A paragraph is a collection of related sentences dealing with a single topic. This handout breaks the paragraph down into its conceptual and structural components. The conceptual components — ...

Has the five-paragraph essay, long a staple in school writing curricula, outlived its usefulness? The venerable writing tool has largely fallen out of favor among influential English/language arts ...

Extended "discourse," such as class presentations or essays written as school assignments, has a particular structure arising from particular expectations and standards. Such structure, expectations, ...

The word essay derives from the title of a 1580 collection of writings by the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne. In his Essays, Montaigne set down his thoughts on whatever subject snared his ...

Dennis Allen doesn’t think the five-paragraph essay is dead. In the years before his retirement in May from West Virginia University, the Professor Emeritus did not assign “strict” five-paragraph ...

This article is the first part in a two-part series examining the disparities between essay-writing styles in nations around the world. This installment focuses on the American model in comparison ...

Do you ever get that sinking feeling when you see “Write an informative essay” on an assignment? Like, you know you gotta explain something, but how do you make it actually interesting? Ugh, the ...

My daughter is in ninth grade and is really struggling with essay writing. English, history, the subject doesn’t matter—she has a meltdown every time. She just stares at the screen and doesn’t know ...

The latter half of Rion Amilcar Scott's outstanding new collection, The World Doesn't Require You, is the brilliant novella "Special Topics in Loneliness Studies," about a college professor at the ...