Features of an essay / page 1
Writing a Successful Essay
The Aim of an Essay: Teach While Writing.
Whereas a class discussion provides an opportunity to try out ideas and to share provisional insights
about a work of literature, an essay requires you to go deeper, to clarify, to organize, and to present
more refined and precise ideas in the most effective way. Think of your essay not as a mechanical
exercise in which you just repeat what the class has already hashed out, but rather as a chance to do
more independent thinking, to make some discoveries, and to further the understanding of others.
Ideally, your essay is a teaching document from which you, your instructor, and your classmates can
learn something new. An essay is also an extended argument: it offers a clear central claim,
preferably a thesis statement offered in the first paragraph, and it seeks not so much to “prove” that
claim as to convince the reader that it is plausible. Your insights will not be the same as everyone
else’s, so you want to make your vision as clear and eloquent as possible. Your reader shouldn’t have
to search for a thesis, stumble over awkward syntax, or wonder “what he/she really means.”
Becoming more objective about your prose style will improve it.
The Process: Write, Revise, Refine—Then Repeat the Process.
Writing well requires revision; do not expect to write a strong essay in a few hours. Begin writing at
least a few days before the due date. Make sure that you have a clear understanding of the
assignment and know precisely what it is asking of you. Then do some “brainstorming” on paper—
writing responses to the question asked and the issues raised. Once you have a general idea of your
focus, and if possible of your argument, you should be able to write the exposition (body) of your
paper, using quoted material to support your main ideas. It is a good idea to write the introduction
and conclusion after you’ve written the exposition, AND after a few hours or a few days away from
the draft, because this allows you to get a clearer perspective on your own work. Finally, in order to
catch mistakes in grammar and editorial mechanics (spelling, capitalization, etc.), make sure that you
read the finished version from a hard copy; reading aloud is most helpful.
The Thesis: The Strong Central Claim on Which the Essay is Built.
The thesis makes a claim about something with which your reader could disagree; otherwise, there is
no point in making a claim at all. A thesis offers a reason why readers must take your argument into
account when reading the literary text you’re discussing, and it helps keep both your argument and
your reader’s attention from wandering. Place the thesis in the first paragraph of your essay as if it
were a road sign pointing forward and telling the reader, “We are going to take a journey in this
direction.”
This is NOT a thesis: “Hamlet is a play about a young man in conflict.”
This IS a thesis: “Hamlet's anxiety derives not from his concern about the justness of revenge, but
from his inability to establish Claudius’ guilt for his father’s death. The play’s central conflict has less
to do with Hamlet’s status as a moral agent than with the relationship between morality and
certainty. The model of tragedy that emerges thus redefines the experience of the tragic protagonist
as one defined primarily by problems of knowledge.”
Features of an essay / page 2
The thesis is arguably the most crucial feature of the essay, so it deserves careful consideration. Do
not expect that your final thesis will be the one you wrote down early in the planning stage; the best
theses are discovered in the process of reading and re-reading the text and they are refined in the
process of writing.
Exposition: Use Paragraphing, Not Plot Summary, to Advance the Thesis.
The exposition is the body of the essay, in which the author makes a series of related supplementary
points that demonstrate the plausibility of his/her main claim. The thesis itself should serve as the
organizational principle for the individual moments on which the exposition concentrates. In other
words, it is the duty of the exposition to discuss the aspects of the primary texts that are most
relevant to the essay’s central argument, and not to recapitulate the plot. The most effective way to
make such a demonstration is to structure the exposition around close readings of passages from the
primary text or texts, passages that are quoted and cited appropriately. The purpose of using
quotations this way is to make your inferences as transparent as possible to your audience. Since an
analytical essay is fundamentally a persuasive piece, the best way to persuade your readers of the
plausibility of your claim is to show them precisely how you’ve derived that claim. When
incorporating quotations, then, be sure to explain specifically why the passages you’ve chosen
support your central argument. The close readings in your exposition should make claims about
points of contention. It is not necessary to offer a reading of a quoted passage in defense of a point
of fact.
Good paragraphing is essential to effective exposition. Each paragraph is another logical stage of the
argument, a unit of thought focused on one main idea that is expressed in a topic statement at the
beginning of the paragraph. Each paragraph builds on the previous one and moves the argument to a
climax. Because your audience is the class, including your instructor, you do not need to re-tell the
plot.
This is NOT a topic statement, because it begins to retell the plot: “In the first scene of Hamlet one
guard asks another, ‘Who’s there?’” This IS a topic statement, because it states an idea that advances
the thesis: “The problem of Claudius’s guilt emerges in the first scene.”
The Conclusion: Last Impressions Count!
It is difficult to make general rules about what a concluding paragraph should do, because the best
conclusion will grow out of the discussion preceding it and satisfyingly round that discussion off. The
conclusion’s critical attitude toward the author or the text you’re writing about should be more
reflective than that of the exposition. A good way to achieve that is to focus on the “vision,” “ethos,”
“aesthetic,” or “message” of the author or text.
It is also important to note some common mistakes that authors make in writing conclusions.
Perhaps the two most common are including an outline-style recapitulation of the exposition and
saving the paper’s main claim for the last paragraph.