before you write an essay it's important to understand basic essay structure now every essay has the same core structure regardless of the kind of essay you're writing now an opinion essay comparison contrast essay or narrative essay will all have slight differences but the basic structure will always be the same it's it will consist of three main parts you have your introduction body and conclusion the introduction and conclusion will each be one paragraph and the body can be any number of paragraphs um depending on the length of the essay you're writing now the introductory paragraph can be split into three parts the first part is what we call the hook and all that means is the first sentence of your essay should Engage The Reader grab their attention and introduce the subject in an interesting way students often think that the best way to do this is to ask a question at the beginning of an essay but that's overused and um I recommend that you do something else instead I would highly recommend um a strong statement or a surprising fact after you've um engaged the reader with a good opening sentence you want to give some background information now that just means any information That's essential for the reader to have in order to understand your main idea or to understand the topic so this could be context like where and when it could be a brief history of the topic um or it could be an explanation of why uh the topic is controversial to begin with OR why it's important okay now once you've given the background information it's time to give your thesis which is the single most important sentence of your entire essay it is always the last sentence of the introductory paragraph and it is the main idea of your entire essay after you've um presented your thesis you can then move on and write your body now the body paragraph or paragraphs is meant to support the thesis with development um such as argument details examples description narration depending on the kind of essay you're writing now a longer essay may include expert opinion quotations um secondary sources that kind of thing but obviously if you're writing an essay for a test or you're writing a short two 250 to 300w essay in class you probably won't need to include secondary sources after you've written a strong body it's time to write your concluding paragraph in the conclusion you should summarize your main points and restate the thesis it's important to think of the reader as a person with a uh a very short memory so at the end of your essay you want to remind them uh what is your main idea and then at the end you also want to end your uh Essay with as strong a statement as you started so you want to make sure that the final comment or statement of your in of your concluding paragraph um is emphatic or interesting in some way and that's the basic structure of an essay um if you want more practice with essay structure follow the link at the end of this video