Building a Great Essay

Imagine your favourite sandwich: what ingredients is it composed of? Some bread, mayonnaise, perhaps; meat, lettuce, and tomato. The works! Now imagine that very sandwich being your essay - the more you have in it, the better, right? What if your sandwich had mayonnaise, peanut butter, lettuce, and cheese? All of those items can be made into a sandwich, but they don't always work well together. The same is true with an essay - you can have a lot of information, but is it always connected?

The key to any great essay is to develop a thesis that will pull and hold everything together. Thesis statements are the foundation to the kind of sandwich you want to build. The slices of bread are your introduction and conclusion. Meat, cheese, lettuce: those represent the body paragraphs.

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