3.7 Paragraphing & Drawing Conclusions in Academic Essays

As discussed in the previous article, "Understanding Essays," there are various sub-genres of essays you might encounter in college. Although each type of essay has some unique expectations and conventions, such as the type of evidence or analysis used, the structure of body paragraphs generally follows a common formula. 

A body paragraph for an academic essay typically includes three main parts:

• Topic Sentence

• Evidence (or further examples)

• Discussion

It may help you to remember it as an acronym: TED. Each body paragraph should have TED. 

Topic Sentence: Typically, the first sentence of a paragraph that states the main idea for that paragraph. For complex topics, you may need a few sentences to fully explain your point. 

Evidence or further examples: Once the main point is established, include evidence to support your point. Depending on the type of essay, this may be a quote from a reading, a specific example to illustrate your point, a personal observation or experience, or something else. Evidence helps demonstrate and support your point. 

Discussion: Use the final section of your paragraph to connect the ideas together for your reader. Connect the evidence or examples that you included to your main point and/or overall thesis of the paper. This will help your reader understand what conclusions you are drawing from the evidence. Wrap up anything you want to say about this sub-topic here before moving on to your next sub-point/paragraph. See "Opinions vs. Drawing Conclusions" below for more information on how to effectively draw conclusions in your writing. 

It can be easy to miss one of these elements when initially drafting a paper. So, it's a good habit to start checking that you have TED in your body paragraphs before turning in your draft. 

Opinions vs Drawing Conclusions

When discussing a topic or evidence, it can be hard to differentiate between opinion and drawing conclusions because it may feel like both of these are your beliefs, but there are some important differences. 

An opinion is a belief you hold about something, which may or may not be based on anything factual. For example, you may have the opinion that pineapples on pizza are awesome or that people should be kind to one another. While some opinions may be supportable with evidence, such as finding a study on the effects of kindness, opinions don't have to be based on facts. Even if everyone else hates pineapples on pizza, you can still believe they are the best pizza topping. 

However, there are times when having an opinion on a topic is less relevant, such as if you were to say, "I don't believe in gravity." While that statement is still stating a belief, it's not a particularly useful one. Your belief, in this case, doesn't actually impact the existence of gravity one way or the other. And, unless you are somehow deep in space while you are saying those words, your world is still being impacted by gravity at that very moment. As Neil deGrasse Tyson has put it, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it." In other words, facts and data aren't impacted by an individual person's opinion. New evidence can certainly change how we understand certain topics and that happens all the time, otherwise, we would not progress as a society technologically, medically, and so on. And more problematically, a person's individual opinion or feelings on a topic may cause bias issues when conducting research that can skew the results. However, the information, itself, isn't impacted by opinion, so arguing about a topic from the perspective of an opinion is not particularly useful to the discussion or understanding of the topic. 

So, if opinions aren't particularly helpful on certain issues, what is it that we're writing about? This is where drawing conclusions based on evidence comes in. Most writing in college will be fact-based, not opinion-based. You will be expected to look at the evidence and then draw conclusions based on the evidence. This evidence can be different things, such as the outcome of an experiment in a science class, lines from a poem in a literature class, or statistics from a business class, just to name a few. A conclusion is a logical deduction based on evidence and reasoning. By exploring and/or analyzing evidence and information, you will be able to draw a conclusion about the topic and then present that information in the form of an essay. 

The essay might be expository, analytical, or persuasive in nature, but the thesis and the points you are making will be based on that evidence and not opinion.  Even in persuasive essays, where an opinion is sometimes appropriate when written for a college class, there will typically be an expectation that the thesis and sub-points are based on conclusions drawn from factual or observational evidence. 

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"Paragraphing & Drawing Conclusions in Academic Essays" by Sarah Karlis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.