How to Be a Better Writer

Do you wish you knew how to write faster and easier? After years of teaching freshman English to college students, I realized most of them had never been taught some basic ideas of writing introductions and conclusions which make essay writing so much easier, and also make your essay more interesting to read.

Especially on research papers, you need help getting all those scattered sources put together into a finished project. Here are some simple steps to take that mass of data and turn it into a polished paper that will impress your professor! First off, you need to decide on an introduction which will grab your reader's attention:

Introduction Ideas: The purpose of the introduction is to interest your reader in your topic and to provide the reader a background in the subject before introducing your thesis question.

Tip One: You introduction and your conclusion should be tied together. One of the best ways to do this is to use stories. Stories can be real (anecdotes) or made up (scenario).

Tip Two: If you choose a great story, you can use the end of the story or a revision of the story for your conclusion. If you introduce the subject with a story, you can go back to the story in the conclusion to draw your main point.

Tip Three: End the intro with a thesis statement or a thesis question (which will be answered in your paper).

Tip Four: Do not summarize the body in your thesis statement. Let the topic sentences in your body tell these points. You may have been taught to use the introduction and conclusion to summarize your paper in high school, especially if you had to write in-class essays for a statewide test. That can help you keep track during an in-class writing experience, but it is not an effective essay technique (pretty boring too!).

Here are some ways to do an introduction using a story:

1. Single story to start essay. Use a story taken from a source, a personal story or a story you make up in order to help the reader understand the subject and the thesis question, which should come at the end of the story.

2. Frame story. A frame story is a story which you start in the introduction but don’t finish. Instead of finishing the story, you interrupt it at the appropriate moment and ask your thesis question. You will then finish the story as the conclusion of your paper—so the story “frames” your paper. The conclusion of the story should conclude the answer to your question and make your point very powerfully.

3. Story/revised story frame. In this case you tell one version of the story which shows the negative point of view. In your conclusion you tell the story again with a positive conclusion which illustrates that your opinion is correct.

Do You Always Need to Introduce with a Story?

No, of course not. Stories don't fit every topic or writing style and some professors don't like them. However, you can still use the ideas above to help you link your introduction and conclusion when you do a different sort of technique. Here are other ways you can introduce your topic:

1. Use statistics or quotations to describe the topic and give the reader some information which makes them realize the importance of your thesis question.

2. For a familiar subject: you might go over the information that everyone knows, or perhaps point out the myths about that subject. You can also introduce some facts that would startle the audience.

3. For an unfamiliar subject: give the main facts or paint a picture through description of this subject so that the audience understands the outlines.

4. For a historical subject: you can give an overview of the other events occurring at the same time to orient your readers and point out how these help lead to your thesis question

5. Contrast your subject with something else or draw an analogy with another similar subject.

6. Use a Quote which gives and interesting viewpoint on your subject and then explain how it introduces your subject.

How to Write the Body of the Essay

Thesis: The topic sentences of each paragraph in the body are the answers to the thesis question. These can be reasons, effects, arguments, causes, definitions or some other category. It is important to think about what category your topic sentences fit into. For instance, if you are writing about “Why the Abolitionists were Unable to Prevent the Civil War,” your topic sentences would be the reasons they were unable to do this.

Categories or Main Topic Points:

In organizing your source material, you will have made up categories. You will take these categories and write them into full sentences. These will be the topic sentences for each paragraph in your body (they will have Roman numerals I, II, III). Sometimes, you will have several paragraphs which all fit into a larger general category. You then may have several sub-paragraphs which will illustrate that main point. Each of these sub-categories will be a full paragraph. The following outline is for 4-5 paragraphs of the essay which will all illustrate the point in the main topic sentence below:

I. One reason the abolitionists could not prevent the war was that the South resisted their efforts to persuade them to emancipate their slaves.

A. Burned abolitionist literature

B. Threatened abolitionist lecturers

C. Laws passed in South to prevent abolitionist activity

D. Laws passed by Southern-influenced congress to prevent abolitionist political organizing.

Turn Your Topic ideas into paragraphs by adding evidence: Write topic sentences which take the categories and make them into full sentences. Under each topic sentence, you will note which responses you will use to support this statement. Example:

A. Burned abolitionist literature

1. The Liberator burned in Virginia (Turner 23-25)

2. Post office burns mail (Jackson 567-69)

3. Copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin burned in 1854 (Southy 143)

Organize the main topic sentences in a logical way in order to support your thesis. This usually means that you put the opposing view first and the view you agree with last. You can also order them from least to most convincing argument, or from least to most important reason.

How to Write Your Conclusion: Four Ways

1. Your opinion about this issue will be the concluding point. Write this part of your outline by telling the main topic sentence and also giving the evidence or reasoning you will use to support this concluding point. If you used a frame story, you will conclude it here and then show how this proves your point.

2. Do an extended evaluation of the evidence in various sources (if it conflicts). If there are several reasons given in answer to the question, you can tell which reason you think is convincing.

3. A third possibility is to support your opinion in the conclusion by giving additional information which helps prove your point. Even if you did not open with a story, you might conclude with one. On a paper about the effectiveness of the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, I opened with basic facts about the paper, but concluded with three stories by people who had been influenced by the paper.

4. Use one of the story endings suggested above.