Effective Essay Structures You Can Try Out

The way you structure your essay sets the stage for the rest of your work. Some writers like to condense their ideas in the introduction and give the reader a sense of how long their essay will be.

Others prefer to open with a general overview of their thoughts before diving into the meat of the work. There are many ways you can go about it. But if you’re unsure where to start, we’ve got some effective essay structure examples you can refer to. Check them out!

Essential Parts of an Essay

Before we dive into the different essay structures, let’s take a quick look at the main parts your essay needs to have.

Whatever type of essay you’re working on, it needs to involve these essential elements: Introduction, Body, and Conclusion. Each part plays a different role in making your essay more cohesive and informative.

Introduction

Topic presentation
Provide background information
Present your thesis statement

Body

Arguments and analysis
Provides research-backed evidence.
Place one central point in every paragraph
A topic sentence is created in each paragraph
Each section needs to relate to your thesis

Conclusion

Tie together all your main points
Shows the significance of your argument

Effective Essay Structure Examples

You can present information in an essay in a variety of ways. In most cases, your assignment will tell you how to structure your essay. Here are some essay structure examples that you can try out:

Chronological

The chronological structure of an essay tells the reader about a series of events in order. Choosing this essay structure is ideal if you are tackling:

A current or historical event
The book or article you read for class
Process or procedure

This essay generally describes your topic and summarises the sequence of events. Each body paragraph takes the reader through a key scene in a series, a decisive battle in history or a pivotal scene. You can explain your thesis by presenting the result of the series you discussed in your conclusion.

Compare and contrast

Compare and contrast essays often discuss multiple topics, like several novels, concepts, or essays you’ve been assigned to read. There are a few different ways to structure a compare-and-contrast essay.

Perhaps the most obvious way to do this is to spend one paragraph discussing similarities between the topics you’re covering (comparing). And then one paragraph describing their differences (contrasting). You can follow this up with a paragraph that explores whether they’re more similar.

Problems-methods-solution

As can be implied by its name, this kind of essay structure presents your position in three segments:

Statement of the problem
Different methods of resolution
The solution achieved by using these methods

This structure is helpful if you want to discuss methods for resolving a problem, like distinguishing credible sources from non-credible ones for assignments. You can also use it when you are asked to explain why specific solutions can’t solve particular problems.

Conclusion

With the help of an effective essay structure, you can adequately write your essay and get your point across to your readers. Each of these essay structures serves different purposes. There are also many variations, so you will have plenty of options for building your essay.