Essay Writing 101
Be Specific
Sein Spezifisch
Professor Jay Welch
North Florida Community College
Step 1
Write your main idea
• Your main idea should answer the question in about
one sentence.
• Remember to focus on what the question is asking.
• There are two ways to come to a main answer or
thesis.
• 1) Come up with an idea that seems to fit the facts you
have learned in class, or;
• 2) Look at the facts you have learned and see what
kind of answer will fit them; either method is ok.
Sample Question
(Practice writing your main idea)
• How has Mr. Welch affected your study of
history?
Bad Examples
• Jay Welch has affected my study of history
greatly.
• Jay Welch has affected my study of history
in many different ways.
Good Examples
• Mr. Welch has helped me understand the
role that history plays in shaping today’s
world.
• Jay Welch has ruined my taste for
studying history by being a rotten teacher.
• Mr. Welch has introduced me to many
different time periods of history.
Step 2
Introducing your main idea
• For the next few slides, let’s use the practice
question:
• “Why was the Neolithic important in the rise of
civilization.”
• A bad example of a main idea for this question
is: “The Neolithic was important for many
reasons.”
• A good example would be: “All of the aspects of
modern civilization rose during the Neolithic,
which makes it the most important era in the
evolution of humanity.”
Writing an introduction
• Try to think of three or four main areas of facts
that support your main idea. Summarize them
into three of four sentences.
• Don’t worry about getting too specific yet, but
you do want to include more specific detail than
is in your main idea.
• You’ll notice that at this point you will have to
actually know something.
Good Examples
• (Good examples are much easier to write, BTW, if you
have a good thesis.)
• All of the aspects of modern civilization rose during the
Neolithic, which makes it the most important era in the
evolution of humanity. Humans began to domesticate
plants during the Neolithic, which caused people to
become settled. These settlements grew in size as
agriculture provided more food for a growing
population. As these small towns grew larger, divisions
of labor and social classes would be needed to
oversee the various functions of these communities.
This movement would produce a civilization.
Step 3
Supporting your argument with
SPECIFIC FACTS!!!
• For an in-class essay, you generally want to turn one
of your major supporting themes into about a
paragraph.
• Remember, each paragraph needs a main idea to get
it started. This should correspond to your major
supporting theme.
• For this exercise let’s use the general area of plant
domestication and rise of agriculture as causal for
permanent human settlements.
• I will underline specific facts found in the piece, so you
get the idea of how to write these for maximum points.
Bad Example
• Humans began to domesticate plants during the
Neolithic, which caused people to become
settled. (Notice this a direct repeat of an earlier
sentence.) Humans would plant plants on
purpose. And eating them was better than they
had lived before. So they settled in one place to
eat these plants.
• (This lacks much specific detail. Nothing is
necessarily wrong, but you need to convince
me that you have command of the material.)
Good Example
• Learning from their domestication of hunting animals
in the Mesolithic, people began to experiment with
domesticating plants. People noticed that plant
domestication yielded more food than they could
harvest as nomadic hunter-gatherers. What they
found, however, was that cultivation of plants like
wheat and barley required year-round work. This
caused people to begin to live in permanent
settlements so they could be near their fields. They
sited their settlements near rivers for irrigating their
crops. This would also help later as humans began to
use the rivers to trade with other settlements.
Step 4
Concluding
• First off, don’t repeat yourself. Saying what
you have said before is not a conclusion. It
is mind-numbingly childish.
• What you do is: show how the pieces of
your argument fit together.
• Also, you may want to show how your
argument not only answers the question,
but actually goes beyond that.
Bad Conclusion.
• Where you restate everything you have
said before, perhaps only in backwards
order. This is stupid. The reader just saw
these same ideas just a few inches away.
They are not simpletons.
Good Conclusion
• During the Neolithic, all the factors of human
civilization arose. Moreover, each subsequent
advancement caused further advancements towards
civilization. The domestication of plants created a
surplus of food in a permanent settlement. The
resulting extra population could devote itself to
building a larger settlement and trade for new items.
Larger settlements created social classes because
towns and cities require these structures to function.
Not only was the Neolithic the turning point for the rise
of human civilization, but it was the first moment
where we glimpse modern man.
Things to avoid
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Words like:
Very
Things, stuff
Phrases like:
In conclusion
I think, I believe, I feel
that, etc.
• Rhetorical questions,
• Rhetorical phrases,
• Pretty much any time
you are tempted to
write the pronoun “I,”
don’t.