An Essay Map
How to Structure, Guide
and Rework the Flow of an Essay
The buck stops with me, and need to take responsibility for what I have control over. I want (and wanted) your essays to be pretty damn incredible, but they are not. They do have the seeds of greatness in them. There is plenty of raw material that can be refined into a more precious metal than you have now—but given the stakes—we need to rethink what we have done and how we can salvage amazing essays out of the work already produced.
Last week I posted a guide for creating a video essay that outlined the general flow that a video essay (or any essay) could follow. Many of you loosely followed the outline.
Very loosely…
Do you remember this?
Stumped? Maybe this will help get you on track. This basic formula will work for a video, an essay, and even a portfolio. It will also allow you to have both the cool factor of a video as well as great writing piece for your applications—if you want. This formula creates about a ten minute video.
Scene One: Introduce Thoreau.
• Open with scenes from Walden Pond with a 30 second narration of an excerpt from “Economy.” (30 seconds)
Scene Two: Introduce yourself
- Narrate (or video) your opening paragraph. "Set the scene and state the theme". (1 minute: 200 words is about a minute)
Scene Three: Your Narrative.
- Tell your personal story about your experience studying Thoreau, going to Walden, and discussing Walden in class. Be sure to touch on how your thoughts evolved and even perhaps changed as we dug deeper into the book and you wrote “deeper” and more thoughtfully in your journal. This is a good place to steal some of your reading responses and your reflection from the Walden trip. (2-4 minutes)
Scene Four: Analysis of Thoreau’s Ideas.
- Weave in your analysis paragraphs, but rework them slightly to reflect your narrative voice: (2-3 minutes)
Scene Five: The Takeaways.
- How are Thoreau’s ideas still valid today? What are the takeaways you got from this experience? (1-2 minutes)
Scene Six: The Conclusion.
- Give your viewer some final thoughts to ponder—maybe even end with an excerpt from Walden. (1 minute)
It is still a good “map” but I think we need to formalize this a bit more, so here is a more detailed rubric we'll follow.
For most of you, this will simply be a process of getting rid of some stuff and tweaking some other stuff. For some of you, it will require you to write or edit a few more paragraphs that stick more closely to the themes of “Walden, Thoreau, and You” using the narrative paragraph rubric.
I know that you do not want to spend time doing this, but neither do most of you want to let your essay, in its present form, out of the door.
Each body paragraph has a purpose, and that purpose is to enhance, amplify, elucidate, and/or explain and explicate some part of the theme introduced in your opening paragraph. (Am I repeating myself?) from everything I have read so far, all of your “themes” have to do with you trip to Walden Pond; your reading and study of “Economy,” and how and in what way Thoreau’s life and words influenced you—so that means that all of your paragraphs need to, must, are required to, on pain of death you must do stick to the themes you are covering.
To create an essay that captures both your experience of reading and studying Walden—and your intellectual response to what Thoreau is trying to say in his writings, you will need an essay map that looks (at a minimum) like this--which is essentially the same as my video map, but more specific in "how" you can write.
Narrative Paragraph #1: Theme: Going to Walden Pond. Use the narrative paragraph rubric located on my sidebar: Weave at least two quotes from Walden into the paragraph
- Quote to weave into paragraph: “Lorem ipsum dul cim”
- Quote to weave into paragraph: “Lorem ipsum dul cim”
Narrative Paragraph #2: Theme: Reading “Economy” Use the narrative paragraph rubric located on my sidebar: Weave at least two quotes from Walden into the paragraph
- Quote to weave into paragraph: “Lorem ipsum dul cim”
- Quote to weave into paragraph: “Lorem ipsum dul cim”
(Add additional Narrative Paragraphs if needed)
Transitional Paragraph: At this point in your essay there is a transition from a narrative voice to a more analytical voice, so it is a wise idea to create a bridge paragraph (it need not be a long paragraph) to help the voice shift in a more natural way.
Analytical Paragraph #1: (Already created, so edit and revise as suits your purpose)
Analytical Paragraph #2: (Already created, so edit and revise as suits your purpose)
Metacognition Paragraph: What it all means to you: what are the takeaways from this unit? Where did you struggle and how were you enlightened? What are your final thoughts on Thoreau?
Conclusion: The Tri-colon sentence: Read my blog for details on how to create this type of sentence.
I just spent two hours writing this post—really...so it is not like I am asking you to do more than I ask of myself.
Take the night off from homework. We can start this in class on Thursday. It should be something we can finish in a couple of class periods.
Thanks for being flexible--and I really would not being doing this if I did not think it was important and needed to do.