Writing an essay requires planning and organization. It is not enough to look at the question, and then start writing your answer. You need to think about the wording of the question: most questions pose a problem of some sort! Which you have to debate. The key words here are Discuss, Account for, How far, words that signal that you need to provide evidence and analyze the material. You also need to plan your answer so that you don’t simply put down some loose thoughts as a way of starting. It’s much better to spend some time generating your ideas and then organizing them into an essay 1 rather than pouring out everything you know. You need, then, to think about the shape, and even rhythm, of your answer.
This, however, is the kind of general, perhaps not always very helpful, advice that people will offer to you over and over again. So let’s be rather more specific. One of the most useful rules in writing an essay, indeed possibly the best tip of all, is the ‘rule of three’. It is a rule that can be made use of in constructing an essay as a whole, in constructing a paragraph, and even in relation to constructing a sentence. We explain and expand the ‘rule’ in the course of this passage, but, in a sense, you already know it.
Everybody knows that an essay needs a beginning, middle and an end; they know that is, that an essay basically has three parts, and that these three parts are not all the same length. The meat of the essay lies in the middle, and it is here that all the problems lie. How do you organize it so that it works? And how can knowing the shape of and your essay help you with the content?
Let’s start with some general principles. If we consider a scientific experiment, it will probably follow a standard format. The experiment starts with certain materials and a number of expectations; we then conduct the experiment; and, if the experiment has worked successfully, we arrive somewhere new. We have advanced our knowledge. For example, scientists were curious about the qualities of, and applications of, bacteria; they studied the formation of bacteria in their experiments; and the end result was, in one case, the development of antibiotics, in particular penicillin. What happens in this, or any experiment, is that the project is set up, then moved along, until it eventually arrives somewhere. Now, if we wanted to write a scientific report on an experiment, how would we go about presenting it? We might choose to write three very long paragraphs, with a paragraph for each of the three steps we have described. That would give us a sort of essay shape, but without any clear beginning or end. It might be better to have eight paragraphs: one to introduce the topic, two to describe the materials and expectations, two to describe the method of the experiment, and two for the results and consults, before a final short paragraph summing everything up. In other words, what we can do is divide the middle section, the core of the essay, into three well-defined stages. The basic shape is still a beginning, middle and end, but now there is a real structure for the main part of the essay. The advantage of a structure like this is that we have moved through the materials sequentially r keeping an order of three stages – but we have also thought in terms of a ear and persuasive essay format that a reader can follow.