Rough Draft 2: Background Information

An essay can be divided into three parts: Introduction, Body, and Conclusion. The 3.5 essay that some of you may be overly familiar with divides the Body into three points or Reasons. Though this works for rather simple personal essays (5 paragraph ones), it does not work well for essays over 500-700 words (writing paragraphs of over 100 words consistently is a learned skill).

It is better to divide the Body of the essay into two parts: Background Information, and Issues. These two should not be seen as paragraphs though, but rather sections of the essay; they may include several paragraphs each, depending on how much information must be shared.

So the layout of the essay becomes Introduction, Background Information, Issues, & Conclusion.

Background Information: It is best to begin here. What sort of information do you think a reader should know? The goal here should not be to explain the experience of your research, or to tell them about the class assignment, but rather just to share the information.

Remember, this is information that a reader needs to know to understand why or how you interpret the results the way you do.

This Background Information section may be one paragraph long; it may be three. It is often easiest to write first because it does not require a lot of thought. Really, you are just summarizing information that you received. Use what you wrote for the summary exercise if you can. When you have finished the section, take a break.