The Beast or How to Write Essays

When I was on holiday this summer, I went to my hometown to visit my parents. They asked me to sort out my old papers and books and get rid of the ones that I didn’t use any more. As I was doing that, I found one great picture illustrating the core of essay writing. It’s from a writing workshop I took part in about 10 years ago when I was working at school. Here it is:


This picture called “The Beast” shows the structure and the essential parts of an essay in a very simple way. Now, this cute beast has 3 parts – the head, the body, and the tail. Similarly, any essay has 3 parts – the introduction, the main body and the conclusion. 

The introduction leads the reader into the topic and has a clear thesis statement. A thesis is the main idea or opinion that the writer is going to argue. Just like this cute beast has a very visible blue horn, your introduction must have a very clear and direct statement of what you are going to talk about in your essay.

The main body, which is usually 2-4 paragraphs long, explains and proves your thesis. Just like the body of this cute beast is separated into segments, the body of an essay must be separated into paragraphs. And just like this cute beast’s body has smaller yellow horns, each of your paragraphs must have a clear topic sentence. The topic sentence, as its name implies, introduces the topic of the paragraph, which you then develop and exemplify.

The conclusion goes over the same ground as the whole essay. In your conclusion you must restate your thesis and summarize your main points.

Ok, that’s theory. Now look at how I put it into practice. This is an essay I wrote one week before I took IELTS last year and got 8.5 for Writing. It’s on one of my pet topics. 






This is an essay I wrote for IELTS, which is why it only has 2 body paragraphs. I usually write 2 body paragraphs for IELTS and 3 for TOEFL. The word count is 259 words. I try not to go more than 10-30 words over the word limit.

Now that you have “The Beast” and my example, essay writing should be easy-peasy! Go ahead and try with one of these topics:
  • IELTS. “Some people believe that information available in the internet will end the era of newspapers and magazines. To what extent do you agree or disagree? Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.” Write at least 250 words.
  • TOEFL. “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Parents are the best teachers. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.” Typically, an effective response will contain a minimum of 300 words.
Oh, by the way, I was totally wrong about 70 words for “snow”, but I didn’t know it at the time of writing this essay. The truth is in this Wikipedia article.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to tame your IELTS pie charts

Image
IELTS line graphs are easy to tame - you just go chronologically, so the description doesn't get out of hand. Information in pie charts, however, can be hard to organize because there are different directions you can go in. In this post, I want to share two IELTS pie chart answers I wrote for the same task. The task is from Cambridge IELTS 11 . The introduction and the overview are the same. As you read, pay attention to the organization and try to decide which description works better. ✼✼✼ Introduction  The pie charts compare the percentage of British students of one English university who knew foreign languages in 2000 and 2010. Main Body Version 1 The percentage of students in three groups grew. Speakers of Spanish formed the largest share in both years, rising by 5% from 30% to 35%. The increase was the same in the “Another language” and “Two other languages” groups. In 2010, the former amounted to 20%, while the latter comprised 15%, making up the second and third largest prop...
Read more

My Fulbright application or a teachable moment on essay writing

Image
I did it one day before the deadline. I submitted my Fulbright application on 30 May 2014. Now, 14 months later, I am going to the USA as a proud Fulbrighter! The program I am participating in is called Foreign Language Teaching Assistant or FLTA for short. As a participant of this program I will be teaching Russian and studying at an American university for an academic year. When my students heard the news, they asked, “What did it take to get this grant?” I replied, “Well, there were several stages. First, I had to write a lot of text. Then, I … .” And one student said, “I am curious to read what you wrote.” I suppose many are, so I am going to let you in on one of my application essays. One of the essays I wrote is called “Objectives and motivations.” What I wrote is too long to upload here (1274 words, no less!), so I am only going to share my introduction and conclusion . Oh, and I see a teachable moment here, which I just can’t help using. Introduction "Albe...
Read more

C2 Proficiency. Writing Task 2. Review (of a film I haven’t seen).

Image
I keep writing like crazy because I am preparing for the C2 Proficiency test (fka CPE). In my previous post, I shared my Writing Part 2 article . In this post, I want to share a review I wrote about a movie I haven't seen and give some insights into handling an unfortunate task. Task A film magazine has invited readers to submit reviews of films which are set in the future, but deal with themes relevant to today’s world, such as our relationship with technology or environmental problems. You decide to submit a review briefly describing such a film and explaining why its themes are relevant today. You should also consider how important it is for films set in the future to say something about contemporary society.   ( Cambridge English Proficiency 2 , Test 2, Question 4). This is a really unfortunate task for me because I watch very few movies, maybe 3 a year. But as I read it, I imagined myself sitting in the exam room not wanting to fail, so I had to come up with somethin...
Read more

Top 8 mistakes Russian learners of English actually make

Image
Due to the nature of my job, every once in a while I stumble upon an article about N most common mistakes that learners of English make. I look at them and go, “Who makes these mistakes? Russians certainly don’t.” (For example, Russians don’t confuse your and you’re .) In this post, I want to talk about 8 common mistakes Russian learners actually make. These mistakes persist on different levels, but are not usually addressed in EFL course books. The list is based on my personal teaching experience. The order is random. 1. I with I often ask students “What did you do at the weekend?” and what I hear is “ I with my friends went to the cinema. ” The right way to say something like this is “ My friends and I went to the cinema ,” or “ I went to the cinema with my friends .” In English, the word order is “subject+verb” and prepositional phrases can’t go in the middle. 2. How to say When students don’t know how to say something, they ask me or murmur to themselves “ How t...
Read more