Essay Writing for Neurodivergent Students: Body Paragraphs
Now that you’ve selected a topic, created an outline, and written your thesis statement, it’s time to start the actual writing.
Rather than writing the entire essay in order, it’s usually easier to skip the introduction and go straight to the body paragraphs. That way, if your essay turns out different than you expect, you don’t have to do extra work rewriting an introduction that no longer matches the rest of your essay. For now, just put your thesis statement at the top of your essay, as a placeholder for the introduction.
For this step, your goal is to turn each of your supporting points into a paragraph. This post will cover two approaches to writing body paragraphs: the “just go for it” approach, and the step-by-step approach. Each of these approaches has advantages and disadvantages, so you should pick whichever one you find easier.
But first, let’s go over a couple things to keep in mind as you write: letting go of perfectionism, and focusing on writing clearly.
Done Is Perfect
At the end of this, your goal is to have a rough draft. No matter how rough your draft may be, something is always better than nothing. And, it’s much easier to fix something that already exists than to create something in the first place.
Imagine your ideal essay is a perfectly cut, polished diamond. But at the end of this first round of writing, you find yourself with a rough, jagged rock instead. That’s okay! It’s much easier to polish a rough stone into something beautiful than to spawn a perfect diamond from nothing.
Remember, no one has to read your first draft. You can be as casual as you want, leave in the typos and awkward wordings and way too long ballooning run on sentences and just keep going. Strive for the end of that page like your life depends on it, and trust that editing your essay won’t be nearly as hard as creating it in the first place.
So, even if it feels like everything you’re writing is terrible, there’s no need to get discouraged. Oftentimes the biggest barrier is just getting those first words written down, and you’re actively overcoming that. Plus, once you look back on it later, you might find that the sentences that felt awful to write actually turned out pretty decent.
All that to say: let go of perfection. It will never be perfect, and you’ll drive yourself crazy trying.
Understanding Your Audience: Be Coherent, Not Brilliant
When you get an essay assignment, it may feel like you’re expected to write something brilliant and profound. After all, if your essay sounds deep and smart enough, then your teacher will be so inspired, they’ll have no choice but to reward your heroic efforts with a good grade. Right?
Unfortunately, writing something brilliant is a pretty daunting task, especially for a topic that you may not even be interested in yourself. Luckily, the reality of your reader’s state of mind actually simplifies things for you.
In general, you can imagine your reader as an overworked, exhausted individual with the attention span of a gnat. Just writing something coherent and well-organized will go significantly farther than trying to be brilliant. As a bonus, coherence is much easier to achieve than brilliance.
So, if you feel like you’re over-explaining, that’s good. If you feel like something isn’t worth spelling out because it’s so obvious, trust me when I say it’s not that obvious, and you should definitely spell it out for your reader. If you feel like you’re being condescending to the reader with how much you’re explaining simple concepts, great job! In general, following your train of thought should require as little effort from your reader as possible.
If you do have something brilliant to say, that’s great! But, no matter how profound your points are, they won’t do you any good if the reader can’t follow your argument. So, whether your own inspiration is rock bottom or through the roof, focus on clarity and coherence before anything else. Your reader (and your future self, when you get your grade back) will thank you for it.
With those notes in mind, let’s move on to actually writing your body paragraphs.
Method 1: Just Go For It
If you’re able to just start writing, then absolutely go for it. Use your outline as a guide, and start writing a paragraph for each of your supporting points. Again, don’t worry about it being perfect, just get something down on the page.
The advantage of this approach is that your essay will probably have good flow, leading to fewer sentence-level edits later. However, you’re also more likely to get off topic or lose sight of the overall structure of the essay, so you may need to make more paragraph-level adjustments later. For now, don’t worry about editing; just keep writing until it’s done.
Of course, some students will find this method difficult, or even impossible. Perhaps you have no idea how to get started, or you write a few sentences but then get stuck on what else to add. If this sounds like you, no need to worry. The next section will give detailed instructions on how to write when you have no idea what to write.
Method 2: Step by Step
This method will give you step-by-step instructions for turning each supporting point into a paragraph. This includes introducing each supporting point, relating it back to the main point, providing and analyzing evidence, and concluding each paragraph with a brief summary.
If you follow this method, your rough draft is likely to have a solid overall structure. However, because you’re following a formula, the sentences may end up sounding stilted and awkward. That’s okay, it just means you’ll have to edit it for sentence-level flow later. For now, focus on getting the paragraphs written.
To show how this method is used, I’m going to write the first paragraph from my previous example outline about cat ownership. For reference, here is the portion of the outline we’ll be writing about:
More people should consider cat ownership.
Cats are easy to care for.
“Cats make wonderful companions for people with busy lifestyles. They’re content to entertain themselves and don’t require daily walks.” (Sunny Paws Animal Shelter)
“Veterinarians say cats are increasingly popular with young professionals who want the companionship of a pet without the time demands of a dog.” (USA Today Pets)
Introduce Your Supporting Point
This could be as simple as copying your supporting point from your outline, at least as a starting point. For my example, the first sentence of this paragraph would be:
Cats are easy to care for.
It’s a fine start, but on its own it’s not super clear why I’m bringing this up. Who cares that cats are easy to care for? What does that have to do with anything? To answer those questions, we’re going to need to…
Relate Back to Your Main Point
In this example, our main point is that more people should consider cat ownership. So, the next step is to explain how that’s related to cats being easy to care for. You could go for something straightforward such as:
More people should consider cat ownership, because cats are easy to care for.
And this sentence basically gets the job done. However, it would be stronger if we directly addressed the implied objection to cat ownership: some people think owning a cat is a lot of work, and therefore they unnecessarily avoid it. Making that idea more explicit, we might end up with something like this:
Some people may think that cat ownership isn’t possible for them, because taking care of a cat would be too much work. However, cats are remarkably easy to care for. Therefore, care needs should not be a barrier to cat ownership for most people.
This revision is stronger than the first version of this sentence, because it clearly spells out the relationship between cats’ ease of care (supporting point) and why more people should consider cat ownership (main point).
Introduce Your Evidence
We’ve made our first point and explained how it supports our main point, but we can’t expect people to just believe that what we said is true. After all, anyone could assert anything they want. I could say the sky is green, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. In general, you should expect your reader to be skeptical of everything you say. To convince them, you need to provide evidence supporting your statements.
In most cases, your evidence will take the form of a quote. Before putting a quote into your essay, you need to introduce the quote to your reader, so they understand the context and speaker. In general, this introduction should include the writer’s name, qualifications, and the title of the source material.
Example of introducing a new source:
According to USA Today Pets, a reputable news source for all things pet, “[v]eterinarians say cats are increasingly popular with young professionals who want the companionship of a pet without the time demands of a dog.”
Note that once you’ve introduced a certain source once, there is no need to fully reintroduce it before each additional quote. In those situations, you can use a shortened introduction (e.g. only the author’s last name) to give the reader a quick reminder of who is speaking.
Example of introducing two quotes from the same source:
An article from Sunny Paws Animal Shelter states: “Cats make wonderful companions for people with busy lifestyles.” Furthermore, according to Sunny Paws, cats are “content to entertain themselves and don’t require daily walks.”
For literary essays analyzing a single book, you would generally mention the title and author in the introduction of your essay. Because there’s only one source, you can skip straight to a shortened introduction for quotes throughout the essay. In the body paragraphs of a literary essay, introducing a quote might mean giving plot context to help orient the reader.
Example of giving plot context for an essay on The Great Gatsby:
When explaining what she wants for her infant daughter, Daisy says: “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” (Fitzgerald, 17)
Explain Your Evidence (This Quote Means…)
So, your essay now has a well-introduced quote to provide evidence for your argument. You might think that the quote is self-explanatory, and you can jump straight to analyzing it.
Not so fast! Regardless of whether the quote’s meaning is obvious to you, you should always assume that the reader doesn’t understand it. Fortunately, clarifying for your reader is pretty straightforward. It might feel strange or unnatural at first, but after every quote, you should explicitly say what the quote means by summarizing it in your own words.
Here are a couple examples:
According to USA Today Pets, “[v]eterinarians say cats are increasingly popular with young professionals who want the companionship of a pet without the time demands of a dog.” This quote shows that even young professionals, a notoriously busy demographic, have plenty of time to care for a pet cat.
An article from Sunny Paws Animal Shelter states: “Cats make wonderful companions for people with busy lifestyles. They’re content to entertain themselves and don’t require daily walks.” In other words, cats are a great pet for people who are busy, because they’re independent and require a relatively small time commitment.
You might feel like it’s redundant to quote something, and then immediately paraphrase the quote. Or, it might feel like you’re being condescending to your reader, who surely could figure it out on their own. These concerns are generally unfounded.
Turns out, the gap between what’s obvious to you and what’s obvious to your reader is fairly large. So, it virtually always makes sense to spell things out more clearly than you think you need to. Plus, paraphrasing the quote gets you back into your own voice, making it easier to…
Relate Your Evidence Back to Your Supporting Point
As with the previous section, how your evidence supports your argument may seem obvious to you. However, you shouldn’t assume that it’s obvious to your reader. Instead, you should explain the connection as clearly as you can, even if it seems like the reader should be able to figure it out on their own.
Continuing the examples from above:
According to USA Today Pets, “[v]eterinarians say cats are increasingly popular with young professionals who want the companionship of a pet without the time demands of a dog.” This quote shows that even young professionals, a notoriously busy demographic, have plenty of time to care for a pet cat. The fact that even very busy people have time for a cat shows how easy it is to take care of a cat.
An article from Sunny Paws Animal Shelter states: “Cats make wonderful companions for people with busy lifestyles. They’re content to entertain themselves and don’t require daily walks.” In other words, cats are a great pet for people who are busy, because they’re independent and require a relatively small time commitment. This small time commitment for daily care demonstrates the overall ease of cat ownership.
At this point you’re almost done with the paragraph. All that remains is to…
Reiterate Your Supporting and Main Points
This is essentially a mini conclusion for your paragraph. Remember, you should always write as though your reader is exhausted and forgetful. So, by the end of the paragraph, it’s safe to assume that your reader needs to be reminded about the topic of the paragraph.
To remind them, you’re going to repeat what you said at the beginning of the paragraph: reiterate your main and supporting points, and how they relate to each other.
Example concluding statement:
Because cats are so easy to care for, potential owners need not be concerned that it will be too much work for them. Therefore, more people should consider cat ownership, without fear that the workload will negatively impact their lives.
Congratulations, you just wrote a whole paragraph!
Repeat for the Other Supporting Points
The final step is to repeat all of the previous steps for each of your supporting points. Depending on the number of supporting points in your outline, you should end up with 2-4 body paragraphs.
Once you’ve turned all your supporting points into paragraphs, your rough draft will be mostly complete.
Conclusion
Once you’ve finished your outline and thesis statement, the next step is to write your body paragraphs. At the end of this step, you should have the majority of a rough draft completed. Before you get started, remember to let go of perfectionism and brilliance. Instead, focus on getting the assignment done, and explaining things clearly for your reader.
There are two methods for writing body paragraphs: step-by-step, and “just go for it.” If you’re able to just go for it, writing about each of your supporting points stream-of-consciousness style, have at it. You’re likely to end up with an essay that flows well, but might need extra attention to paragraph-level changes during editing.
If you need more guidance than “just start writing,” try the step-by-step method instead. For each supporting point, complete the following steps: introduce your supporting point, relate it back to your main point, introduce your evidence, explain your evidence, relate your evidence back to your supporting point, and reiterate your supporting and main points. By following these steps, you will likely end up with an essay that is well-organized on the paragraph level, but may need extra attention to sentence-level flow during editing.
Congratulations, you’ve just written most of an essay!
If you find yourself falling short of the word count or page requirement, check out tips for writing more (coming soon). Otherwise, the next step is to edit your essay at the paragraph level (also coming soon).
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