This page offers (or will offer at some point in the future) examples of student writing, shared with permission. This website is pretty new, so I haven’t gotten permission from any students to share their work on the internet. Instead, I’ll share an example essay that I wrote several years ago in one of the classes I was teaching. It’s not a perfect essay, by any means, but it does some illustrate some basic moves that effective essays generally do.
This example essay contains some of the following key ingredients that may be helpful in writing your own essays.
- An introduction paragraph with
- A hook
- Context to set up the thesis statement
- A thesis statement
- Body paragraphs
- Focused on specific main ideas
- Containing evidence and analysis
- Citing sources
- Quoting and summarizing sources
- A conclusion paragraph wrapping up the essay
- A list of works cited (although it’s out of date)
- MLA formatting conventions