Theodore Roosevelt

Writing Guidelines for History Identifications and Essays

Your essay should have an introductory paragraph that in some way summarizes, encapsulates, suggests, shapes, and/or sets up the ideas, themes, facts, or whatever you are going to discuss in the main body of your essay. In other words, you should set forth your thesis.

Here, in the main body of your essay, you should develop the principal ideas and themes, and support them with the appropriate facts. The main body will inevitably be several paragraphs long, perhaps a page or two or more, depending on what you want to say and the amount of material you include. Basically, the main body consists of as many paragraphs as you need to discuss the question at hand.

Also let me note that individual paragraphs generally begin with a topic sentence for that paragraph, follow that by a couple of sentences of development,...
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