Learning Unit 7 – Essay Structure
Reading Material
Having written an outline, you should have some idea of the overall structure your essay will
take. In broad terms, an essay consists of an introduction, a main body, and a conclusion.
Introduction
The introduction establishes the context of your essay and indicates the direction your
argument will take. Depending on the essay question, it may include historical or
biographical background information, or definitions of a specific concept. However, you
should avoid including material that is too general and/or irrelevant to the topic under
discussion. Since you are writing in response to a specific essay question, your introduction
should also provide your interpretation of this question. Thus, you may need to identify the
main problems or point out the importance of concepts implied within the question.
This is particularly important if the essay question consists of a quotation, or if the topic is
very general. You need to indicate to the reader what themes and issues will be covered in
your essay. Ideally, your introduction will serve as a guide to the overall structure of your
argument, and show how the various ideas are related. In addition, you should point towards
the conclusion of your essay. Note that, since your essay structure is likely to change with
each subsequent draft of your essay, it is quite common to write the introduction after you
have written the main body of the essay.
In short, you can look at the introduction as a brief, provisional answer to the essay question,
for which the main body of your essay provides the supporting evidence.
Main Body
It is in the main body of your where that the structure you have indicated in your introduction
comes to the fore. Using paragraphs, you need to link up the various ideas that will lead to
the proposed conclusion. In essence, each paragraph should contain one idea that is central
to the question or topic under discussion. A paragraph should thus never appear isolated,
but always function in relation to the whole argument. It also follows that paragraphs should
be linked logically. Linking phrases are essential in creating coherence, and guide the reader
through your argument.
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Open the below folder entitled ‘Linking Phrases’ for a list of linking phrases and a sample
paragraph [not included in this resource].
Depending on the topic or type of question, your material can be structured according to
various principles. You may choose to organize your ideas and, by extension, paragraphs
thematically, chronologically, or according to any other principle that applies to the topic
under scrutiny. One thing you should avoid, however, is structuring your paragraphs too
closely around the structure of the primary text. If you do this, you risk summarizing the plot
rather than interpreting a text. This is of course less of a danger in linguistics essays.
Whereas your introduction provided a provisional interpretation of the essay question, it is in
the main body where you support this interpretation with textual evidence from both primary
and secondary sources. Each paragraph should consist of a main idea that you describe and
evaluate on the basis of this evidence.
Conclusion
Although conclusions, like introductions, vary depending on the topic under consideration,
there are a few rules that you should keep in mind. A good conclusion should draw all the
parts of your essay together and prove to the reader that you have stuck to the focus
outlined in your introduction. It also has to follow logically from what you have been
discussing throughout your essay. This means that you should never introduce new material
in your conclusion. On the other hand, merely summing up is also not enough. The reader
has to feel that your discussion of a given topic has led to some form of concluding
statement. If your essay is structured well, then the conclusion follows naturally from the last
paragraph you’ve written. The conclusion should be your final statement. This means that
you shouldn’t end your essay with a long quotation.
Learning Outcomes
Having read the material and completed the assignments you should have:
understood the basic structure of an essay
learned how to construct an introduction
learned how to use paragraphs in structuring the main body of your essay
learned how to structure a conclusion
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Essay Structure - Assignment 12 (for both Literature AND
Language and/or Linguistics Students)
Read the sample essay question and then read through the following introduction. List five
features that identify this paragraph as an introduction, indicating how the introduction
relates to the essay question.
Question
‘Postcolonial writers have put literary ‘classics’ to new uses for which they were scarcely
originally intended’. To what extent do you consider this kind of intertextuality to be a useful
strategy in postcolonial fiction?
Introduction
Post-colonial cultures are by definition hybrids of the colonising and colonised cultures. This
hybridity makes intertextuality in post-colonial literature inevitable. It seems impossible to
write in and about the after without referring to the before. One form of such intertextuality is
counter-discourse. Helen Tiffin in ‘Post-colonial Literatures and Counter-discourse’ writes
that ‘decolonisation is process not arrival; it evokes an ongoing dialectic between hegemonic
centrist systems and peripheral subversion of them’ (97). One post-colonial writer who is
particularly aware of, and extensively uses subversive counter-discourse in his work, is J.M.
Coetzee. In this essay, rather than concentrating on Coetzee’s ‘canonical counter-discourse’
(97) to Daniel DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders in Foe, I will discuss how
Coetzee, in much of his work, writes in dialogue with Kafka in order to create a very subtle
form of anti-colonial discourse.
Essay Structure - Assignment 13 (for both Literature AND
Language and/or Linguistics Students)
Being able to think critically about your work is an important aspect of writing well. Copy &
paste the conclusion to one of your essays submitted for another module into a blank Word
document. Write a 300 word paragraph in which you identify the structure of your conclusion
and justify its content in relation to the main argument of your essay.
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English Subject Centre Departmental Projects
This report and the work it presents were funded by the English Subject Centre under a
scheme which funds projects run by departments in Higher Education institutions (HEIs) in
the UK. Some projects are run in collaboration between departments in different HEIs.
Projects run under the scheme are concerned with developments in the teaching and
learning of English Language, Literature and Creative Writing. They may involve the
production of teaching materials, the piloting and evaluation of new methods or materials or
the production of research into teaching and learning. Project outcomes are expected to be
of benefit to the subject community as well as having a positive influence on teaching and
learning in the host department(s). For this reason, project results are disseminated widely
in print, electronic form and via events, or a combination of these.
Details of ongoing projects can be found on the English Subject Centre website at
www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/deptprojects/index.htm . If you would like to enquire about
support for a project, please contact the English Subject Centre:
The English Subject Centre
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham, Surrey TW20 OEX
T. 01784 443221
esc@rhul.ac.uk
www.english.heacademy.ac.uk
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Non-Commercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the
resulting work only under a licence identical to this one.
For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this
work.
Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright
holder.
Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.
Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.
This is a human-readable summary of the Legal Code (the full license).
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