The 5 Paragraph Essay
7/8 Grade – see pages 32-34, 64-66, 98-100 or 104-106,178-181 or 182-184,
218-219 or 220-222 in your English Book for further helps.
Title - The Title of an essay should be about 5 words. You can be creative, but be honest. Your title should summarize the main idea of the essay in the title.
Introductory Paragraph - This paragraph will answer the question of the essay theme or alert readers to your main idea and what you want to say about the main idea.
The other purpose of the introductory paragraph is to capture the attention of the reader. You can do this by attacking a comment, create suspense with a story that will follow the whole essay, present a problem to be solved, use of humor, the use of a startling statement, ask a question, add a personal note, give the reader a reason to read.
Body - These 3 or more paragraphs (usually not more than 5) will explore the points or events you stated in the Introductory paragraph. These points or events could be the answer to the theme you are writing about. In these paragraphs, you need to defend your points one by one or elaborate on the events you are describing. A new paragraph should be devoted to each main point or event you stated in the introductory paragraph. Understand you may use more than one paragraph on a particular point to defend, explain or describe your point or event to the reader.
How do I defend my ideas or points or elaborate on a an event. Here are some suggestions:
You should defend your point through examples (past or present), statistics, or a short story episode. We can also use examples from literature or the media and apply it to your point. The Bible is a good source for examples. With an event or story, always show rather than tell. Remember in Tom Sawyer when Aunt Polly leaves the field triumphant that is showing us what happened. Use descriptive language.
The Summary paragraph or Conclusion summarizes your main idea and or points, but in a different way than was stated in the Introductory paragraph. A great essay will tie the whole essay together here in a creative way. Be sure to convey your feelings here and encourage your reader to say yes yes to writing or no no to your writing.
Basic types of essay
Argument and Persuasion - Here you try to convince the reader to see your opinion or to convince the reader to act on something. You use good convincing facts, expert opinion, or examples from the past or present to get people to say they agree with you.
Observe, Judge, or Review - Here we really don't care if any one agrees with us. We state our opinions and try to defend the opinion, but our main point is to state an observation, to judge a situation, or to review something we saw (I.E.: a movie). We do tell why we believe, but we don't need to back it up with solid facts, but it does help.
Critical - Here we are free to talk around a subject. This type of essay really explores an idea, we do not state an absolute to defend, but we do get people to think by raising questions and recalling history.