HOW TO WRITE A //HIGH SCHOOL// ESSAY
When most* English teachers grade essays, they aren’t actually sitting down and reading your work like it’s a novel. They scan through and make sure you have all the key components for essay writing (that’s why you see little checkmarks over your essay when it’s returned. Once they see you have the sentence there, they leave the mark and move on).
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This is the template I used for 90% of my essays in high school:
I just filled in the sentences for the relevant topic, copy pasted them into a paragraph, and proofread once or twice to make sure it flowed and there were no basic spelling mistakes.
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*THIS IS NOT //GOOD// ESSAY WRITING
In an academic capacity, these types of essays are weak, boring, and won’t hold up. It works in high school because /technically/ it has everything you need, so it gets a 100/100 (or close, fingers crossed) on the rubric.
If you end up with a teacher that doesn’t let you just plug in sentences and actually pushes you to /write/ something, take advantage of it! I learned more about writing from one teacher that ignored rubrics and actually graded the quality of my work than I did in all four years of high school combined.
That being said, this is not meant to put down teachers or make it seem like I know everything. I’m absolutely sure all the english teachers I had saw through what I was doing (one or two of them even commented on it), but it was still enough (the bare minimum) to get me through the slog of high school. Good luck and happy writing!
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NOTES ABOUT THE TEMPLATE:
Add in transition words at the start of each paragraph and at the beginning of each new piece of “PROOF”
Repeat the “BODY PARAGRAPH” template three times with each different piece of your thesis
You only need 2-3 ‘PROVE, EXPLAIN, CONNECT” sections for each body paragraph. A good idea is to aim for one longer paragraph with three supports, and have that be your strongest argument, and let your two other paragraphs only have two supports.
This template works best for PERSUASIVE ESSAYS. It can be used with tweaking for comparative essays, but I don’t recommend it because it’s specifically designed to cater to the persuasive essay rubric
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Here’s an example of the template in use for a body paragraph. This was, in fact, one of my old high school essays, I just pulled up the old document. The thesis was that there are no heroes in Hamlet.