The Writer as 'Architect' | Today's Editorial Feature | The Hindu ❤️

Acing the Structure of An Essay 

The Hindu | Recasting India’s Food System

#newspaperinlearning

20th October 2023

When Dr. Felix Moses was Head, Research Department of English, MCC, he made sure that the Five-Paragraph Essay was included in the module on ‘Writing Skills’, as part of the Fourth Semester’s Paper for all our Part-II English students.

This he said, will help them to know and to write a ‘structured’ essay.

Yes! A well-crafted academic paper requires a good structure to its design, as much as an impressive house or a bungalow requires a well-structured building plan and a blueprint!

This particular article in today’s Editorial Page of The Hindu, titled, ‘An Opportunity to Recast India’s Food System’, has a beautiful structure to it. 

It’s been ‘crafted’ by Abishek Jain, Fellow and Director of Powering Livelihoods at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, an independent think-tank.

The first paragraph is something similar to a compact abstract, that foregrounds the problem, and suggests the intended, possible outcome as well.

Then the author proceeds to divide his essay into three parts, which is then followed by his concluding remarks.

In short, his article contains the basic structure of an essay –

An Introduction,

A Body, and

A Conclusion

After having got the basic structure of an essay right, then comes the organising part of the article, which the writer had done remarkably as well.

Here goes the Introductory part of the article - 

Now let us move on to the Body of the article - 

Finally, let us look at the Concluding Remarks given by the author -  

Writing a well-crafted essay is as simple as this! 

Only that, you need to plan before you go ahead and build your answer!

Now the question is –

Is structure that important to writing an essay?

At least for academic essays, or formal writing, yes, it is!

That’s because a structure helps you organise your thoughts coherently!

It provides the skeletal framework for your writing. 

It helps to lead and to guide the reader in a beautifully graded way to your ideas, one by one!

In other words, a structure provides a sure foundation – a solid foundation for your writing.

So before you start writing, make sure you plan the structure of your article well in advance.

Imagine you are an architect planning to ‘build’ a beautiful, palatial house.

Before you build, as an architect, you will do a lot of planning, ain’t you?

You will do a ‘structural’ master plan of the proposed palatial house – the outcome - and only then go ahead and build it!

As a writer, you double up as an architect as well!

To sum it up, it would do well to remember the famed axiomatic expression, slightly rehashed - 

All WRITERS are ARCHITECTS, but all ARCHITECTS are not Necessarily WRITERS. :-)

PS: For more on this article titled, The Writer as Architect, you may want to read our past post HERE on our academic blog.