Relax, It’s Just a Formal Essay

The formal essay – bane of college students everywhere, the formal essay can bring even the strongest of writers to their knees. A backbone of most college and high school writing courses, the formal essay is the true test of one’s writing ability.

As its name so rightly states, the structure of a formal essay is quite set: there is an introductory paragraph, body of the essay, and finally the conclusion.

There is no set minimum or maximum length for a formal essay, unless one is specifically mentioned by the person requesting the essay. What is important, however, is that the essay maintains the distinct parts – the introduction, the body, and the conclusion.

The Introductory Paragraph
Arguably, the introductory paragraph is more important in the formal essay than it is in any other type of essay. This is because the introductory paragraph contains the thesis, the backbone of your formal essay. If you do not have a good thesis, the rest of your essay is doomed to failure, so spend a good amount of time here.

Similar to an opinion essay, the thesis represents the statement that you will be proving in your formal essay, and should be short and concise.

An example of a terrible thesis: “Piracy is bad for the music industry”. This is not a good thesis because it is too vague. There should be justification as to why piracy is bad for the music industry. An improved thesis would be something like “With the advent of peer – to – peer filesharing networks, internet piracy has caused a decline in music industry profits”. This thesis is much more concise.

The Body – Proving Your Point
Now that you have your thesis, you have to support it with the body of your formal essay. In the body, you should be making statements that support the thesis, and then backing it up with facts.

For instance, continuing the same essay topic, we can point to real world proof that music industry results are declining. We can look at the closure of several major record labels and stores, and point at the industry’s rapidly declining CD sales.

It is not only important that the examples you choose clearly support your thesis, but that you spend time explaining why it does. In writing an effective formal essay, you should not be making the reader use their critical thinking skills. Instead, you’ve already done the critical thinking for them – you want to tell them something, and then make it completely obvious why it is true by using logical supporting statements.

The Conclusion – Closing the Deal
Don’t overlook the importance of the conclusion. This is the last thing your reader will see, and it is time to remind them of why they spent all this time reading your essay. An effective conclusion will summarize all the key points of your formal essay without being repetitious.

Gently remind the reader what your thesis was. Summarize the key points of each of your body paragraphs. Finally, add a hook that will leave the reader a sense of conclusion. This may all seem very overwhelming at first, but with enough practice formal essays are really quite simple.