A free guide to types of essays
If you are looking for an essay types guide and you have an assignment on any type of essay or you have an essay type in mind but are not sure how to write the paper using that essay type format, the following essay types guide on the various types of essay will be very helpful.
Five paragraph essay
This essay is considered the simplest. As its name suggest, it contains five paragraphs made up of an introduction, a body comprising three paragraphs, and a summary or a conclusion.
Admission essay
Admission essays are used in job application or college admission. They assess an individual’s abilities for the applied position.
Academic essay
These are commonly used by educational bodies as continuous assessments. This essay seeks to identify whether a student can address a question through research.
Argumentative essay
These essays introduce a strong statement that can either be new or provocative. An argumentative essay uses the standard essay format when supporting a thesis statement or expands an argument using evidence to persuade a reader that the thesis statement is true.
Cause and effect essay
This essay tries to explain the reasons why things happen and there consequence. Apart from the ability of a writer to explain his argument, this essay requires skills to think critically in addition to presenting it in a straightforward language.
Classification essay
A classification essay is mainly concerned with the categorisation of different things. It uses a principle to put things into categories and in place supported by examples for those categories.
Comparison essay
A writer compares and contrasts two or more components which are related under a common topic. In literature you may be asked to use one genre and compare the way two authors address it a similar theme using it.
College essay
This essay is similar to an admission essay. An admission board uses it to gain more information when assessing an application. It provides additional insight into an applicant to help determine if the applicant is suitable to be admitted.
Critical essay
Critical essays assess a piece of writing to show the writing’s most interesting points. It that can either follow or precede a description.
Deductive essay
A deductive essay structure consists of premise, evidence and a conclusion. This essay relies on facts for deductive reasoning to make assumptions resulting in a conclusion.
Definition essay
It involves stating what a thing means. Various subjects may choose different ways to define something although a writer can also select a desired methodology to use.
Descriptive essay
A descriptive essay requires the highest creative writing skills from a writer to assist a person picture a scene, and cause the senses to react. Although it uses a lot of adjectives, semantic fields like adverbs are also used in the essay.
Evaluative essay
This type of essay seeks to evaluate something with reference to a predetermined criterion. A valid evaluation requires that the subject that is to be evaluated, and the evaluation criteria to be employed, be clearly stated.
Exploratory essay
This essay is different from other types of essays because of how it starts is not influenced by the way it’s supposed to end. Readers ‘learn as they progress’, which is different from proving a conclusion they had already made because the essay explores its evidence as it develops.
Expository essay
As opposed to other types of essays, this essay does not require a writer to say what they think, but asks the writer to provide the views of other people just as the term ‘expose’ suggests.
Illustration essay
This essay is similar in many ways to a narrative essay. The main difference is that this essay provides evidence by using illustrations as examples to support a claim. Using an illustrative essay, a writer seeks to make the reader visualize the effect of the argument using the illustrations.
Informal essay
An informal essay is usually intended to entertain a reader. This is the type of essay that you encounter in your early school years when being introduced to essay writing. An example of informal essay can be when you were asked to write an essay about the things you did during the holiday.
Literature essay
This type of essay is used to assess the ability of a student in responding to questions concerning a text, or how a student can select texts in order to respond to a given topic.
Narrative essay
Narratives describe experiences using the structure of a story. A narrative essay’s point of view is normally personal. The description contributes a lot to the feel of the essay with its point of view being personal.
Personal essay
This type of essay is also referred to as personal statement. A personal essay intends to tell a person who does not know anything about you, everything concerning you. A personal essay closely resembles an admission essay.
Example personal essays:
- Healing tears
- What are my core values?
- Goals for the semester
- My athletic career
- Living with a parent who suffers from Bipolar Disorder
Persuasive essay
This essay makes use of reasoned arguments with an intention of making a reader agree with the argument a writer is presenting.
Research essay
Research essay is similar to a persuasive essay because it depends on the reasoned evidence and ideas acquired from research by the writer to support the thesis.
Response essay
Response essays are used when evidence of responses from a reader is required after the reader has read a writing related to the style and biographical information of an author.
Scholarship essay
This essay resembles a personal statement. A scholarship essay requires you to supplement information on the application form with other personal facts that will assist with the admission or assessment procedure.