Prior to writing an essay, it is essential to arrange your ideas to ensure proper organization of your composition. When given an assignment, it's important to assess the prompt or carefully listen to the instructions provided by the teacher as this often hints to how the essay should be structured such as whether it is a cause-and-effect essay or a compare-and-contrast essay. Through asking specific questions and analyzing the answers to these questions regarding the topic, one can narrow down the overall structure of the essay. Essentially, an essay should have three parts: an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Though there are several ways to form an introduction such as defining an important term or asking a question, primarily all introductions should introduce the topic as well as grab the readers' attention. The main purpose of the body paragraphs of an essay is to justify your thesis by providing information and valid points. All body paragraphs should be properly organized, flow smoothly, and offer well developed support of the thesis. Types of support include examples, reasons, facts, statistics, details, expert opinions, personal experiences, and visuals and should be chosen based on their relevance to the topic and their ability to best justify the thesis. Transitions can be utilized throughout the body paragraphs to help move the essay along and provide insight of time or sequence. The conclusion is very important due to the fact that it plays a significant role in what the readers take away from the writing. The conclusion should function as a way to emphasize the thesis as well as the purpose of the essay. Rather than state new points, the conclusion should summarize both essay's main idea and the tone of the essay. In addition, the conclusion should guide the reader to keep thinking about the topic of the essay and form their own thoughts and opinions.
After reading Chapter 3 Arrangement, I do feel that I have a better grasp on how to organize my essay and how to determine what structure and pattern to use. Although I already did know the basic composure of an essay in terms of an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion, this chapter offered a lot of tools and methods which I can refer back to when writing my essays. Parts in particular which caught my attention were the different ways to form an introduction as well as the list of transitions. I often have a fairly difficult time starting my essays so having several different examples to look back at will help guide me when beginning my essays. Also, I found the tip of writing your entire essay and then going back to write the introduction to be very helpful because I've never really thought about it in that way. While writing my introductions, I have a hard time finding ways to introduce the topic without putting specific details which I'm saving for my body paragraphs. Overall, this chapter showed me errors in my writing and helped provide me with reference points that I can come back to.
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