A lesson on essay writing

Essays consist of an introduction, two or three body paragraphs and a conclusion. In this lesson, you will learn to write standard body paragraphs with the help of a mouth-watering simile.

 A good body paragraph can be likened to a hamburger. Just like the top bun (bread), the topic sentence should only introduce the subject of the paragraph; there should not be any details in the topic sentence as the top bread in a hamburger is simply half a bread roll as well. The main ingredients (layers of meat) come in the middle of the hamburger and are called major supporting sentences of a paragraph. These sentences (normally 2 or 3) contain the main ideas supporting the topic sentence and are absolutely essential to the existence of the paragraph. However, you definitely agree that a hamburger would be disgusting (or tasteless, to say the least) if it only consisted of bread and meat (without lettuce, onions, mustard, relish, etc.); therefore, it is necessary to add some other ingredients called minor supporting sentences (colourful vocabulary, examples, etc.) to make your writing more readable (or more eatable rather!). Finally, to hold all the ingredients together, your hamburger needs a bottom bun. This piece of bread looks more or less like the top bun (in reverse), and so does your concluding sentence. That is to say, the last sentence of your paragraph should repeat the topic sentence in different words summarising the information presented in the paragraph. You can think of a concluding sentence as a topic sentence in reverse. Thus, I suggest you remember a hamburger next time you are writing a body paragraph.

 RED  = the topic sentence (top bun)
 BLUE  = major supporting sentences (meat)
 BLACK  = minor supporting sentences (lettuce, onions, mustard, etc.)
 ORANGE  = the concluding sentence (bottom bun)

Want another model paragraph? Read about why trees lose their leaves.