Short Essay

A short essay is a common academic assignment for students in high school, graduate school and even undergraduate programs. Short essays allow students to express their opinions, convey ideas, and review information in a succinct way. Professors often assign short essays because they allow students to study a particular topic in depth and think critically about it. Short essays are also easier for professors to read if they have large classes.

In order to write an effective and thorough short essay, learners should follow the same format that they would follow for a normal composition. They should begin with an introduction, which includes information about the purpose of the report, background information about the topic of the report, and a thesis. The thesis for a short essay will be a one-sentence statement that the learner will prove to be true. The thesis states the purpose and goal.

After the introduction, the student should include body paragraphs. In a short essay, the student may wish to only contain three body paragraphs, which is a standard recommendation for shorter works. Each body paragraph should provide new information or ideas that support the thesis.

The last paragraph of the article should contain a conclusion. The short essay may only contain about five paragraphs, so the conclusion might only need to tie together the ideas from the introduction and the three body paragraphs into one easy-to-understand paragraph.

A short report should be formatted to look like an inverted pyramid. The broad theme of the article should be introduced in the beginning. The conclusion should contain the point. Each of the paragraphs should contain information that leads to that point.

The paragraphs of short reports should also look like inverted pyramids, with broad information in the first sentence and the point of the paragraph in the last sentence.

A short report is different than a long essay, even though the two are similar. A short...