okay so let’s cover some just some review some of you probably took English 101 last semester maybe it’s been a summer ago maybe it’s been a year ago maybe it’s been 20 years everybody just so you know I you know it’s not uncommon to go a long period of time without having to write an essay so this is something that I’m just going to do a basic review of the elements of the formal essay that should be in every essay that you write for this course every essay is broken up into three parts and I I’m gonna give you some visual representation so we have an introduction we have the body of the essay and then we have the conclusion now the reason I draw the introduction as an upside-down triangle is to kind of give you a visualization of how an introduction should be structured introductions are the first thing that the reader is going to read and just like if you were to speak to somebody you probably wouldn’t jump right into something that’s really deep or something that’s very so or into like some kind of an argument you probably wouldn’t jump right into that you would say hello how you doing or you would say something to get your audience’s attention that is the goal of the introduction the introduction is going to go start in a broad place and work its way to a very specific thing that that very specific thing is what we call the thesis statement okay so what is the thesis statement well basically and this is also something you can find in your textbook but essentially a thesis statement is your claim this is the claim that you’re going to demonstrate the truth of in the body of the essay so some rules just to remember about thesis statements and you may want to write this down one rule is that you never use I or in my opinion or you basically are always going to use third person in a thesis statement the reason for this is that you’re trying to prove the truth of the statement if I were to say I think that Metallica is the best band ever you would say okay that’s just your opinion right well I can’t really prove whether or not I believe that because it is what it is I just told you I believed it okay fine but if I were to say Metallica is the best band ever or Metallica is the worst band ever then that’s a claim that’s something that I could try to prove with evidence or I could try to prove using some of the rhetorical appeals and basically I would have to give you reasons to believe that so remember a thesis statement is always in the third person it’s something that you’re never going to say the words in my opinion obviously it’s your opinion right and it does need to be something that’s opinionated that’s the other rule so your thesis statement would not be water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit because that is a fact that is something that okay yes that’s true you don’t have to write an essay to prove that because it just is so a thesis statement needs to be your claim it’s something that you’re going to argue or prove or demonstrate the truth of and you’re going to do that in the body of the essay itself the body of the essay is where all of the points that you’re going to make all of the evidence to prove that thesis statement you’re gonna have multiple paragraphs and I know many people get through classes and they’ve written just a five paragraph essay forget that you’re going to write a lot more paragraphs than than just three body paragraphs in this class so you remember paragraphing when it comes to paragraphs which one topic per paragraph so if you switch topics or if you’re in the same topic but you’re going to kind of change directions maybe it’s a subtopic of a larger topic well in that case in that case you’ll start a new paragraph you’re not going to just have one big long chunk of text paragraphs are great the human eye appreciates paragraphs and just to demonstrate this if you’ve ever been on social media maybe your friends on the Facebook or whatever and they just have this long chunk of text a lot of times I just scroll right by that maybe they’re poor their heart out and it’s something that’s really important that they want to get across but it’s so intimidating to the eye because it’s not broken up and you would want to make sure that you’re not intimidating your reader you’re not wanting to make this a chore to read your essay and you want to make it so that it’s very well organized organization is something that you were graded on how well do I organize my thoughts and that’s something that each paragraph is going to demonstrate okay I’m going to talk about this topic and this topic than this topic than this topic and these are all going back to demonstrate the truth of or to prove my claim and that is the thesis statement in the conclusion we generally as a rule we were never going to bring up any new information the conclusion is just a wrap-up okay so so just remember whenever you’re you’re writing your conclusion you’re gonna wrap it up okay and oftentimes you’re gonna find that a good conclusion is an echo of the introduction an example of that might be if you’ve ever seen like a documentary perhaps it’s about black holes and and and I don’t know you’ve got somebody who you know Morgan Freeman is your narrator well you would start off normally they don’t just start off saying exactly hey we’re gonna talk about black holes in this documentary okay here it starts know that they start off with like maybe a little story or some kind of an anecdote that you can relate to you like for instance there’s there’s one that I can remember where Morgan Freeman starts his this documentary and it starts off with simply Morgan Freeman talking about when he was a child and he says you know whenever I was a child I would go to my grandmother’s house and all my grandmother’s house there wasn’t well and my friends and I would find rocks threw rocks down this well and try to hear if it hit ever at the bottom and in our imaginations we believed that this was a well that went on forever and ever an infinite whole into nothingness right now notice I didn’t talk about black holes but you cannot you already get the connection there you already get how okay we’re starting with a broad story and you can understand already intuitively oh I see how this is going to connect with black holes well then the next thing he talked about and by that time we’ve made it probably this far the next thing he’s going to talk about is is connecting that idea to the thesis statement so maybe he might say scientists are finding that there actually are places in the universe that are infinite dark black holes and they’re caught well and they’re called black holes you know and basically you can see how that connects well that’s what we do up here well once we get down to the collusion maybe we echo what we said in the introduction maybe we bring up a few of the things that we talked about in the in the essay itself we just never bring up new things any new topics because this is not the time the time is here this is where you bring up all the information everything new all the all the research you’ve done to back up this claim but when you get to the in the conclusion you simply say maybe you might say so just like when I was a child and I went to my grandmother’s farm there are things in the universe that are just as just as incredible as my imagination was as a child these are called black holes and you know maybe he reviews some of the things that were said in the documentary so that is that is just overall the the format of a formal essay this is for every asset you write this is the format it’s not going to change okay so yes the jobs that you’re going to perform in the actual essay itself they will vary but this basic structure is going to be the same for every essay you’ll ever write ever okay so this is basic to essay formatting the reason why you have to take this class most likely is that you’re going to be in a major that requires you to write essays or do some research and that’s why they want you to understand these things so that’s our job in this and this whole this whole semester our job is to get you ready to continue to say listen I have done I understand how to do research I understand how to write an essay that proves a thesis statement or that demonstrates the truth of that piece of statement okay so let’s get started