Farm? Support your answer with examples from the novel. (800 words at least).

Read a sample of a Liteary Analysis

"The Beast of Fear" Writers INC 229-230

Analytical Essay

An analytical essay asks that you rationally and scientically defend the validity of your thesis statememt.

An analytical essay differes from an persuaisive or argumentative essay in that the tone of the essay is more objective, rational and scientific, rather than subjective, rhetorical and...