Basic Essay Formulas
While there are no magic potions that will instantly turn you into a fabulous writer, able to ace any academic assignment, there is a set of basic essay formulas that will serve you well when writing many types of academic essays and responses to essay-type questions.
These formulas represent the underlying structure of the expository essay formula--introduction, body, conclusion--and should be seen as a sort of skeleton on which good writers can build. Remember the lesson of William Shakespeare's sonnets: The Bard used a very strict formula for those poems, each of which had to be exactly 14 rhymed lines with exactly 10 syllables per line. But that rigid formula was just the container, the basic structure that held his overflowing genius.
Bottom line: Study formulas well, but use them wisely.
Five-Paragraph Essay Outline