Writing: B2+

2

Aims

  plan your essay structure

  guide your reader through structure, signposting and cohesion

  understand paragraph structure and how to connect paragraphs

Quiz

Self-evaluation

For each statement below, circle the word which is true for you.

Making your essay more readable

Your assessor is mainly concerned with the content of your essay. This partly depends on your research skills but also on your ability to get your points across.

You can make your essay easy to read in a number of ways, e.g. by using a clear structure and by guiding the reader through the text.

Essay structure

Glossary

outline (outlines) N-VAR An outline is a general explanation or description of something.

principle (principles) N-COUNT The principles of a particular theory or philosophy are its basic rules or laws.

When you wrote shorter essays, you learnt that the basic structure is: introduction / main body / conclusion, and that each separate idea needs a new paragraph. When you are writing a longer essay, the main principles are the same, but there are some differences.

The same three-part structure applies to any essay. In a longer essay, the introduction and conclusion will be more developed, but the biggest change will be in the main body, where there will be much more space to develop ideas. Although each new idea will still require a new paragraph, these separate ideas are likely to need more than one paragraph each to be fully developed. Before you do your research, you won’t know how many paragraphs you will be writing, but you are able to do an outline of the structure of the whole essay from the start.

The method we used in Chapter 1 can be used here to help with structure too. Look back at the example essay question about parallel trade and the three-step analysis of this question in the section Analysing key words and structure of essay titles.

This breakdown will lead to your outline, which can function as a plan for your writing as well as a starting point for your research.

Here, it would look like this:

Exercise 1

Write an outline for the essay title below, from Chapter 1 Exercise 3. Before you start the outline, look at the Answer key for Chapter 1 for the three-step analysis of the essay title.

What are the most important key urban planning theories of the post-war period? Outline in summary their key characteristics. With reference to one of these theories, explain how they help us understand the nature of planning practice.

The last thing you want to do is confuse your reader, so it is important to structure your work in the order that they would expect to find it.

The introduction

In an introduction you would normally:

1 give a description or explanation of the situation or problem (more general)

2 say why this situation or problem (or a more specific aspect of it) is important

3 say what your aim is, what your position on the situation or problem is, and what the organization of your essay will be.

The main function of the introduction is to show your reader you have understood the question and to indicate that you will be discussing it fully. You do not have to go into detail yet.

It is difficult to say how long an introduction should be, but as you won’t be starting to discuss anything in any detail yet, it won’t be long. It is likely to be less than 10 per cent of the word count.

Until you have finished your research, you might not be sure exactly what the structure of your essay will be, so it is a good idea to write your introduction last.

Exercise 2

Look at these two introductions of 1,000-word essays. Look at the three things you would normally include in an introduction above and then think about how you would improve the introductions.

‘It would be better not to let pupils use calculators at all in their maths lessons.’ Discuss.

Introduction A

It may be a good idea not to let students use calculators in maths classes, but there are also reasons why they can be helpful. This essay will first address the role calculators play by considering their benefits, as well as possible drawbacks. Then I shall present a simple argument for the use of calculators by examining the fundamental purpose of an educational system before concluding that we should not reject the use of calculators in a learning environment.

Introduction B

Calculators are useful pieces of equipment and are very popular in mathematical learning. However, some of their functions have raised concerns with maths teachers about the harmful effects on the students’ ability to improve their learning. This is why the idea of forbidding the use of calculators is being discussed. I think this opinion is too extreme and limited.

The conclusion

Your conclusion will normally consist of:

1 a summary of the main ideas (related to the importance to the topic)

2 a summary of your evidence (with your evaluation of it)

3 your overall conclusion / your answer to the question.

The conclusion will be more specific than the introduction, as you will already have mentioned the ideas you are commenting on. Do not add any new evidence or ideas: if you have more to say, then this should be done in the body of the text. Like your introduction, your conclusion is likely to contain no more than 10 per cent of the word count.

Exercise 3

Look at the ending of this 1,500-word essay and identify the three different parts of the conclusion. The first part has been identified for you.

In conclusion, (1) new technologies have provided a remarkable breakthrough which has allowed society itself to become incredibly advanced. They have now become so highly developed that they have provoked ethical questions about their morality. One of the main reasons for this is that they can be controlling, but as we have seen, they are liberating at the same time, with cyborg (mechanical body parts) technology even being able to save people’s lives. Another area of thought is related to the area of feminism: despite their large contribution to the fields of science and technology, women still have to struggle with inequality in everyday and scientific life. While new technologies have undoubtedly influenced postmodern thinking, the amount of research activity in the field in recent years suggests that the influence may also work the other way round.

The main body

The main body of the text consists of a number of paragraphs, blocks of text that develop ideas. We will look at them in more detail below in The structure of paragraphs.

For more information on the language used in introductions, conclusions and the main body, see Chapter 3.

Guiding your reader

The longer your piece of writing is, the more important it is that you guide your reader through it. You can do this by telling them about the structure (signposting), by using language that shows that the different aspects of your writing relate to each other (cohesion) and by distinguishing clearly between paragraphs (paragraphing).

Let’s have a look at how a student did this in a short piece of writing. (He has made several mistakes, which are discussed below.)

Glossary

cohesion N-UNCOUNT If you write with cohesion, you use language that shows that the different aspects of your writing relate to each other, fit together well, and form a united whole.

distinguish (distinguishes, distinguishing, distinguished) VERB If you distinguish one thing from another or distinguish between two things, you show, see, or understand how they are different.

guild (guilds) N-COUNT A guild is an organization of people who do the same job or activity.

This essay will look at how young people can be encouraged to vote in two main ways.

Firstly, the government should devise campaigns to inform them and increase their awareness of the importance of voting.

To start with, these campaigns should be as informal as possible and use electronic media such as blogs, websites or any other means that are accessible to that generation. Later on, the medium could also include newspapers and posters.

In addition, the contents of the campaigns should include the fact that voting is the right of every citizen, and state the benefits of voting such as the ability to choose the right representative for a particular area. It is also important to inform the young citizens that it is easy for them to vote.

Finally, after all the campaigns are done through the many information channels, the government may also promote voting by educating people in colleges, student guilds and other student organizations.

In conclusion, by taking these approaches, hopefully more young people will vote.

The student has indicated in the first sentence that there are two approaches he will discuss (but he could have made it clearer that these are media campaigns and educational programmes). He uses linking words to indicate the structure of his discussion: ‘Firstly’ and ‘Finally’ introduce the two areas he will discuss. He also uses other linking words.

Many students have been taught that linking words are very important, but some use these types of words too often. This is the case in this example. ‘In addition’ could be crossed out without it affecting the meaning: ‘the contents of the campaigns’ gives more information about a topic that was already raised, which is a natural thing to do, so the reader does not need to be told there is a link. It is also a bad choice of linker: it does not introduce an additional idea, but a more specific one. Here the linking words are all used at the beginning of a paragraph, making the text sound very repetitive (if you read it out loud, you will notice the pattern repeating). To sum up, linking words can be helpful to guide the reader, but you should only use them if they are necessary; make sure you use an appropriate one, and vary their place in the sentence.