At this point, you have had a lot of practice organizing and supporting your ideas to write good paragraphs. These paragraphs will be the building blocks for almost all of the other writing you will do both in your time in college and the professional world. This means that our next big step is to expand what we know about writing paragraphs and expand that to writing longer pieces that entail multiple paragraphs.
While there will be some new things to learn, much of what you do in writing a longer essay is identical to what you have been doing to write a paragraph. You will still want to use those same three prewriting steps: idea generation, idea focus, and idea organization. Also, you will still be considering the four keys to good writing we have discussed throughout this course.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 5 hours.
To get a better feeling of what a five-paragraph essay might look like, read this expansion about the Corner Store you read about earlier, and identify how it is different from the paragraph version.
Read this section to learn about what a thesis statement is, how to put one together, how it functions in an essay, and get some practice writing thesis statements.
After learning about how to write a thesis statement, get some practice by doing this activity. Answers will vary, but you can compare yours to the answer key when you are finished.
The first paragraph or series of paragraphs (in longer essays) of a multi-paragraph essay is the introduction. Introductions are very important because that is where you grab the readers' attention and get them interested in continuing to read. Think about what is happening in the "Corner Store" model essay in the introduction and read this section to learn about that and some common approaches to writing an introduction.
Get some practice writing introductions by doing this activity. There is no correct answer and many ways these could be written, but after you are done, you can compare your writing to the answer key.
The very last paragraph of a multi-paragraph essay is the conclusion. Conclusions are typically much easier to write than introductions and often tend to be short. Read this section to learn how to write this final piece of an essay.
Read this section to learn about some of the final considerations you need to make when writing a longer essay.
Read this model essay to see another example of how a five-paragraph essay is put together.
Do this activity to practice expanding a paragraph into a five-paragraph essay. There is no correct answer, but you can look at the sample response essay to see if you are on the right track.
After all this practice, now it's time to take that paragraph essay you wrote after doing the prewriting activity and work on improving using the information in Units 2–4 and expand it into a five-paragraph essay. Use the instructions in this section to help you in this process.
When you finish this writing, use this checklist to proofread and polish your work and ensure your essay is error-free.
Now that you have had opportunities to practice your writing, consider sharing something you wrote in the discussion forum. Read the work of some other students, and celebrate the progress you have made in your writing journey!
Take this assessment to see how well you understood this unit.