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How to Write a Body Paragraph for a College Essay  

January 29, 2024

No matter the discipline, college success requires mastering several academic basics, including the body paragraph. This article will provide tips on drafting and editing a strong body paragraph before examining several body paragraph examples. Before we look at how to start a body paragraph and how to write a body paragraph for a college essay (or other writing assignment), let’s define what exactly a body paragraph is.

What is a Body Paragraph?

Simply put, a body paragraph consists of everything in an academic essay that does not constitute the introduction and conclusion. It makes up everything in between. In a five-paragraph, thesis-style essay (which most high schoolers encounter before heading off to college), there are three body paragraphs. Longer essays with more complex arguments will include many more body paragraphs.

We might correlate body paragraphs with bodily appendages—say, a leg. Both operate in a somewhat isolated way to perform specific operations, yet are integral to creating a cohesive, functioning whole. A leg helps the body sit, walk, and run. Like legs, body paragraphs work to move an essay along, by leading the reader through several convincing ideas. Together, these ideas, sometimes called topics, or points, work to prove an overall argument, called the essay’s thesis.

If you compared an essay on Kant’s theory of beauty to an essay on migratory birds, you’d notice that the body paragraphs differ drastically. However, on closer inspection, you’d probably find that they included many of the same key components. Most body paragraphs will include specific, detailed evidence, an analysis of the evidence, a conclusion drawn by the author, and several tie-ins to the larger ideas at play. They’ll also include transitions and citations leading the reader to source material. We’ll go into more detail on these components soon. First, let’s see if you’ve organized your essay so that you’ll know how to start a body paragraph.

How to Start a Body Paragraph

It can be tempting to start writing your college essay as soon as you sit down at your desk. The sooner begun, the sooner done, right? I’d recommend resisting that itch. Instead, pull up a blank document on your screen and make an outline. There are numerous reasons to make an outline, and most involve helping you stay on track. This is especially true of longer college papers, like the 60+ page dissertation some seniors are required to write. Even with regular writing assignments with a page count between 4-10, an outline will help you visualize your argumentation strategy. Moreover, it will help you order your key points and their relevant evidence from most to least convincing. This in turn will determine the order of your body paragraphs.

The most convincing sequence of body paragraphs will depend entirely on your paper’s subject.  Let’s say you’re writing about Penelope’s success in outwitting male counterparts in The Odyssey . You may want to begin with Penelope’s weaving, the most obvious way in which Penelope dupes her suitors. You can end with Penelope’s ingenious way of outsmarting her own husband. Because this evidence is more ambiguous it will require a more nuanced analysis. Thus, it’ll work best as your final body paragraph, after readers have already been convinced of more digestible evidence. If in doubt, keep your body paragraph order chronological.

It can be worthwhile to consider your topic from multiple perspectives. You may decide to include a body paragraph that sets out to consider and refute an opposing point to your thesis. This type of body paragraph will often appear near the end of the essay. It works to erase any lingering doubts readers may have had, and requires strong rhetorical techniques.

How to Start a Body Paragraph, Continued

Once you’ve determined which key points will best support your argument and in what order, draft an introduction. This is a crucial step towards writing a body paragraph. First, it will set the tone for the rest of your paper. Second, it will require you to articulate your thesis statement in specific, concise wording. Highlight or bold your thesis statement, so you can refer back to it quickly. You should be looking at your thesis throughout the drafting of your body paragraphs.

Finally, make sure that your introduction indicates which key points you’ll be covering in your body paragraphs, and in what order. While this level of organization might seem like overkill, it will indicate to the reader that your entire paper is minutely thought-out. It will boost your reader’s confidence going in. They’ll feel reassured and open to your thought process if they can see that it follows a clear path.

Now that you have an essay outline and introduction, you’re ready to draft your body paragraphs.

How to Draft a Body Paragraph

At this point, you know your body paragraph topic, the key point you’re trying to make, and you’ve gathered your evidence. The next thing to do is write! The words highlighted in bold below comprise the main components that will make up your body paragraph. (You’ll notice in the body paragraph examples below that the order of these components is flexible.)

Start with a topic sentence . This will indicate the main point you plan to make that will work to support your overall thesis. Your topic sentence also alerts the reader to the change in topic from the last paragraph to the current one. In making this new topic known, you’ll want to create a transition from the last topic to this one.

Transitions appear in nearly every paragraph of a college essay, apart from the introduction. They create a link between disparate ideas. (For example, if your transition comes at the end of paragraph 4, you won’t need a second transition at the beginning of paragraph 5.) The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Writing Center has a page devoted to Developing Strategic Transitions . Likewise, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Writing Center offers help on paragraph transitions .

How to Draft a Body Paragraph for a College Essay ( Continued)

With the topic sentence written, you’ll need to prove your point through tangible evidence. This requires several sentences with various components. You’ll want to provide more context , going into greater detail to situate the reader within the topic. Next, you’ll provide evidence , often in the form of a quote, facts, or data, and supply a source citation . Citing your source is paramount. Sources indicate that your evidence is empirical and objective. It implies that your evidence is knowledge shared by others in the academic community. Sometimes you’ll want to provide multiple pieces of evidence, if the evidence is similar and can be grouped together.

After providing evidence, you must provide an interpretation and analysis of this evidence. In other words, use rhetorical techniques to paraphrase what your evidence seems to suggest. Break down the evidence further and explain and summarize it in new words. Don’t simply skip to your conclusion. Your evidence should never stand for itself. Why? Because your interpretation and analysis allow you to exhibit original, analytical, and critical thinking skills.

Depending on what evidence you’re using, you may repeat some of these components in the same body paragraph. This might look like: more context + further evidence + increased interpretation and analysis . All this will add up to proving and reaffirming your body paragraph’s main point . To do so, conclude your body paragraph by reformulating your thesis statement in light of the information you’ve given. I recommend comparing your original thesis statement to your paragraph’s concluding statement. Do they align? Does your body paragraph create a sound connection to the overall academic argument? If not, you’ll need to fix this issue when you edit your body paragraph.

How to Edit a Body Paragraph

As you go over each body paragraph of your college essay, keep this short checklist in mind.

• Consistency in your argument: If your key points don’t add up to a cogent argument, you’ll need to identify where the inconsistency lies. Often it lies in interpretation and analysis. You may need to improve the way you articulate this component. Try to think like a lawyer: how can you use this evidence to your advantage? If that doesn’t work, you may need to find new evidence. As a last resort, amend your thesis statement.
• Language-level persuasion. Use a broad vocabulary. Vary your sentence structure. Don’t repeat the same words too often, which can induce mental fatigue in the reader. I suggest keeping an online dictionary open on your browser. I find Merriam-Webster user-friendly, since it allows you to toggle between definitions and synonyms. It also includes up-to-date example sentences. Also, don’t forget the power of rhetorical devices .
• Does your writing flow naturally from one idea to the next, or are there jarring breaks? The editing stage is a great place to polish transitions and reinforce the structure as a whole.

Our first body paragraph example comes from the College Transitions article “ How to Write the AP Lang Argument Essay .” Here’s the prompt: Write an essay that argues your position on the value of striving for perfection.

Here’s the example thesis statement, taken from the introduction paragraph: “Striving for perfection can only lead us to shortchange ourselves. Instead, we should value learning, growth, and creativity and not worry whether we are first or fifth best.” Now let’s see how this writer builds an argument against perfection through one main point across two body paragraphs. (While this writer has split this idea into two paragraphs, one to address a problem and one to provide an alternative resolution, it could easily be combined into one paragraph.)

“Students often feel the need to be perfect in their classes, and this can cause students to struggle or stop making an effort in class. In elementary and middle school, for example, I was very nervous about public speaking. When I had to give a speech, my voice would shake, and I would turn very red. My teachers always told me “relax!” and I got Bs on Cs on my speeches. As a result, I put more pressure on myself to do well, spending extra time making my speeches perfect and rehearsing late at night at home. But this pressure only made me more nervous, and I started getting stomach aches before speaking in public.

“Once I got to high school, however, I started doing YouTube make-up tutorials with a friend. We made videos just for fun, and laughed when we made mistakes or said something silly. Only then, when I wasn’t striving to be perfect, did I get more comfortable with public speaking.”

Body Paragraph Example 1 Dissected

In this body paragraph example, the writer uses their personal experience as evidence against the value of striving for perfection. The writer sets up this example with a topic sentence that acts as a transition from the introduction. They also situate the reader in the classroom. The evidence takes the form of emotion and physical reactions to the pressure of public speaking (nervousness, shaking voice, blushing). Evidence also takes the form of poor results (mediocre grades). Rather than interpret the evidence from an analytical perspective, the writer produces more evidence to underline their point. (This method works fine for a narrative-style essay.) It’s clear that working harder to be perfect further increased the student’s nausea.

The writer proves their point in the second paragraph, through a counter-example. The main point is that improvement comes more naturally when the pressure is lifted; when amusement is possible and mistakes aren’t something to fear. This point ties back in with the thesis, that “we should value learning, growth, and creativity” over perfection.

This second body paragraph example comes from the College Transitions article “ How to Write the AP Lang Rhetorical Analysis Essay .” Here’s an abridged version of the prompt: Rosa Parks was an African American civil rights activist who was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Read the passage carefully. Write an essay that analyzes the rhetorical choices Obama makes to convey his message.

Here’s the example thesis statement, taken from the introduction paragraph: “Through the use of diction that portrays Parks as quiet and demure, long lists that emphasize the extent of her impacts, and Biblical references, Obama suggests that all of us are capable of achieving greater good, just as Parks did.” Now read the body paragraph example, below.

“To further illustrate Parks’ impact, Obama incorporates Biblical references that emphasize the importance of “that single moment on the bus” (lines 57-58). In lines 33-35, Obama explains that Parks and the other protestors are “driven by a solemn determination to affirm their God-given dignity” and he also compares their victory to the fall the “ancient walls of Jericho” (line 43). By including these Biblical references, Obama suggests that Parks’ action on the bus did more than correct personal or political wrongs; it also corrected moral and spiritual wrongs. Although Parks had no political power or fortune, she was able to restore a moral balance in our world.”

Body Paragraph Example 2 Dissected

The first sentence in this body paragraph example indicates that the topic is transitioning into biblical references as a means of motivating ordinary citizens. The evidence comes as quotes taken from Obama’s speech. One is a reference to God, and the other an allusion to a story from the bible. The subsequent interpretation and analysis demonstrate that Obama’s biblical references imply a deeper, moral and spiritual significance. The concluding sentence draws together the morality inherent in equal rights with Rosa Parks’ power to spark change. Through the words “no political power or fortune,” and “moral balance,” the writer ties the point proven in this body paragraph back to the thesis statement. Obama promises that “All of us” (no matter how small our influence) “are capable of achieving greater good”—a greater moral good.

What’s Next?

Before you body paragraphs come the start and, after your body paragraphs, the conclusion, of course! If you’ve found this article helpful, be sure to read up on how to start a college essay and how to end a college essay .

You may also find the following blogs to be of interest:

• 6 Best Common App Essay Examples
• How to Write the Overcoming Challenges Essay
• UC Essay Examples 
• How to Write the Community Essay
• How to Write the Why this Major? Essay
• College Essay

Kaylen Baker

With a BA in Literary Studies from Middlebury College, an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, and a Master’s in Translation from Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, Kaylen has been working with students on their writing for over five years. Previously, Kaylen taught a fiction course for high school students as part of Columbia Artists/Teachers, and served as an English Language Assistant for the French National Department of Education. Kaylen is an experienced writer/translator whose work has been featured in Los Angeles Review, Hybrid, San Francisco Bay Guardian, France Today, and Honolulu Weekly, among others.

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• Writing Tips

How To Write Essay Body Paragraphs

• 3-minute read
• 4th October 2022

Writing essays is an unavoidable part of student life . And even if you’re not pursuing a career that involves much writing, if you can boost the quality of your essays , you’ll improve your grades and have a better chance of reaching your goals.

One effective way to improve your writing is to strengthen your essay body paragraphs. Those are the paragraphs between the introduction and the conclusion. In our guide below, we’ll consider four components of body paragraphs:

●  Purpose

●  Evidence

●  Analysis

●  Connection

For each paragraph you write , ask yourself: Why are you writing this paragraph? What point are you trying to make? This can be turned into a topic sentence, which is a brief sentence at the beginning of the paragraph clearly stating its focus.

Let’s say our essay is arguing that Fall is the best season, and, in this paragraph, we’re promoting the enjoyableness of Fall activities. Our topic sentence could be something like:

Fall activities, like apple picking, visiting a pumpkin patch, and playing in the leaves, are more enjoyable than activities in other seasons.

Now that you have a clear idea of the point you’d like to make, you must support it with facts. You can do this by citing scientific and/or academic sources; sharing data from case studies; and providing information that you’ve discovered yourself, such as by conducting your own study or describing a real-life experience.

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We sent a survey to 100 participants. One question asked: “Which activity do you prefer: apple picking, building a snowman, planting flowers, or kayaking?” Sixty percent of respondents chose apple picking.

Now that you’ve provided evidence, critically analyzing it is key to strengthening your essay. This involves explaining how the presented facts support your argument, what counterarguments exist, and if there are any alternative points of view.

Although the response to one question indicated that 55% of respondents prefer swimming to jumping in piles of leaves, the responses to the rest of the questions in the survey showed that most participants chose Fall activities as their favorites. These findings indicate that Fall activities are more enjoyable than other types of activities.

Each paragraph must be connected to the paragraphs around it and the main point. You can achieve this by using transitional words and sentences at the end of the paragraph to summarize the current paragraph’s findings and introduce the next one. Transition words include likewise , however , furthermore , accordingly , and in summary .

Therefore, Fall is the best season when it comes to activities. Furthermore, the clothing worn during this season is also superior.

Proofreading and Editing

This step should not be overlooked. Even the best writers will miss errors in their own writing, so it’s crucial to have an outside pair of eyes check your work for spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and readability.

Our expert editors can also ensure your referencing style is followed correctly, offer suggestions for areas where your meaning isn’t clear, and even format your document for you! Try our service for free today by uploading a 500-word sample .

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Body Paragraphs

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Body paragraphs: Moving from general to specific information

Your paper should be organized in a manner that moves from general to specific information. Every time you begin a new subject, think of an inverted pyramid - The broadest range of information sits at the top, and as the paragraph or paper progresses, the author becomes more and more focused on the argument ending with specific, detailed evidence supporting a claim. Lastly, the author explains how and why the information she has just provided connects to and supports her thesis (a brief wrap-up or warrant).

Moving from General to Specific Information

The four elements of a good paragraph (TTEB)

A good paragraph should contain at least the following four elements: T ransition, T opic sentence, specific E vidence and analysis, and a B rief wrap-up sentence (also known as a warrant ) –TTEB!

• A T ransition sentence leading in from a previous paragraph to assure smooth reading. This acts as a hand-off from one idea to the next.
• A T opic sentence that tells the reader what you will be discussing in the paragraph.
• Specific E vidence and analysis that supports one of your claims and that provides a deeper level of detail than your topic sentence.
• A B rief wrap-up sentence that tells the reader how and why this information supports the paper’s thesis. The brief wrap-up is also known as the warrant. The warrant is important to your argument because it connects your reasoning and support to your thesis, and it shows that the information in the paragraph is related to your thesis and helps defend it.

Supporting evidence (induction and deduction)

Induction is the type of reasoning that moves from specific facts to a general conclusion. When you use induction in your paper, you will state your thesis (which is actually the conclusion you have come to after looking at all the facts) and then support your thesis with the facts. The following is an example of induction taken from Dorothy U. Seyler’s Understanding Argument :

There is the dead body of Smith. Smith was shot in his bedroom between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., according to the coroner. Smith was shot with a .32 caliber pistol. The pistol left in the bedroom contains Jones’s fingerprints. Jones was seen, by a neighbor, entering the Smith home at around 11:00 p.m. the night of Smith’s death. A coworker heard Smith and Jones arguing in Smith’s office the morning of the day Smith died.

Conclusion: Jones killed Smith.

Here, then, is the example in bullet form:

• Conclusion: Jones killed Smith
• Support: Smith was shot by Jones’ gun, Jones was seen entering the scene of the crime, Jones and Smith argued earlier in the day Smith died.
• Assumption: The facts are representative, not isolated incidents, and thus reveal a trend, justifying the conclusion drawn.

When you use deduction in an argument, you begin with general premises and move to a specific conclusion. There is a precise pattern you must use when you reason deductively. This pattern is called syllogistic reasoning (the syllogism). Syllogistic reasoning (deduction) is organized in three steps:

• Major premise
• Minor premise

In order for the syllogism (deduction) to work, you must accept that the relationship of the two premises lead, logically, to the conclusion. Here are two examples of deduction or syllogistic reasoning:

• Major premise: All men are mortal.
• Minor premise: Socrates is a man.
• Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.
• Major premise: People who perform with courage and clear purpose in a crisis are great leaders.
• Minor premise: Lincoln was a person who performed with courage and a clear purpose in a crisis.
• Conclusion: Lincoln was a great leader.

So in order for deduction to work in the example involving Socrates, you must agree that (1) all men are mortal (they all die); and (2) Socrates is a man. If you disagree with either of these premises, the conclusion is invalid. The example using Socrates isn’t so difficult to validate. But when you move into more murky water (when you use terms such as courage , clear purpose , and great ), the connections get tenuous.

For example, some historians might argue that Lincoln didn’t really shine until a few years into the Civil War, after many Union losses to Southern leaders such as Robert E. Lee.

The following is a clear example of deduction gone awry:

• Major premise: All dogs make good pets.
• Minor premise: Doogle is a dog.
• Conclusion: Doogle will make a good pet.

If you don’t agree that all dogs make good pets, then the conclusion that Doogle will make a good pet is invalid.

When a premise in a syllogism is missing, the syllogism becomes an enthymeme. Enthymemes can be very effective in argument, but they can also be unethical and lead to invalid conclusions. Authors often use enthymemes to persuade audiences. The following is an example of an enthymeme:

If you have a plasma TV, you are not poor.

The first part of the enthymeme (If you have a plasma TV) is the stated premise. The second part of the statement (you are not poor) is the conclusion. Therefore, the unstated premise is “Only rich people have plasma TVs.” The enthymeme above leads us to an invalid conclusion (people who own plasma TVs are not poor) because there are plenty of people who own plasma TVs who are poor. Let’s look at this enthymeme in a syllogistic structure:

• Major premise: People who own plasma TVs are rich (unstated above).
• Minor premise: You own a plasma TV.
• Conclusion: You are not poor.

To help you understand how induction and deduction can work together to form a solid argument, you may want to look at the United States Declaration of Independence. The first section of the Declaration contains a series of syllogisms, while the middle section is an inductive list of examples. The final section brings the first and second sections together in a compelling conclusion.

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How to write the introduction, body and conclusion of an essay

How do I write an introduction? How do I write the body of an essay? How do I write a conclusion? How do I use all of these to write an amazing essay that will get me an A-plus? Check out our tips below to learn how you can improve your papers and essay grades in easy ways.

How to write an introduction

The introduction has a couple purposes.

1. Get the reader interested in your paper

2. Tell the reader what you are writing about

3. The introduction may explain why the topic is relevant or why you have written the paper (without saying 'I wrote this because...'. Never use "I" in an essay.

Getting the reader interested in your essay is VERY important! This is the difference between an essay that gets a B and an essay that gets an A. The introduction to your essay gets people excited and interested in the topic, and to that, you must talk about the topic as thought it is exciting. If you are bored by your topic and you show it, your reader will be bored. This may not sound important, but it is.

In a newspaper article, the writer wants you to be interested enough to read the article, so they start off with something exciting and maybe show a little bit of mystery. That is what you want to do in your intro.

How to draw in your reader

Some ways to get your reader interested are:

1. Start with a quote that is related to your topic

2. Start with a short story or anecdote that is related to your topic. If it is a book, you can start by describing in a few sentences a poignant scene of the book and then relating it to what you will be writing about. A memorable scene or one with suspense, or intrigue works well - but use only a few sentences to describe it.

3. If your essay is about a book or poem, pull one of the important phrases to use as a quote to get you started

After that, you have to state why you included the quote. For instance, if you are writing about Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, you could choose a quote from the book or you could choose a quote about something related to the book. It works well is the quote is slightly ironic or has a double meaning or talks about some great truth that relates to life as a whole and relates to the book. You can explain briefly why this is important, and get people interested in your topic because they understand why the topic applies to life. See the introduction sample below for an example of how to do this.

Sample Introduction:

Title: The evolving role of friendship in Huckleberry Finn

"This communicating of a man's self to his friend works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in half." (Gets the reader's attention)

If Huckleberry Finn, Jim and Tom Sawyer heard this quote by Francis Bacon, they would have all agreed with the sentiment, and yet each in his own way. (This sets up a bit of mystery - the reader wonders what you mean by such a statement.) Each character in Mark Twain's novel, "Huckleberry Finn", has a markedly different approach to friendship. This multi-faceted and changeable definition of friendship is one reason Twain's story has fascinated readers for more than one hundred years.

How to write the body of an essay

1. For the body of your essay, use your thesis statement to create three parts.

2. The first part is the point of your thesis statement. The second part is your second point and the third point is your third section.

3. Within each section, you will use sub-points to prove your big point. This isn't as hard as it sounds.

4. Start each section with a mini-thesis statement that tells the reader what that section is going to be about.

Sample body of an essay:

One reason Martin Luther King Jr was a great leader is that he motivated others to take action. (State the paragraph by telling people what they will read about) . He inspired common people to get involved (sub-point 1) , he inspired leaders to listen to him (sub-point 2) and he was an effective communicator whose speeches and sermons influenced people's opinions (sub-point 3) .

In the following paragraphs just give some examples that prove those points. For example, you can say that he inspired common people to get involved because many people marched in the streets with Dr. King. Or you can point out that he was covered by the media which meant many people heard what he said. You can also say that people read his writings, which inspired them to get involved.

How to write a conclusion

1. Re-state your thesis statement and your three points that went with it.

2. Add some new idea at the end, some kind of 'kicker' that gives the essay something special. Again, this is VERY important and the difference between a B and an A paper.

3. The special bit at the end could be something that says why the topic is relevant to people today, something ironic, something poetic, or could even point out something obvious that is related to your topic. It could also call the listener into action by telling them what they can do about the topic or how it applies to the reader's own life. It could also ask a question or make the reader think about what could happen in the future with the topic.

Sample conclusion

In conclusion, changes in women's fashion trends have matched how the average woman's life has changed over the past century and half approximately. Those changes could be seen in the way that fashion fit with lifestyle changes for women from 1850-1900, from 1900-1950 and from 1950 to the present. (Thesis statement and restate your points - summarize what the reader just read about)

The question now is how fashion will change over the next 50 years to reflect the changing lifestyles of women. Will the fashion continue to keep pace with our fast-paced, ever-changing, global world? (Ask the reader some question to make them wonder) / The answer should be self-evident: as we change, so we will change the clothes we wear and the appearance we try to show to the world. It has been true throughout time, and will continue into the next century. (This reinforces the point you've just made in the essay and gives the reader the idea that the essay is now finished) .

More information : We hope this page was helpful and provided you with some information about how to write the introduction, body and conclusion of an essay . Check out our main page for more articles here Can U Write .

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Purdue OWL - Introductions, Body Paragraphs, and Conclusions for an Expository/Persuasive Essay

Introductions, Body Paragraphs, and Conclusions for an Expository/Persuasive Essay

Introduction

The introduction is the broad beginning of the paper that answers three important questions:

• What is this?
• Why am I reading it?
• What do you want me to do?

You should answer these questions by doing the following:

• Set the context – provide general information about the main idea, explaining the situation so the reader can make sense of the topic and the claims you make and support
• State why the main idea is important – tell the reader why s/he should care and keep reading. Your goal is to create a compelling, clear, and convincing essay people will want to read and act upon
• State your thesis/claim – compose a sentence or two stating the position you will support with logos (sound reasoning: induction, deduction), pathos (balanced emotional appeal), and ethos (author credibility).

Thesis Checklist

Your thesis is more than a general statement about your main idea. It needs to establish a clear position you will support with balanced proofs (logos, pathos, ethos). Use the checklist below to help you create a thesis.

This section is adapted from Writing with a Thesis: A Rhetoric Reader by David Skwire and Sarah Skwire:

Make sure you avoid the following when creating your thesis:

• A thesis is not a title: Homes and schools (title) vs. Parents ought to participate more in the education of their children (good thesis).
• A thesis is not an announcement of the subject: My subject is the incompetence of the Supreme Court vs. The Supreme Court made a mistake when it ruled in favor of George W. Bush in the 2000 election.
• A thesis is not a statement of absolute fact: Jane Austen is the author of Pride and Prejudice.
• A thesis is not the whole essay: A thesis is your main idea/claim/refutation/problem-solution expressed in a single sentence or a combination of sentences.
• Please note that according to the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers , Sixth Edition, "A thesis statement is a single sentence that formulates both your topic and your point of view" (Gibaldi 56). However, if your paper is more complex and requires a thesis statement, your thesis may require a combination of sentences .

Make sure you follow these guidelines when creating your thesis:

• A good thesis is unified: Detective stories are not a high form of literature, but people have always been fascinated by them, and many fine writers have experimented with them (floppy). vs. Detective stories appeal to the basic human desire for thrills (concise).
• A good thesis is specific: James Joyce’s Ulysses is very good. vs. James Joyce’s Ulysses helped create a new way for writers to deal with the unconscious.
• Try to be as specific as possible (without providing too much detail) when creating your thesis: James Joyce’s Ulysses helped create a new way for writers to deal with the unconscious. vs. James Joyce’s Ulysses helped create a new way for writers to deal with the unconscious by utilizing the findings of Freudian psychology and introducing the techniques of literary stream-of-consciousness.

Quick Checklist:

_____ The thesis/claim follows the guidelines outlined above

_____ The thesis/claim matches the requirements and goals of the assignment

_____ The thesis/claim is clear and easily recognizable

_____ The thesis/claim seems supportable by good reasoning/data, emotional appeal

Body Paragraphs

Summary: This resource outlines the generally accepted structure for introductions, body paragraphs, and conclusions in an academic argument paper. Keep in mind that this resource contains guidelines and not strict rules about organization. Your structure needs to be flexible enough to meet the requirements of your purpose and audience.

Body Paragraphs: Moving from General to Specific Information

Your paper should be organized in a manner that moves from general to specific information. Every time you begin a new subject, think of an inverted pyramid - the broadest range of information sits at the top, and as the paragraph or paper progresses, the author becomes more and more focused on the argument ending with specific, detailed evidence supporting a claim. Lastly, the author explains how and why the information she has just provided connects to and supports her thesis (a brief wrap up or warrant).

  The four elements of a good paragraph (TTEB)

A good paragraph should contain at least the following four elements: T ransition, T opic sentence, specific E vidence and analysis, and a B rief wrap-up sentence (also known as a warrant) – TTEB!

• A T ransition sentence leading in from a previous paragraph to assure smooth reading. This acts as a hand off from one idea to the next.
• A T opic sentence that tells the reader what you will be discussing in the paragraph.
• Specific E vidence and analysis that supports one of your claims and that provides a deeper level of detail than your topic sentence.
• A B rief wrap-up sentence that tells the reader how and why this information supports the paper’s thesis. The brief wrap-up is also known as the warrant. The warrant is important to your argument because it connects your reasoning and support to your thesis, and it shows that the information in the paragraph is related to your thesis and helps defend it.

Rebuttal Sections

In order to present a fair and convincing message, you may need to anticipate, research, and outline some of the common positions (arguments) that dispute your thesis. If the situation (purpose) calls for you to do this, you will present and then refute these other positions in the rebuttal section of your essay.

It is important to consider other positions because in most cases, your primary audience will be fence-sitters. Fence-sitters are people who have not decided which side of the argument to support.

People who are on your side of the argument will not need a lot of information to align with your position. People who are completely against your argument - perhaps for ethical or religious reasons - will probably never align with your position no matter how much information you provide. Therefore, the audience you should consider most important are those people who haven't decided which side of the argument they will support - the fence-sitters.

In many cases, these fence-sitters have not decided which side to align with because they see value in both positions. Therefore, to not consider opposing positions to your own in a fair manner may alienate fence-sitters when they see that you are not addressing their concerns or discussion opposing positions at all.

Organizing your rebuttal section

Following the TTEB method outlined in the Body Paragraph section, forecast all the information that will follow in the rebuttal section and then move point by point through the other positions addressing each one as you go. The outline below, adapted from Seyler's Understanding Argument , is an example of a rebuttal section from a thesis essay.

When you rebut or refute an opposing position, use the following three-part organization:

The opponent’s argument – Usually, you should not assume that your reader has read or remembered the argument you are refuting. Thus at the beginning of your paragraph, you need to state, accurately and fairly, the main points of the argument you will refute.

Your position – Next, make clear the nature of your disagreement with the argument or position you are refuting. Your position might assert, for example, that a writer has not proved his assertion because he has provided evidence that is outdated, or that the argument is filled with fallacies.

Your refutation – The specifics of your counterargument will depend upon the nature of your disagreement. If you challenge the writer’s evidence, then you must present the more recent evidence. If you challenge assumptions, then you must explain why they do not hold up. If your position is that the piece is filled with fallacies, then you must present and explain each fallacy.

Conclusions

Conclusions wrap up what you have been discussing in your paper. After moving from general to specific information in the introduction and body paragraphs, your conclusion should begin pulling back into more general information that restates the main points of your argument. Conclusions may also call for action or overview future possible research. The following outline may help you conclude your paper:

In a general way,

• restate your topic and why it is important,
• restate your thesis/claim,
• address opposing viewpoints and explain why readers should align with your position,
• call for action or overview future research possibilities.

Remember that once you accomplish these tasks, unless otherwise directed by your instructor, you are finished. Done. Complete. Don't try to bring in new points or end with a whiz bang(!) conclusion or try to solve world hunger in the final sentence of your conclusion. Simplicity is best for a clear, convincing message.

The preacher's maxim is one of the most effective formulas to follow for argument papers:

• Tell what you're going to tell them (introduction).
• Tell them (body).
• Tell them what you told them (conclusion).

 Copyright ©1995-2011 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University .

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Paper writing: introduction, body and conclusion, what is an essay made up of.

A standard essay is made up of 5 paragraphs.  An introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs and a conclusion. 

First, we'll talk about the introductory paragraph:  In this paragraph, you give a brief overview of the topics you're going to talk about.  Generally you will provide three topics of discussion. You will provide your thesis in this paragraph. 

The thesis acts as a roadmap for the entire essay.  The point you are trying to prove is stated in the thesis, and generally falls at the end of the introductory paragraph.

In the body paragraphs you delve deeper into the points made in your intro paragraph.

Following the last body paragraph, you will provide a conclusion paragraph . In your conclusion you will sum up the points you made, and restate your thesis. 

Example of a short 5 paragraph essay about writing an essay:

It is important in education today that students know how to write a five paragraph essay.  Most five paragraph essays include an introduction like this one, as well as three body paragraphs and a conclusion.  Each body paragraph argues a different point.  The first body paragraph argues the strongest point, the second boy paragraph argues the second strongest point and the third body paragraph argues the weakest point.  The conclusion ends the essay, and restates the thesis which belongs here.

The first paragraph contains the strongest argument in the paper (or the mot obvious beginning point).  The topic for this paragraph, as with the other paragraphs should be stated within the first several sentences.  The thesis should be supported by content in the paragraph.  Then you should move on to the next paragraph, providing a clear transition.

The second paragraph should contain the second most significant example or point in the paper. It should provide evidence for the point being made (as should the other paragraphs) with quotes or other content.  It should relate to the thesis (in favor of or against it).  Then this paragraph can be wrapped up neatly, and transition nicely into the next paragraph.

The third paragraph should contain the weakest argument, follow up to the previous point(s), weakest example, etc.  All of the paragraphs should flow seamlessly together, and should not feel awkward or disjointed.  This paragraph should also tie into the thesis.  The last sentence in this paragraph should signify somehow that you are moving into your conclusion; this paragraph should feel complete.

The concluding paragraph should slightly mirror the introduction.  You should revisit the points you made in your previous paragraphs. This paragraph should echo your thesis/ provide a description of how you proved your thesis (i.e "through the intense character analysis of Hester Prynne through her interactions with Pearl we find 1, 2 and 3). Then, provide a final statement signifying you have completed your paper/point/argument. 

Source: wiki, nikki

Different Types of Essays (and a few things to remember)!

This brief slideshow discusses different types of essays, as well as a two points to remember.

The Essay Song (There is no image provided! Nothing is wrong with your computer!)

This song will help you remember the steps to writing an essay!

Source: myself and a little inspiration from grancie

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Online Learning Resources

Academic skills office, academic skills.

Introduction

• Academic essays
• Thesis statement
• Question analysis

Sample essay

• Introduction paragraphs
• Beginner paragraphs
• Perfecting Paragraphs
• Academic paragraphs
• Conclusion paragraphs
• Academic writing style
• Using headings
• Using evidence
• Supporting evidence
• Citing authors
• Quoting authors
• Paraphrasing authors
• Summarising authors
• Tables & figures
• Synthesising evidence
• About academic reading
• Identify your purpose for reading
• Some reading techniques
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Sometimes a good example of what you are trying to achieve is worth a 1000 words of advice! When you are asked to write an essay, try to find some samples (models) of similar writing and learn to observe the craft of the writer. You can use the samples as a basis for working out how to write in the correct style.

About sample essays

Most books on essay writing will supply you with a number of model essays—collect some of these as they are great teachers! No matter what the topic is, you will see similarities between your writing tasks and these model essays. This is because many features of writing are common across subject areas. In some subjects (e.g. Law, Economics, Psychology and others), it is very useful to find subject -specific essay models as you can use these to work out the ‘peculiarities’ of writing for that subject area.

Read an academic essay

The following five paragraph essay has paragraph labels to show the parts of an academic essay. (Note: This essay does not contain authentic references and has been written specifically to use for this teaching task.)

Body paragraph 1

Body paragraph 2

Using assignment essays for assessment supports student learning better than the traditional examination system. It is considered that course-work assignment essays can lessen the extreme stress experienced by some students over ‘sudden-death’ end of semester examinations:

If we insist that all students write about everything they have learned in their study courses at the same time and in the same place (e.g. in examinations), we are not giving all of our students equal opportunities. Some students are not daunted by the exam experience while others suffer ‘exam nerves’ and perform at the lowest level of their capabilities. (Wonderland University, 2006, p. 4)

Additionally, Jones et al. (2004, pp. 36-37) propose that assignment essays can be used to assess student learning mid-course and so provide them with helpful feedback before they are subjected to the exam experience. Exams only provide students with a mark rather than specific feedback on their progress. Therefore, setting assignment essays for a substantial part of student assessment is a much fairer approach than one-off examination testing.

Body paragraph 3

Bloggs, J. (2003).  Linking teaching, learning and succeeding in higher education . London: Bookworld.

Jinx, J.M. (2004). Student essay writing.  Journal of Research in University Education, 9 (2), 114-125.

Jones, J., Smith, P.L., Brown, K., Zong J., Thompson, K., & Fung, P.A. (2004).  Helpline: Essays and the university student . Tokyo: Courtyard Printers.

Sankey, J.M., & Liger, T.U. (2003).  Learning to write essays  [CD-ROM]. Sydney: Wonderland University.

Taylor, G. (1989).  The student’s writing guide for the arts and social sciences . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wonderland University. (2006).  Attributes of a university graduate . doi:10.1098/063-112

Yang, S., & Baker, O.E. (2005).  Essay writing and the tertiary student . Melbourne: Diamond Press.

Zapper, Y. (2006). Learning essay writing. In F.T. Fax & Y. Phoney (Eds.),  Learning Experiences at University  (pp. 55-70). Calcutta: Academic Scholar Press.

Analyse an academic essay

Most students really appreciate seeing a finished product. If you are to really benefit from model essays, you need to learn how to read the ‘techniques of the writer’. The following exercise helps you to get started with developing your ‘read the writer’ skills.

1. The introduction paragraph

2. Body paragraph 1

3. Body paragraph 2

4. Body paragraph 3

5. The conclusion paragraph

6. The reference list

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Takako Isayama, a 12-year-old congenital victim of Minamata disease, with her mother, in Minimata, Japan, 1972. Photo W Eugene Smith and © Aileen Mioko Smith

The risk of beauty

W eugene smith’s photos of the minamata disaster are both exquisite and horrifying. how might we now look at them.

by Joanna Pocock   + BIO

There is a moment in my life that marks a split between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. I was around 12 years old, sitting cross-legged on the cream carpet in my family’s living room in Ottawa when I opened a large, heavy book, awkward in my skinny arms. The texture of the paper was strange: it was matt, a word I didn’t know then. The ink was blacker than anything I had seen. A pure void – no light, no reflection, nothing. My fingers left small shiny traces on the paper, which took a few seconds to disappear. My child’s mind could not understand what it was seeing.

Bodies. Contortions. Something was very wrong. Humans who had been put together incorrectly, limbs sticking out at odd angles, crumpled like broken birds’ wings, like snapped twigs.

I kept looking, trying to make sense of these photographs.

Pipes discharging wastewater into a black sea.

Schools of fish. Boats with men and women hauling bulging nets onto the decks.

A sparkling factory, its lights like stars in a black sky. It looked like a spaceship.

I was staring into my father’s copy of Minamata (1975), W Eugene Smith and Aileen M Smith’s masterpiece of photojournalism with accompanying essays. It was published three years after the Smiths’ photo essay ‘Death-Flow from a Pipe’ had appeared in Life magazine. Eugene Smith and his then-wife Aileen had spent three years in the small fishing village of Minamata in Japan documenting the effects of mercury poisoning by the Japanese Chisso Corporation for the purposes of their essay, which was expanded to become the hefty Minamata .

Aileen M Smith and W Eugene Smith in Minimata. Photo © Takeshi Ishikawa

About halfway through the book, I came across the photo that truly claimed me, spread across two pages.

The left is almost all black. We are in a small room; the photographer must also be in the room as the figures are so close to us. On the right-hand page, a woman holds the rigid body of a teenager. The teenager is naked. All we can make out is her three-quarter profile, eyes rolled upwards, her teeth showing through a slightly opened mouth, her skinny torso, ribs, deformed hands hovering in the air; one knee resting on her mother’s wrist, the other hovering. Her thick black hair flops back from her forehead. You can almost feel the steam filling the room like hot breath.

This photo , ‘Tomoko and Mother in the Bath’ by Eugene Smith, triggered something profound that I have never been able to shake or even fully comprehend. Why this image? Why did it penetrate so deeply? The effect it had on me has something to do with the fact that it was pure accident that led me to it; the photo found me, rather than the other way round. By discovering it in one of my father’s books, I felt I had stumbled upon a secret, something I wasn’t meant to see. The pain captured in this photo – and captured so humanely – was something that I, a child of the Canadian suburbs, had never seen. This kind of before-and-after moment is expressed by Susan Sontag in her book On Photography (1977). Her ‘first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror’, she tells us, was ‘a kind of revelation’. It was photos of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau that she came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945 that broke her. ‘Nothing I have seen – in photographs or in real life – ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously,’ she writes. ‘Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was 12) and after.’

S eeing Tomoko’s young, contorted body was the moment I realised there was such a thing as horror and that those who are most affected are often victims of chance or fate. Here was a girl who, by dint of being born in Minamata rather than Ottawa, had been poisoned. All these years later, I am unnerved by the fact that Tomoko’s appearance was so unlike a healthy teenager that Sontag, writing about this very picture, could not make out that she was female, and referred instead to ‘Smith’s photograph of a dying youth writhing on his [sic] mother’s lap’. The youth was not male nor was she dying – she lived another five years. The composition of this photo echoes the classic pose of the Virgin Mary holding a dying Christ. Sontag sees it as a ‘Pietà for the world of plague victims’. Tomoko died for us all, is the subtext here – but it is important to note that she did not die from an uncontainable virus. She died because of a human-made environmental catastrophe.

Michelangelo’s Pietà in St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. Courtesy Wikipedia

From 1932 to 1968, the Chisso Corporation dumped methylmercury-laced wastewater into Minamata Bay. From the mid-1940s, a ‘strange disease’ started to appear in town. At first, the symptoms – seizures, loss of motor control, numbness, paralysis, sensory impairment and death within weeks, months or years from the first signs of illness – were described anecdotally. However, in 1957, a Chisso Corporation doctor gave it a name: Minamata disease. Babies were born deformed, blind and with a range of disabilities as the mercury passed through their mother’s placenta. Sometimes, the unborn baby acted as a sponge for the toxin, leaving some mothers without symptoms. This was the case for Tomoko Kamimura. Her family called her their ‘treasure child’ because she spared her mother from the disease.

Just as in fairy tales, the poison gets out, it spreads; there is always a story in its wake

For years, the Chisso Corporation would not accept any correlation between its industrial waste and Minamata disease. Yet this connection made so much sense – even to my child’s mind: you poison the water, the fish end up toxic. People eat the fish, they get sick. How could it have taken so many years and a lengthy photographic exposé to join the dots? The Smiths’ 1972 photo essay in Life drew global attention to the issue of mercury poisoning. Their photographs played a huge part in Chisso accepting responsibility and paying compensation to those affected by the disease. By 2004, the corporation had paid out $86 million to claimants. The company was also ordered to ‘clean up’ the contamination. But the thing with water is that you can’t clean it up. Once the poison is there, it never goes away. All you can do is stop eating the fish.

I don’t remember going beyond the photo of Tomoko when I pored over Minamata as a child. But I do remember the feeling I had as I closed the book: I knew, I just knew in my bones, that Minamata wasn’t really very far away, and that poison – like horror – doesn’t observe boundaries: it never stays in the pot. Just as in fairy tales, the poison gets out, it spreads; there is always a story in its wake. It wasn’t simply the content of that image that seared my memory, but the fact that someone had gone there to document it . This gets to the heart of the importance of the photographic enterprise. A photo like ‘Tomoko and Mother in the Bath’ exists because someone needed to take it.

An image has a provenance, a context and a history. The moment of a photograph’s inception is the moment a human has put themselves behind a camera to be a witness. The photographer’s intention is woven into the fabric of the photograph from its beginning. You could say that the decisions made on the part of the maker (where to stand, where to point the camera) are the source of an image, and its meaning flows from that source. Without that spark of intent, there would be no photograph. All of which is to say that one can feel the presence of Eugene Smith in the image of Tomoko – a presence unique to him, to his desire to enter that bathroom and show us that even intimate moments are not immune to being penetrated by the horrors of this world. In our drone-saturated, AI-infected, Photoshopped world, the maker is often lost or forgotten. Images labelled ‘content’ are deprived of context or meaning. We are daily bombarded with photographic images whose provenance we simply have no idea about, and whose intentions are often murky.

‘W hat good was served’ by seeing photos of camp survivors, Sontag asks? But perhaps an equally important question is: how were the subjects served by the reproduction and propagation of their image?

Eugene Smith believed he had two responsibilities: one to his subjects and one to his viewers. The story of ‘Tomoko and Mother in the Bath’ begins with Smith spending enough time with the Kamimuras for them to trust him during an intimate moment, followed by his hand clicking the shutter, but it does not end with the image on photographic paper or the deaths of the subject and the maker. When a French television company contacted the Kamimura family about a documentary they were making about the most important photographs of the 20th century, Yoshio Kamimura refused to be interviewed, stating that he wanted his daughter to ‘be laid to rest’.

A photograph emigrates from the territory of the present into the well of timelessness where art dwells

Aileen Smith had inherited the copyright to the image after Eugene’s death in 1978; when she heard of the family’s reaction, she travelled to Minamata and passed on the copyright to the Kamimuras. ‘This photograph would be a profanity if it continued to be issued against the will of Tomoko and her family,’ Aileen said . ‘The decision I made as holder of copyright to the photograph “Tomoko and Mother in the Bath” was … made after a great deal of deliberation, with love and care,’ she wrote – no doubt thinking about Eugene’s sense of responsibility to his subjects. Yoshio Kamimura could not alter the fate of his daughter, but he could decide how her image was used – if at all. As of 1998, 21 years after Tomoko’s death, it became against copyright to reproduce this photo, the one I have been carrying inside myself since I was a child. The Smiths knew the limits of the photographic image. ‘Photography is neither medicine nor god,’ Aileen wrote. ‘The photograph “Tomoko and Mother in the Bath”, in spite of its worldwide release, could not cure Tomoko’s illness.’

In its passage from ‘document of reality’ to ‘iconic work of art’ – a journey that often happens with the passage of time – a photograph emigrates from the territory of the present into the well of timelessness where art dwells. It’s a journey that can also drain an image of some of its potency. As an exercise in photographic time-travel, I think about aerial images of razed old-growth forests featuring lost-looking solitary orangutans, or unmanned drone images of ravaged war-torn cities, often described as ‘like something from a movie’. I imagine looking at them 50 years hence. Will some emigrate from ‘document’ or ‘reportage’ to ‘art’? Should they? Do we have a responsibility to prevent this alchemy or should we welcome it?

This is the paradox of the Pietà: although we may be broken by confronting horror, we also risk being comforted by the beauty of an image. But if we remember that someone went there to document it , perhaps we can bring some of the immediacy and potency back to an image. This act of returning authorship to a photograph cannot happen with the endless stream of images we scroll past on our phones. ‘Images transfix. Images anesthetize,’ Sontag writes when she describes how the shock of a photographic image ‘wears off with repeated viewings … making the horrible seem more ordinary – making it appear familiar, remote (“it’s only a photograph”), inevitable.’

T owards the end of 2023, I got the urge to revisit Minamata . I had no idea where my father’s first edition had gone after he died, so I asked my husband for a copy for Christmas. The one he got me was beautiful, but nothing like the original of my childhood. The pages were glossy, not matt, and its soft cover sat more comfortably in my arms. I started reading it in bed on Christmas day, when I fell ill with COVID-19. On page 138, I came upon Smith’s Pietà. This time, I knew it was coming, but I was still unprepared. I had shrunk down the image over the years in my memory until it was small enough to fit inside me. In the book, Ryoko and Tomoko’s surname is given as Uemura (a mistranslation by Eugene Smith from the Japanese). His text tells us that on the day of the court victory for victims affected by mercury poisoning, one newspaper ran the headline ‘The Day That Tomoko Smiled’. Smith adds with his trademark directness: ‘She couldn’t have cared less. She couldn’t possibly have known.’ And if Tomoko had been aware of the newspaper headline, it would have given her cold comfort. No compensation, however large, could make her healthy. Tomoko Kamimura died in 1977 at the age of 21. Eugene Smith died a year later, at 59.

When I was 12, I didn’t go beyond the photo of Tomoko. I stopped there and put the book down. But this Christmas I carried on. I turned the page and got a shock. What I had felt as a child, that what had happened in Minamata could happen anywhere – that horror could not be contained – was borne out. On the reverse of Smith’s Pietà was the startling heading: ‘Canada: Half a World Away’.

The Canadian section in Minamata about Grassy Narrows runs to a mere four pages. Grassy Narrows is a First Nation settlement about an hour’s drive from Kenora, in northwestern Ontario, the province I had grown up in. I knew of Kenora because it had been in the news back in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Also, around this time, one of my sisters started dating a member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation. I had visited his family on his reservation in upstate New York. He had a sister my age and we have remained in touch all these years. My sister married him and the issues around the government’s treatment of people I knew, who were now part of my family, became another source of grief and horror to my young self, linked now to the seed that had been planted in me by the Smiths’ photographic work.

Aileen Smith begins the Canadian section in Minamata by telling us that, two years previously, Gene had received a letter from some Ontario residents who were ‘fighting a lonely battle against mercury and destroying their main source of income in the process’. These people owned a tourist business along the English-Wabigoon River near Kenora. For centuries, this land had been prime hunting and fishing territory for the Grassy Narrows tribe, whose original name in the Ojibwe language is Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek, and whose history and culture are based around a profound and ongoing connection to the land – a land that now appeared to be poisoning them. Between 1962 and 1970, Dryden Chemicals (a Canadian subsidiary of the British multinational the Reed Paper Group Ltd) used mercury to make caustic soda and chlorine for bleaching their paper products. As part of the manufacturing process, they dumped more than 9,000 kg of mercury into the English-Wabigoon River upstream of the Grassy Narrows reserve.

It turns out that Minamata was far closer to me than I had been told, and yet somehow my child self knew this

The story in Grassy Narrows tragically echoes the story in Minamata. It would be comforting to think of this level of human and environmental devastation as something from the past, and yet how wrong this would be. There is little information out there about Ontario’s mercury-tainted water, but a 2017 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) article by the journalist Jody Porter, who died in 2022, reported that ‘90 per cent of the population in Grassy Narrows experiences symptoms of mercury poisoning’, including ‘neurological problems ranging from numbness in fingers and toes to seizures and cognitive delays.’ Health services on the reserve consist of one small nursing station.

In 2014, the 17-year-old Calvin Kokopenace died from mercury poisoning in Grassy Narrows. His younger sister Azraya struggled with the loss, and in 2016 she sought help. Ontario police officers dropped her off at the Lake of the Woods District Hospital in Kenora. Two days later, her dead body was found nearby. Her family has been trying to get an autopsy report and an inquest but no one will give them the information they need to understand Azraya’s final hours. The 14-year-old has become another statistic in Canada’s long list of missing and murdered Indigenous women. It is such a common fate, that the acronym MMIW has a hashtag. Azraya’s friends believe her death was tied to despair over the loss of her brother. One of Azraya’s cousins, Chayna Loon, told the CBC: ‘Knowing how Calvin died, we could all be dying. We probably are, already, and we don’t know what’s going to happen because nobody is helping.’ It turns out that Minamata was far closer to me than I had been told, and yet somehow my child self knew this.

Back in the 1970s, the provincial government of Ontario told Grassy Narrows residents to stop eating fish, their main staple. Then all the commercial fisheries were shut down. Yet the Canadian government still refused to admit there was a problem. For years, Dryden Chemicals executives insisted there was no correlation between their plant and the presence of mercury in the water, despite the fact that fish caught near the mill showed much higher levels of mercury than fish caught further away. Private water-testers found levels of mercury in fish in the English-Wabigoon River to be as high as 27.8 parts per million (ppm). To give a sense of scale, the US Food and Drug Administration now says that the maximum safe level of mercury in seafood is 1 ppm. The Canadian government has since admitted that ‘some mercury levels in local fish were 30 times what was “acceptable”.’

The community’s staple food was now lethal, local jobs had disappeared, and Grassy Narrows went into decline. Suicide rates were high, as were cases of substance abuse. Because symptoms of Minamata disease can present in similar ways to the effects of alcohol poisoning, insult was added to injury by those in power who suggested that the symptoms they were seeing in the population were merely the signs of alcoholism. A 2020 article in The Lancet describes Grassy Narrows as being the epicentre of ‘one of the worst cases of environmental poisoning in Canadian history’. Despite this, a quick Google of nearby Kenora brings up this:

Take a cruise on Lake of the Woods on the MS Kenora or get your picture taken with Husky the Muskie, a 40 foot tall, 2-ton replica of a fish the lake is famous for. Kenora is known for its waterfront beauty and there are five major beaches in town.

A ‘muskie’ is the shortened form of muskellunge, a fish famous in Canada for its giant size. You can feed many people from a muskie. You could also potentially make them ill.

Steve Fobister, a former chief of the Grassy Narrows community and a campaigner for environmental justice, died in 2018 at the age of 66, just one year after Porter interviewed him for her CBC article. She wrote that Fobister ‘now has difficulty standing and swallowing … Even talking is a chore. It often requires him to hold his lower jaw with his thumb to reduce the shaking long enough to form words.’ The government still won’t admit that anyone at Grassy Narrows has been poisoned – only that some people ‘experience symptoms of Minamata disease’. Where is the person willing to go there and document it ? Where is the Pietà for Grassy Narrows?

The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky does indeed photograph ecological devastation in Ontario, his home province, and beyond. However, his photos of mines, tailing ponds and blasted, poisoned landscapes depict the land without its people. Burtynsky turns ecological disaster into wall-size collectible images oozing terror and beauty. In the early 1980s, he stood on the edges of vast open pit mines across North America to show us the precipitous craters left behind from mining. His images are unsettling: tailing ponds sparkle like gemstones in Earth’s crust, deep-cut mining sites become geometric quilts. He later captured the patterned landscapes created by dryland farms in Spain from the open door of a helicopter. He goes higher again, photographing from a Cessna; and by 2021, he is using remote-controlled drones to photograph diseased olive trees in Puglia, soil erosion in Turkey and rare earth metal mining, among other ecologically devastating resource extraction. His trajectory from a hand-held camera to aerial drones is the trajectory of our times. His images are elegiac, abstract and aesthetically beautiful, and yet just below their surface they speak of devastation. Because of this, they sidestep the ‘paradox of the Pietà’. They fall fully formed into the well of art.

T he problem with raising awareness of social or environmental issues, whether in the form of Smith’s emotionally charged Pietà or Burtynsky’s cool abstractions, is that, in order to ‘fix’ the problems, we would need to completely change the way we live, the way we think, do business, raise children, grow food, and live out our lives on the most granular level. Aggressive farming practices, the liberal application of pesticides, the proliferation of single-use plastics, disposable technologies requiring the extraction of metals, and a mindset of uncontained overconsumption mean that situations like Grassy Narrows will carry on.

Expecting a single photograph or photographer to change this is unfair. Sontag believed that: ‘The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling …’ She continues: ‘Like the post-romantic novelist and the reporter, the photographer was supposed to unmask hypocrisy and combat ignorance.’ I would add that when a photograph lands in the right hands, it can also plant a seed in a person’s deepest psyche. This sometimes comes at a personal cost not only to the subject, but to the photographer. Smith was badly beaten by Chisso’s hired security guards while photographing protesters in Japan. He suffered serious physical injuries that dogged him for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, he did go there and document it.

Since I started writing about Smith’s photo, I have noticed that my relationship to ‘Tomoko and Mother in the Bath’ has altered dramatically over the years. Where my childhood gaze was locked on Tomoko, my adult gaze now registers the presence of Tomoko’s mother. She, too, is naked and vulnerable in the bath with her daughter. Her expression is loving, concerned, peaceful, almost expectant, as if waiting for Tomoko to say something. Her downcast eyes are fixed on her daughter’s upturned face. What I hadn’t grasped then but now see so clearly is that those of us unaffected so directly by horror share something profound with Tomoko’s mother. We, too, are witnesses, and it is our job to hold the painful, suffering bodies left in the wake of devastation.

Seeing how horror can arrive unbidden on the doorstep of the innocent was the moment I lost my innocence. As a middle-aged woman, my gaze has shifted from the teenager to her mother. I’ve realised that is it she who holds the key. Maybe this is the most we can expect from an image of horror: that it asks us not to look away. It demands that we stay with it, and that we allow it to do its work within us: that we take on the gaze of Tomoko’s mother. Eugene Smith went there to document it ; Life magazine brought his photo to the world. The rest is, and always has been, up to us.

Sleep and dreams

Spinning the night self

After years of insomnia, I threw off the effort to sleep and embraced the peculiar openness I found in the darkest hours

Annabel Abbs

History of ideas

Philosophy of the people

How two amateur schools pulled a generation of thinkers from the workers and teachers of the 19th-century American Midwest

Joseph M Keegin

Nature and landscape

Laughing shores

Sailors, exiles, merchants and philosophers: how the ancient Greeks played with language to express a seaborne imagination

Giordano Lipari

Political philosophy

Citizens and spinning wheels

For Indians to be truly free, Gandhi argued they must take up traditional crafts. Was it a quixotic hope or inspired solution?

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C L R James and America

The brilliant Trinidadian thinker is remembered as an admirer of the US but he also warned of its dark political future

Harvey Neptune

Progress and modernity

The great wealth wave

The tide has turned – evidence shows ordinary citizens in the Western world are now richer and more equal than ever before

Daniel Waldenström

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• Knowledge Base
• How to write an essay outline | Guidelines & examples

How to Write an Essay Outline | Guidelines & Examples

Published on August 14, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

An essay outline is a way of planning the structure of your essay before you start writing. It involves writing quick summary sentences or phrases for every point you will cover in each paragraph , giving you a picture of how your argument will unfold.

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Table of contents

Organizing your material, presentation of the outline, examples of essay outlines, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about essay outlines.

At the stage where you’re writing an essay outline, your ideas are probably still not fully formed. You should know your topic  and have already done some preliminary research to find relevant sources , but now you need to shape your ideas into a structured argument.

Creating categories

Look over any information, quotes and ideas you’ve noted down from your research and consider the central point you want to make in the essay—this will be the basis of your thesis statement . Once you have an idea of your overall argument, you can begin to organize your material in a way that serves that argument.

Try to arrange your material into categories related to different aspects of your argument. If you’re writing about a literary text, you might group your ideas into themes; in a history essay, it might be several key trends or turning points from the period you’re discussing.

Three main themes or subjects is a common structure for essays. Depending on the length of the essay, you could split the themes into three body paragraphs, or three longer sections with several paragraphs covering each theme.

As you create the outline, look critically at your categories and points: Are any of them irrelevant or redundant? Make sure every topic you cover is clearly related to your thesis statement.

Order of information

When you have your material organized into several categories, consider what order they should appear in.

Your essay will always begin and end with an introduction and conclusion , but the organization of the body is up to you.

Consider these questions to order your material:

• Is there an obvious starting point for your argument?
• Is there one subject that provides an easy transition into another?
• Do some points need to be set up by discussing other points first?

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Within each paragraph, you’ll discuss a single idea related to your overall topic or argument, using several points of evidence or analysis to do so.

In your outline, you present these points as a few short numbered sentences or phrases.They can be split into sub-points when more detail is needed.

The template below shows how you might structure an outline for a five-paragraph essay.

• Thesis statement
• First piece of evidence
• Second piece of evidence
• Summary/synthesis
• Importance of topic
• Strong closing statement

You can choose whether to write your outline in full sentences or short phrases. Be consistent in your choice; don’t randomly write some points as full sentences and others as short phrases.

Examples of outlines for different types of essays are presented below: an argumentative, expository, and literary analysis essay.

Argumentative essay outline

This outline is for a short argumentative essay evaluating the internet’s impact on education. It uses short phrases to summarize each point.

Its body is split into three paragraphs, each presenting arguments about a different aspect of the internet’s effects on education.

• Importance of the internet
• Concerns about internet use
• Thesis statement: Internet use a net positive
• Data exploring this effect
• Analysis indicating it is overstated
• Students’ reading levels over time
• Why this data is questionable
• Video media
• Interactive media
• Speed and simplicity of online research
• Questions about reliability (transitioning into next topic)
• Evidence indicating its ubiquity
• Claims that it discourages engagement with academic writing
• Evidence that Wikipedia warns students not to cite it
• Argument that it introduces students to citation
• Summary of key points
• Value of digital education for students
• Need for optimism to embrace advantages of the internet

Expository essay outline

This is the outline for an expository essay describing how the invention of the printing press affected life and politics in Europe.

The paragraphs are still summarized in short phrases here, but individual points are described with full sentences.

• Claim that the printing press marks the end of the Middle Ages.
• Provide background on the low levels of literacy before the printing press.
• Present the thesis statement: The invention of the printing press increased circulation of information in Europe, paving the way for the Reformation.
• Discuss the very high levels of illiteracy in medieval Europe.
• Describe how literacy and thus knowledge and education were mainly the domain of religious and political elites.
• Indicate how this discouraged political and religious change.
• Describe the invention of the printing press in 1440 by Johannes Gutenberg.
• Show the implications of the new technology for book production.
• Describe the rapid spread of the technology and the printing of the Gutenberg Bible.
• Link to the Reformation.
• Discuss the trend for translating the Bible into vernacular languages during the years following the printing press’s invention.
• Describe Luther’s own translation of the Bible during the Reformation.
• Sketch out the large-scale effects the Reformation would have on religion and politics.
• Summarize the history described.
• Stress the significance of the printing press to the events of this period.

Literary analysis essay outline

The literary analysis essay outlined below discusses the role of theater in Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park .

The body of the essay is divided into three different themes, each of which is explored through examples from the book.

• Describe the theatricality of Austen’s works
• Outline the role theater plays in Mansfield Park
• Introduce the research question : How does Austen use theater to express the characters’ morality in Mansfield Park ?
• Discuss Austen’s depiction of the performance at the end of the first volume
• Discuss how Sir Bertram reacts to the acting scheme
• Introduce Austen’s use of stage direction–like details during dialogue
• Explore how these are deployed to show the characters’ self-absorption
• Discuss Austen’s description of Maria and Julia’s relationship as polite but affectionless
• Compare Mrs. Norris’s self-conceit as charitable despite her idleness
• Summarize the three themes: The acting scheme, stage directions, and the performance of morals
• Answer the research question
• Indicate areas for further study

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
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• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

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You will sometimes be asked to hand in an essay outline before you start writing your essay . Your supervisor wants to see that you have a clear idea of your structure so that writing will go smoothly.

Even when you do not have to hand it in, writing an essay outline is an important part of the writing process . It’s a good idea to write one (as informally as you like) to clarify your structure for yourself whenever you are working on an essay.

If you have to hand in your essay outline , you may be given specific guidelines stating whether you have to use full sentences. If you’re not sure, ask your supervisor.

When writing an essay outline for yourself, the choice is yours. Some students find it helpful to write out their ideas in full sentences, while others prefer to summarize them in short phrases.

You should try to follow your outline as you write your essay . However, if your ideas change or it becomes clear that your structure could be better, it’s okay to depart from your essay outline . Just make sure you know why you’re doing so.

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Caulfield, J. (2023, July 23). How to Write an Essay Outline | Guidelines & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved September 14, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/essay-outline/

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