A good structure to your academic work is vital to make it understandable, easy to read and engaging. An essay or report tells a story, so as any good story does, it needs a beginning, a middle and an end. It's not just the work as a whole that needs structure but your paragraphs too. This section includes guidance on how to create a good overall essay structure. For more information about creating structure for your individual paragraphs see our paragraph structure guide.
To gain good marks and fulfil the learning outcomes of your assignments, you need to demonstrate that you understand the concepts and the work that you have used to form your argument. Structure also ensures that:
The basic structure of an essay looks something like this:
Creating sections helps you to plan how much you need to write on each area. This breaks the task down into smaller chunks.
For example:
If your subject has three major themes you can then break the main body down again:
This is not a precise rule; you can adjust the word counts to accommodate where more emphasis is needed or not, but it can be used to break a large word count into manageable sections.
In this episode of the Assignment Journey Podcast, Alex and Diana (Skills Graduate Placement), discuss how you can use your understanding of the assignment to structure your assignment. They go through what is expected in an introduction, main body and conclusion of an essay as well as a simple paragraph structure.