Writing the Main Body Paragraphs of an Essay

The main body of an essay is the most important segment because the author can present their main arguments here.

The essay introduction gives you the chance to introduce the topic and provide background information, but it does not argue anything.

On the other hand, the conclusion section reiterates the main body’s points and offers suggestions for future work without making any new arguments.

All your arguments are contained inside the main body of the essay.

Organizing and structuring an essay’s main body is perhaps the most challenging facet of essay writing that most essayists struggle with. So what information needs to be placed in the main body? How much information will be sufficient? How do you structure the main body?

Here are some tips on writing an essay’s main body paragraphs to help you correctly plan and organize the most critical part of your academic essay.

Plan, Organise and Reorganise

Your essay paper’s organisation starts even before the essay is written and continues even after it is written. This means that you will have to continue to work on your essay organisation throughout the process.

From the point where you imagine your essay’s main idea to the point where your essay is completely written, you must be willing to reorganize the paper if needed.

This doesn’t mean that you will need to change the sequence of things after writing every few sentences, but you must regularly check your paper’s order and organisation to see if the structure is coherent.

Develop an Essay Outline

This, by far, is the most helpful strategy to ensure your essay paper is well organised and follows the planned structure. Developing an essay outline will help with remembering the most important points that need to be covered in your essay and how they all relate to each other.

Make Notes

Be prepared to take notes to improve your essay’s organisation and add new points to your essay outline as you continue to write. You will likely come up with new ideas and might even need to refine the existing plan.

Use topic sentences to record your key ideas. This is particularly important if you already have a clear idea of what you would like to say in your essay.

However, make sure to use all the essential components of a topic sentence to remember your own ideas when you are done with the part of an essay you are working on.

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Importance of Thesis Statement

Like topic sentences, having a good thesis statement will help you a great deal in keeping track of everything as you write. It is always a good idea to check your topic sentences against the thesis statement to ensure each topic sentence is relevant to the topic subject.

Similarly, you will want to check your topic sentences against each other to avoid repetition of statements and ensure the correct sequence of the main body paragraphs and their relevance to the topic matter.

Making Sense of Topic Sentences and Thesis Statement

Reduce each paragraph of the essay to a simple topic statement. Reading them one at a time will help you compare them against the topic sentences you wrote and establish whether you have stayed on track.

Even if you recognize that your ideas have deviated slightly from the initial planning, it is still perfectly alright, but you must be aware of this transition.

If the transitions are logical, and at the end of reading all topic sentences, you can logically grasp the ideas without getting lost, you can move on.

Analyzing topic sentences is a great way of making sure your essay paper follows a logical structure/route from the beginning to the end.

Avoid Repetition

You don’t want to be repeating the same statements and words over and over. Each paragraph of your essay must convey a different point and offer something new to the readers.

If, upon evaluation, you discover that any two paragraphs of your essay are discussing something similar, then you need to either discard one or rewrite it to cover a different aspect of the topic.

Are Paragraphs Transitioning Smoothly From One Another?

After completing the draft essay paper, if you realize that your essay’s information doesn’t flow smoothly and the organisation is not logical, there is still no need to panic. Many students find themselves overwhelmed by their workload and start to question their essay writing skills.

If you find yourself stuck, you can take some time off and come back later with a fresh mind. You might even want to redo the essay outline if you are unhappy with the essay structure.

As suggested previously, there is nothing wrong with filling in structural gaps needed to improve the paper’s overall organisation.

Also Read: How to Use Transitions in Essay

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