A Basic Guide to How to Write a School Essay

Some of you may remember the 90s T.V. show "Saved by the Bell". In this T.V. show, the main character, Zach Morris was telling his friends how easy it was to write a paper for school. He said "say what you're going to say. Say it. Then say what you said." In truth, he was right. A properly organized essay as a teacher would want it in school has three basic parts: an introduction, a main body and a conclusion. In the introduction you explain what you are going to write about. In the main body you go into greater detail about the subject and in the conclusion you summarize what you said and perhaps add additional suggestions and opinions.

To achieve this goal of a properly organized essay, you must first have a very clear idea about where you are going with your work. You need a map to guide you on your journey. You need to know what you are specifically writing about. That sounds simple enough, however, many essays are written in which the person writing it really does not know what they want to say about the subject. They just start writing and then get lost in what they are writing about. Therefore, you must first very clearly decide what the subject is going to be.

Now that you know what you want to write about, take another moment. Decide what the sub-themes are that are related to the main topic. Try to think of 3-4 ideas related to the main topic in about 30 seconds. Write them down quickly. They don't need to be in any particular order, just write them down for now. After you have written them down, you will want to decide in what order you want to address them. Arrange these sub-themes in that order. Each one of these sub-themes will represent a paragraph of your essay. Following this think of approximately 3 other issues related to each sub-theme. List them under each sub-theme. The sub-theme and its related issues will each constitute one paragraph of your essay. Each related issue will make up one to two sentences of each paragraph.

You should at this point now have the order and the main themes related to your general topic. Now you can begin writing your essay. Your introduction will be one paragraph. First, you will want to write a topic sentence for the introduction. This topic sentence is very important. It introduces the reader to the rest of what your essay will be about. Therefore, your topic sentence must clearly state what you are writing about in order to let the reader know where you are going and not to confuse them. You will then introduce to your reader the other main themes of the essay by simply stating which each of them is in your introductory paragraph. Each subsequent paragraph should also have a clear topic sentence dealing with the primary contents of that paragraph.

You will also need a clear topic sentence for the conclusion that simply re-states the main issue from the other end, highlighting the major issues you have just written about. You may want to express an opinion or simply state how, based on the evidence you have presented, that the topic you have addressed is an important one.

The most important thing of all is to have a clear idea of what your topic is about and to decide how you want to address it before actually beginning to write. This will save you a lot of time and will help keep you from getting confused yourself about your topic and what you plan to say.