Ask a secondary student what an essay is, and you will probably get an answer like: ‘It has an introduction, three body paragraphs and a conclusion. The body paragraphs have a topic sentence, explanation, evidence and linking sentence (TEEL).’
That’s correct – if you were asking what an essay is made from. It’s as if you asked someone what an omelette is, and he replied, ‘eggs, milk and a pinch of salt’.
But does the student understand why essays are supposed to be structured that way? How that structure helps the essay to achieve its purpose? And what the purpose of an essay is?
We often encounter gaps in our students’ understanding of these fundamental questions. Here are a few signs that you (or your child, if you are a parent reading this) might have a similar understanding gap:
- You struggle to write an essay without the help of a detailed scaffold
- You often receive feedback that your essays are not answering the question or that they are going off track partway through
- You aren’t sure what counts as ‘evidence’ in your body paragraphs
- You have struggled to make the transition from secondary school essay writing to university essay writing (If this sounds like you, hold out for our future blog post on…essay writing at university!)
A good essay starts with a solid plan and structure — which is why scaffolds and templates are so helpful! But scaffolds are like training wheels; eventually the training wheels have to go and the cyclist has to provide the balancing skill. It’s at this point in their writing education that many students start to struggle. It is being left up to them to provide their own structure, and while they probably have a formula ingrained (introduction, body paragraphs, conclusion, etc.), do they know the hows, whats and whys of using it? Not necessarily.
Sometimes the easiest way to understand a thing is by analogy with something more familiar. Here is one of our favourite analogies for explaining the structure of essays:
An essay is like a spider’s web
A well-formed web is an architectural wonder! It can traverse amazing spaces, and it has a secure spot in the middle where the spider hangs out ready to achieve its goal: catching dinner. 
The middle of the web corresponds to the purpose of your essay: it is the reason you are writing — that one main idea you are trying to say. This is often called the contention or the thesis.
But the contention/thesis can’t just float in the middle of the air. That’s called asserting your point without backing it up. So, what supports your main point? Those are the key structural strands of web that extend out from the centre to the secure places that hold the web up.
In your essay, the structural strands are your key points — the reasons why your contention/thesis stands strong. Imagine someone asked you, ‘how do you know your main idea is true?’ You could answer, ‘because of key point 1, key point 2, and key point 3’. This tells you what you are going to say in each of your three body paragraphs (and what goes in your topic sentences).
It’s possible to imagine a web that just had these strands criss-crossing through the centre. But it would be pretty bare and it wouldn’t be very strong. The web needs more support — it needs the strands that go round the others and hold them all together.
Those strands are what back up your key points, and they provide the substance for the rest of your body paragraphs. This is where the ‘explanation’ and ‘evidence’ comes into your writing. Once again, they help answer the question, ‘how do you know your key point is true?’ And because they support your key points, they ultimately also connect to and support your main idea.
Just as your main idea and key points can’t just hang alone in midair, so too your evidence and explanation can’t just sit there on their own. If your evidence isn’t touching a key point (i.e. it isn’t relevant to
it) it’s not actually going to contribute to the web as a whole. So even if it might feel like you are adding to your writing by throwing extra things in—because you are adding more ideas—you actually aren’t adding anything to your essay. Instead, there’s a danger your web might end up looking something like this:
It’s all in the planning
Learning to structure an essay well goes a long way towards writing an essay well. Which is why we often encourage students who struggle with essay writing (or who just need to get more practice in!) to just practise planning out the argument — and to do this as much, or even more often,than they practise writing full paragraphs or full essays.
It’s faster, meaning they can do more of them, and it’s easy to then get direct feedback from teachers on their ideas and how they are fitting together. It might be just what they need to lose the training wheels and start cycling freely.
Learning to how refine their own writing skills is one of the many things we assist our students with week in and week out — please get in touch if you would like to know more.
