Essays

Today in english class we were assigned to go over how essays are supposed to be structured when you write them.
The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing is a very good page to gather informations from.

Essays have a basic blueprint with three main parts: a beginning, a middle, and an ending. The beginning should engage the reader's attention, state the argument, and provide an essential context so the reader has a sense of "so what?" It should do more than say something like this: This essay will look at Amazon.com. A good introduction should pose a problem: Jeff Bezos became a billionaire after founding Amazon.com in 1995, but his company has yet to make a penny of profit. How did Amazon get so big so fast? Can it sustain its remarkable growth? And will Amazon and scores of other high-profile dot-coms ever become profitable—or are they built on a flawed business model?

After the beginning, the middle is where you actually make your argument—where you grapple with the problem you've introduced. Here's where you bring in background material, tell your story in detail, and work through the argument step by step. These logical steps typically unfold in paragraphs or clusters of paragraphs (whole chapters, in a book).

Finally, the ending is where you remind your reader of what you argued, and make some larger point that sends him off with a satisfied feeling that he's learned something worth learning, that he hasn't wasted his time.

The simplicity of this structure is kind of reassuring: it means that you already know how to design good essays. But the simplicity of this standard design also poses a difficulty for you, because it means that to your reader there's nothing immediately distinctive about your essay. The frame—introduction, body, conclusion—is so general that your reader is going to need a lot more guidance to get through your particular argument.

Make sure your essay has a title. It should not be italicized or put in quotation marks (if you are giving the title of a book or essay, or using a quotation in your title, then you use the appropriate style.) The title should be more than a bare-bones identifier (like Essay #1 or Essay on Management). It should signal to the reader what your essay is about (like Deming's Total Quality Management Perspective or Jefferson on Slavery).

Just thought this was both educating and funny:
It's true, for instance, that one should be careful about using split infinitives, simply because most readers have been trained to recognize them as a mistake. But that's not the same thing as saying one should never split an infinitive, or that split infinitives violate some real law of language. Sometimes a split infinitive is just the most graceful and rhythmic way to say something. What if Captain Kirk, cowed by his English teacher, had said, "Boldly to go where no man has gone before." That sounds prissy rather than soaring, doesn't it? 


I found another good page how you are supposed to write five paragraph essay:
BookRags Article