How to Structure Your Essay

• Mar 02, 2023
• 5 min read

• Tags: Academic Writing

Essay writing can seem easy, but the mechanics of it can be tough, especially if you are not used to writing them on a semi-regular basis or at all. The most important thing to figure out when you start writing one is its structure. Even if your content is good, badly structured essays can throw the evaluator off course and result in a bad grade. Here’s how you can structure one properly:

1. Write down your topic sentence. In this case, a topic sentence can mean the main argument that your essay is trying to put forward. It is around this statement that it will revolve. You have to make sure that every sentence in in it brings the reader back to this main statement. 

2. Divide it into three parts: the introduction, body, and the conclusion. What should these three include?

Introduction

When you write an essay, every sentence is important. But the introduction sets the tone of how it’s going to pan out. It is like the first impression, and all first impressions have to be good, right? You want to put your best foot forward into crafting an introduction.

Most professors will start the grading process as soon as they start reading it. A good introduction determines its scale; good/bad? weak/strong? impactful/ineffective? Develop an introduction that clearly sets out the objectives of what you will write. 

• What is it trying to achieve?
• What are some of its main points?

The idea here is to give the evaluator a brief overview of your essay and to show that your thought process is coherent and logical. Don’t write about your key points in depth, just introduce them because they will be covered in the body.

If your essay is a structured ‘either-or’, set both sides in the introduction. The length of the introduction depends on the length of the essay. If it’s longer than 1000 words, limit it to one paragraph.

Body

The second part of the essay is the body. This is the longest part of an essay, spanning over three paragraphs or more. Each paragraph is a specific point that relates to the topic. Ideally, you should begin a new paragraph for each idea your essay entails. This can be summarized in a ‘signpost sentence’, one that will set the main point apart that you’re going to explore in that section.

A helpful tip could be referencing the title of your essay in that section so that it reminds the evaluator and yourself of the exact main statement that it’s trying to expand on. Refrain from writing anything that doesn’t correlate to the issue in any way.

Conclusion

The last section of your essay is the conclusion. Normally, it is just one paragraph, but if your essay is longer, it will exceed up to three. The purpose of a conclusion is to summarize the main points of your argument and draw a final decision or judgement based on them.

Don’t introduce any new ideas in the conclusion. Remember that it’s simply a summary of all the points that you have covered in your essay until now. Refer back to the title so as to make sure that you have thoroughly answered it and clarified it.

Now that you know how to structure your essay, another question looms: where to begin? Not everyone can follow the steps in the prescribed order. Everyone works differently. A lot of people like me have difficulty forming an introduction and seem to be stuck on it for ages.

That’s why what we would advise is do things your own way. If you don’t know how to introduce and conclude your essay, write the body first. It will be like a puzzle, once you’ve gotten the center piece, you will automatically know which pieces to put where. 

Writing an essay will become a piece of cake once you keep in mind our advice about structuring it. But another important thing that you should do is edit and proofread it. We’d advise that you give it to an editing and proofreading company because it’s very difficult to objectively edit your own essay.

At PaperTrue, we have academic editors who are experienced and efficient in editing and proofreading essays in a multitude of domains. You can check out more articles about academic writing on the PaperTrue Resource Center.

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Rishi

Rishi was a zealous student at IIT Bombay when he realized, firsthand, the power of good language in effective communication. As part of this belief, after a brief stint in a hedge fund, he co-founded PaperTrue in 2014.