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Structure of an Essay

Structure of an Essay

The essay, in many ways, forms the foundation of college writing. Understanding its individual parts and how they work together is critical to student success. For example, creating interesting titles may come easily to you, but effective thesis statements may still elude your grasp. In the Writing Center we are happy to work with you at any stage of the writing process and on any part of your essay. However, when visiting the Writing Center is not possible, we want to provide other ways to support your writing process. After researching many other writing center sites, we have selected what we think are the most informative and thorough discussions about essays.

Overall, these are the best and easiest to navigate websites we have found to help students with the writing process:

LEO: Literacy Education Online (St. Cloud State University)
http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/

Writer’s Web (University of Richmond)
http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb.html

The Writing Center (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill)
http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/index.html

The Writing Center (University of Wisconsin Madison)
http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/

The following websites have outstanding explanations of specific parts of the essay structure:

Titles

Center for Writing (University of Minnesota)
http://writing.umn.edu/docs/sws/quicktips/titles.pdf

Introductions

Princeton Writing Center (Princeton University)-this site also discusses the connection between the Introduction and Conclusion of a paper
http://web.princeton.edu/sites/writing/Writing_Center/WCWritingResources.htm

MIT Online Writing and Communication Center (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
http://www.grinnell.edu/academic/writinglab/writers/process/includes/MIT_Introduction_Strategies.pdf

Thesis Statements

LEO: Literacy Education Online (St. Cloud State University)
http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/thesistatement.html

Dartmouth Writing Program (Dartmouth College)
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/student/ac_paper/develop.shtml

Paragraph Development

The Writing Center (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill)
http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/paragraphs.html

OWL at Purdue (Purdue University)
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/724/02/

Transitions

The Writing Center (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill)
http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/transitions.html

The Writing Center (Harvard University)
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wricntr/documents/Transitions.html

Conclusions

BYU Writing Center (Brigham Young University)
http://english.byu.edu/writingcenter/handouts/academicessays/conclusions.htm

Revising, Editing, and Proofreading
As always, with any form of writing, your “best friend” is the process of revising, editing, and proofreading:

The Writing Center (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill)
http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/revision.html
http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/proofread.html

“Some of the world’s future writers may come from this cubbyhole in the Learning Center!” – Anonymous