Writing and Five-paragraph Essay

902 Project: Five-Paragraph Essay Project: Thesis, Supporting Points, Outline

To do well on a project you should be prepared to spend time over several days to do your best work. You should plan to apply yourself to your project, take a break from it, and come back several times to polish and refine your work. Your goal for this project is to complete some exercises about a prompt for a five-paragraph essay. The essay will be due in a later unit. As you work on the exercises, understand that your essay can be persuasive (supporting a position or belief) or expository (informing about a topic) and will be about 600-800 words long (about 2-3 pages). Choose the prompt carefully.

Prompts for a Five-Paragraph Essay
Look at the writing prompts provided below. Are there any that interest you or cause you to think? Choose one, and on a piece of paper jot down all the ideas that come to mind when you think about that topic. Do not edit your thoughts as they come to you—just write them down.

Five-paragraph Essay Prompts

What is the importance of voting? or Why should all citizens vote? What is an important trait to have? Help your readers to understand why they should strive for this trait. Positive effects of video games or Negative effects of video games Explain the benefits of an activity that the reader should try (consider one of your favorite activities). The ills of cell phone use or Why cell phones are a useful technology The best place to grow up is in the city or The best place to grow up is in a rural area What is the best season of the year? Try to convince your reader.

Organizing thoughts:
After you have chosen a prompt and jotted down some ideas about that prompt you can start to organize these ideas. If you are having second thoughts
about this prompt, now would be the time to change prompts and try again. To help you get organized, please answer the following questions right here (the space will expand as you type). 1. What do you want to prove or explain about this topic? What will your reader understand more clearly after reading your essay? - I want to explain the importance of voting, so that the reader will understand the significance of the process more clearly.

2. What are three main points (and only three) that you can make about this topic? - The importance of voting, the benefits of voting, and the fortunate right that we posses to vote.

3. Think of a few things you could mention or ways you could introduce the topic to make it interesting to your reader. Write these down as possible “hooks” for your introduction.- I could attract the readers by using my own personal thoughts and theories, making the essay more intimate.

4. Will this be an expository or a persuasive essay? Explain why. - expository, because I am only explaining the significance of voting, not attempting to persuade anyone to vote or agree with my own opinion.

Writing the Thesis:

Every good essay should have a thorough, precise, and strong thesis statement that tells the reader exactly what you will try to explain or prove. A thesis statement is therefore like a compass for your essay. Just like a compass points you in the direction you should go, the thesis explains either what you want to explain to your reader about your topic (if you’re doing an expository essay) or what position you are taking toward your topic (if you’re doing a persuasive essay). By the end of your essay, your readers should reach their “destination”: they should understand your topic better or understand the position you took toward it. The thesis will also list supporting points surrounding your explanation/position. The thesis statement should be thorough enough that you cover all these supporting points (i.e. “This is true because of reasons A, B, and C.”). Formulate your own thesis statement about your topic and write it here. Keep in mind
that if your teacher thinks that a reader could still ask “So what?” the exercise may be reassigned.

Write your thesis statement and your three supporting points for the thesis in complete sentences here: THESIS STATEMENT -
TOPIC – The importance of voting.
People don't understand the importance of voting.
Why don't people understand?
Some people don't understand because they are too focused on other things besides the freedoms – such as voting – that we have.

Making an Outline:

The final step in this project is to write an outline for your five-paragraph essay. An outline will be the structure and the order of items you will follow as you write the essay. To write the outline, you need to understand the structure of the five-paragraph essay. Typically, the first paragraph of a five-paragraph essay is an introduction. The second paragraph of this essay will discuss the first supportive point in detail, before moving on to the third paragraph, which will discuss the second supportive point. As you can guess, the fourth paragraph contains the third and final supportive point, and the conclusion is the fifth paragraph of the five-paragraph essay. Note that your supporting points need to show up in the order that you discussed them in your thesis statement; any other order will merely confuse the reader. The outline should be in sentence format only (not topic or word format). This outline with an introduction, three main points (and all sub-points), and a conclusion will look like the example below. Note the numbering, lettering, and indenting; all of these should be correctly used in your outline, as well.

Guide written by phdify.com. You also can read about dissertation writing at their blog.