The Structure of the Essay

Everything is structured; everything has form and content. All messages are structured, and writing is a special kind of message. Writing, therefore, has a special structure.

            Every message has a beginning, middle, and an end. If you wave to someone, that’s a message. And it begins, lasts for a while, and ends. The same thing if, for instance, you yell, “Fire!” When we write, everything we write has this same very basic structure: it begins, it continues, it end. But this basic structure doesn’t tell us much about writing as distinct from other types of messages. So, what makes the structure of writing different?

            First of all, we have to make it clear what kind of written message we are referring to. While all messages have a beginning, a middle, and an end, not all written messages have the kind of structure that we need to learn and make use of in order to communicate effectively. When we write a note to ourselves, we do not worry much about the structure of the message. For instance, we do not write to ourselves a message like this: “Joe. Please remember to pick up the milk on your way home from work. Joe.” I just write the note, perhaps something like this: “pick up milk”. This shorthand is all I need for the message to be clear to me since I wrote the message. This is obvious, but what is not so obvious is why we need a specific structure for public audiences, when we want to communicate to someone else.

            Every type of public written message has a structure that is appropriate (it has been proven to work) for that type of message.  For essay writing, the kind of writing that is most common in an academic setting, this structure has only one form, though the form is very flexible and allows for much creativity. This form has been proven to work. It has developed during the past two hundred or more years of mass literacy. [Writing in the form that we recognize it has been around for about 8000 years, but mass literacy developed after the invention of the movable type printing press, the Gutenberg press, in the late fifteenth century. But mass literacy is a much more recent phenomenon.]

            A written public message such as the essay has a structure that, like all messages, has a beginning, middle, and end; however, these parts have additional qualities. The beginning of an essay is the Introduction. The middle of the essay is the Body. The end of the essay is the Conclusion. And each of these three parts has very specific functions.

            The Introduction has two functions: it must contain a technique that gets the reader interested in the message, and it must inform the reader about what the message is. After it does that, the Introduction is over. Then comes the middle part, the Body.

            The Body of the essay has only one function: it present the Details of what the message is all about. After it does that, it is over.

            The Conclusion of the essay has two functions. The most important one is to unify the message, and the easiest way to do that is to use repetition, repeating something from the introduction. The final, and most difficult, function of the Conclusion is to leave an image that is appropriate to the message and one that will last long in the readers’ mind.

            If a writer pays close attention to this structure, then the message will be received by readers the way the writer wants it to be received. It is guaranteed to work. It has proven itself to work ever since essays have been written. And since it works, why not use this structure? A better questions is, “If it works, why would you write any other way?”

            To succeed as an essay writer, you need to be familiar with this structure, know the functions of each part of the structure, and then make sure that you adapt what you wish to write to this structure that has proven itself to work.

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Return to the English 102 Syllabus