Such a method seems to be readily applicable to a scientific experiment, where there is usually a set order for doing things, but is it going to have any relevance for an essay on, say, the life of Florence Nightingale? We think it is again a good idea to think in terms of ‘a rule of three’. The temptation in writing about someone’s life in a history essay might be just to produce an endless list on the lines of ‘she did this, then she did this, and then she did this’. But if we divide the core of the essay into three stages we start to impose a shape on the raw material; we begin to have an idea of the argument, of setting the issue up, pushing the issue along, and then seeing where we arrive. The essay immediately begins to acquire some shape and direction, and this is true even before we have considered what we are going to include in each section of the essay. In an essay on Florence Nightingale, we could follow the eight-paragraph format we described above. An introductory paragraph might give a very brief outline of her life. The first stage of the essay (paragraphs 2 and 3) could describe the context in which she grew up fend what was expected of a woman of her class; the middle stage of the essay (paragraphs 4 and 5) could describe her well-known achievements as a nurse and administrator of nursing in the Crimean War; and then the last section of the essay (paragraphs 6 and 7) could consider the consequences for Nightingale herself, for the profession of nursing, and more generally for women as people with an active contribution to make in society. It might choose to explain this through an examination of Nightingale’s career in the years following the Crimean War. A final paragraph, of perhaps no more than ten lines, would then provide you with an opportunity to sum up the significance of the material, themes and issues you have presented.
The same structure – set the issue up, move it along, see where you arrive I will work for virtually any essay set on any subject at university. The attraction of such a structure is that it avoids the most frequent shortcomings in students’ essay writing. Far too often students produce shapeless essays, in which they ramble through or around the alleged subject of their essays with very little idea where they are going. What such essays lack is a disciplined Structure and sense of direction. It is possible to devise other essay formats and schemes, but they tend to be too specific to one subject or one issue. For example, language students might be asked to report on the five maily aspects of language in a passage rather than to develop an essay on it; in creative writing, you might be asked to come up with as many ideas as possible and then to review and assess these. These are different kinds on writing exercise with their own logic, and can be adopted for formal, academic work. The great advantage of the ‘rule of three’ essay method, however is that it works on the lines of the general logic of all argument – that you introduce your propositions, develop them, and draw conclusions. Or we could put that even more simply and say that the great advantage of a ‘rule of three’ essay method is that it ensures that an essay has a beginning, a middle and an end both in the literal sense and in terms of a central argument built in three stages. It guards, therefore, against the directionless essay, or the essay that loses its sense of direction.
In a standard undergraduate essay at university (an essay that is generally somewhere between 1500 and 2000 words), it is, we believe, a good idea, at least to begin with and until you have found your writing feet, to think in terms of producing eight paragraphs. Start with a short opening paragraph and finish with a short closing paragraph, perhaps of no more than ten lines each. Avoid spending all your time on the introduction and then unnecessarily repeating points in the conclusion. It is usually a danger sign in an essay if the opening paragraph is too long, for what it means is that you have overloaded the opening of your essay with more material than you need or can control at that stage. An essay is always written for an audience, and a long opening paragraph will lose and confuse your reader (and probably lose and confuse you as the person writing the essay). The closing paragraph should be equally short and to the point, for its only function is to draw the threads together of what you have established in your essay.
In between the opening and closing paragraphs, we recommend that you aim for six paragraphs that are fairly substantial and also fairly equal in length: about one-half to two-thirds of a page. Paragraphs that are much longer than this will tend to lose the thread of what you are trying to say. Short paragraphs – paragraphs, in particular, of no more than four or five lines – should be a real warning signal to you that something is going wrong in the writing of an essay, for short paragraphs are making bitty little observations that float on their own rather than contributing to the steady overall step-by-step development of the essay.
It might be objected that this advice sells essay-writing short; that in real life people write very short paragraphs and very long paragraphs; that length has nothing to do with an essay and that what matters is ideas. Shouldn’t an essay be driven by its content, not by its form? If you have nine ideas, how can you fit them into this format? Isn’t the best way to make a list of points, get them into a skeleton order, and write your topic sentence for each paragraph and then summaries the essay in the opening paragraph? Certainly this is a valid approach, and we know a lot of students prefer to tackle essay-writing in this way. But we also know a huge number of students who cannot get any kind of argument going in their essay or see how to make it work. If that is your position, then you have nothing to lose by adopting the eight-paragraph format. Indeed, you have everything to gain.