English essay writing, Appunti di Lingua Inglese

Scarica English essay writing e più Appunti in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! Essay writing Paragraphs 4 types of prose • 4 main types of prose Descriptive Narrative Expository Lyric For your essay, we will be dealing with the first 3. • Rarely is any essay composed of a single type of prose. Often descriptive, narrative, and expository modes are mixed in the same essay. This is what you will be attempting to do for your second and third year essays. • Every essay will have an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. • Every essay will be built of paragraphs. • A paragraph is a group of sentences built around a central idea or topic. • On the printed page, the first word of a paragraph is always indented about five spaces from the left hand margin. Topic Sentences • Most paragraphs will have a topic sentence. • The topic sentence is the sentence that expresses the core concept of your paragraph. • It can often be the first sentence, but not always. Sometimes a sentence or two of transition or introduction may be needed. • A well-written topic sentence is like a map both for the reader and the writer. It shows you where you are going next. • Here are some examples. • Most students have smartphones. This is a fact, not really an idea. So it isn’t a good topic sentence. • For most students, smartphones are indispensable to carry on social relationships. • The above gives us an idea to write about. • Most teenagers couldn’t live without smartphone. This gives us not only an idea, but an opinion to write about. • Here’s another example. • Ninety-five buses in Rome have exploded or caught fire while in service since 2018. • Again, this is a fact. If we were writing a report on Roman buses, this could serve as a topic sentence. But if we are writing an essay, we might want something like this: • Riding a bus in Rome can be a journey into hell. • Another common error in writing topic sentences is the tendency to leave an idea only partly developed. For example: • Driving is stressful. This doesn’t work as a topic sentence because it is too vague. In what conditions is driving stressful, for whom and when? • For inexperienced drivers, driving in poor weather conditions can be very stressful. This tells us a little more. Maybe our essay will be about suggestions on how to alleviate the stress. • Environmental protection, “Saving the Earth,” is an important issue especially for generation Z, who must live in the world we have created. • Learning a new language is an important skill in today’s job market. • Learning a new language is a like opening a window on a whole new world. • In the above sentences we see more focus, opinion, and idea. • Yet another error to avoid is the announcing of your topic: “In this essay I am going to write about pollution.” • Don’t announce your topic, just begin writing about it. Paragraph building • Once you have your topic sentence, there are many ways you can build your paragraph. You can: – Define terms and contextualize them. For example, we wrote an essay on Sexual Equality. A good way to begin was with a definition and contextualizing of the term. In many ways, the quality of our environment has deteriorated with each new advance of the gross national product. Increases in electric power mean burning more coal and fuel, hence the discharge of more pollution into the air. The growth of the paper industry has brought a vast increase in trash. The production of new automobiles and the discard of old ones has resulted in unsightly piles of hulks. The growth of urban traffic is choking both the mobility of the city and the lungs of the city-dwellers. • In the previous paragraph, we can see how the author illustrates his point with specific examples: electric power, the paper industry, and the auto industry, then concludes with a strong, graphic image. • Another way to build a paragraph is through restatement: • “Madness. It runs through the mythic life of women like a stream running down through a rain forest, seeking the level of the sea. Women go mad. Men shoot themselves bravely, but women go mad. Hamlet dies, but Ophelia goes mad. Macbeth dies, but Lady Macbeth goes mad. Our men die but our asylums are overflowing with mad women: women who become depressed– and go mad.”