Building an Essay

Overview

An essay is a group of paragraphs clustered together to present and develop an idea for the reader. The structure of an essay in many ways is like the structure of a paragraph, which has a topic sentence stating the main idea and then several support sentences. The difference is that an essay presents a larger idea than a paragraph and develops it with support paragraphs rather than support sentences.

So sentences are the building blocks of the paragraph, just as paragraphs are the building blocks of essays. And just as a paragraph’s main idea is called a topic and is stated in the topic sentence, an essay’s main idea is called a thesis, and is stated in the thesis sentence, which is usually the final sentence of the first paragraph (the introductory paragraph).

One last thing to keep in mind is that writing an essay is not as difficult as you might think if you build your essay one paragraph at a time rather than try to write the whole essay at once.

Let’s work with an example. Let’s pretend we are writers for a gourmet foods magazine and that we are responsible for the monthly dessert article (an article is really an essay). One day as we are planning the next month’s article, our editor walks by and advises us not to write yet another article about one of the typical gourmet desserts such as chocolate mousse, crepes suzette, or baked Alaska. Rather, we are to write an article that introduces a new gourmet dessert.

As we struggle to come up with a new dessert, one of us, noticing another of us sipping on a McDonald’s milkshake, suggests that we might elevate the common milkshake to gourmet standards. We agree and begin the writing process.

E Go to Step #1--Brainstorming