Tips for Structuring an Academic Essay

Structuring an essay can be difficult. This page gives easy tips that can help papers be more coherent.

Overal Essay Structure
An academic essay should have three basic parts:
- An introduction (where you make your claim)
- A body (where you back your claim up)
- A a conclusion (where you recap)

Introduction
An introduction should begin with a general statement about your topic. When writing about a work of literature, be sure to mention the author's first and last names as well as the title of the source text as early as possible.

End your introduction with your thesis statement. A thesis statement is a self-contained argument that makes a claim about the work you are writing about. This claim has to be arguable. If your thesis can't be disproved or effectively argued against, then it is not a thesis.

In between your first sentence and your thesis, you need to make progressively more specific statements about the text. A good introduction could be outlined like this:

- Geoffrey Chaucer's The Miller's Tale is very explicit.
- Robin the miller tells the tale while drunk.
- In the tale, everybody gets punished in some way, except Alison.
- The Miller's Tale exemplifies the miller's invented sense of justice and exposes his mysogeny.

Body / Paragraph Structure
The body of an essay should serve to back up the claim you make in your thesis with evidence from the text and from any outside research you may have done.

When writing a paragraph, open it with a statement or even an entire sentence that states simply what you are going to talk about. Then you should explain why this is relevant to your thesis, give examples from the text, and then end with a transition to the next topic you are going to discuss.

Body of a compare / contrast essay
When writing a compare / contrast essay, it is generally better to do a point by point comparison rather than a block comparison

In a point by point comparison, you will pick different aspects of the two topics and compare and contrast them so that you switch back and forth between the two throughout the essay. An outline of a point by point comparison might look like this:
- Color of Apples
- Color of Oranges
- Texture of Apples
- Texture of Oranges
- Cooking with Apples
- Cooking with Oranges

In a block comparison, you spend half of the time talking about one subject, and the other half talking about the other subject. An outline would look similar to this:
- Color of Apples
- Texture of Apples
- Cooking with Apples
- Color of Oranges
- Texture of Oranges
- Cooking with Oranges

Block comparisons are much more difficult to orgnize into effective arguments.

Conclusions
The conclusion of an essay should contain no new information.

When writing your conclusion, structure it in the oppisite way you would your introducion. Start by restating your thesis, and then recap all of the points that you made in your introduction, but reword them. Try to end your conclusion with a general reflection that gives some insight into literature.