Billy's Painfully Brief Guide to Essay Form and Format.
The essays you will be submitting in this course are worth 60 per cent of your final grade. It is important, therefore, that you do well on them if you wish to do well in the course. One vital part of any good essay is, of course, the quality of its ideas; however, just as important is that these ideas be presented as clearly and convincingly as possible. In order to help you communicate your good ideas effectively, we will be spending some time in class on the basic mechanics of essay writing. We will discuss the general form of your essay and how to develop your argument through the use of an introduction, body, and conclusion; we will go over some of the basic aspects of citation and documentation of sources; and we will address some smaller details of presentation as well. If you follow this advice, you should be able to put together a decent essay in this course. Moreover, this brief guide should serve you well in writing papers for your other English courses.
The paragraph you have just read is this essay's introduction, which sets out the thesis statement, describes briefly how this thesis will be developed, and suggests the conclusion that the essay will reach. The thesis statement is crucial to your essay; please do not confuse a topic with a thesis. This essay's topic, for example, is essay writing. So what? What am I trying to tell you about essay writing? Well, my thesis here, if you look back to my introduction, is that this essay's directions should help you to put together a decent essay. Please note that a thesis statement is much more precise than a simple topic statement, and raises an issue which the reader will expect to see discussed in the body of the essay. The thesis statement should begin the process of directing the reader toward the argument that your essay will develop.
The body of this essay started one paragraph ago, when I started to discuss what I had mentioned in my introduction.