The Process of Writing a Process Analysis Essay

The process of writing a process analysis essay is something that confounds many students. Weeks may be spent in a college English class discussing this one type of essay. Though writing one may seem daunting, I believe that, once informed everyone can learn to write a very good essay.

To start with: what is a process analysis essay? Hodges Harbrace Handbook says it is a rhetorical strategy either to instruct the reader how to perform a procedure or to explain how something occurs (789). What this means, basically, is a step-by-step description of an action. This can be anything from digestion to building an airplane.

So, after figuring out what a Process Analysis is, you begin the task at hand-writing the essay. First, pick a topic that interests you or your audience (preferably both.) Say your topic is The Process of Writing a Process Analysis Essay. You would want to go to the library and find as many books as possible relating to this subject. You may also use the World Wide Web (the Web) in gathering information. Be wary of jumping right into a Web search, however, as researchers can be overwhelmed by the number of available sites and waste time investigating sites that prove unhelpful. [Also] a high percentage of sites lack credibility (Hodges 525).

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The next step is the actual writing process. Start the paper with an introductory paragraph. This will contain your thesis statement, the most important of all literary terms (other than foreshadowing.) Your thesis statement sums up what your paper is about. If your essay was about duck migration, your thesis statement might be, Ducks are crazy, migrating animals. Most teachers want beginners to underline their thesis statement. (ex: Ducks are crazy, migrating animals.)

After your introductory paragraph, you must begin the body. This is the meat of the paper that all your info is contained in. You must put together all the info you have collected into some recognizable order. In a Process Analysis essay, the body would be the several paragraphs containing the steps of the process. Be especially careful of the connections between your sentences in a process essay. There is a temptation to connect each sentence with And then, then,,and then (Professional 201). That's all right when Aunt Gloria is telling you how to make meat loaf, but it's boring in an essay. Try writing the essay with all the and thens you want, and then go back and eliminate most of them; you'll probably find you don't need most of them. Try for a variety of transitional tags. Don't number the steps of your essay, and avoid using words like secondly, thirdly, etc. (Professional 201). You might want to say "first" and "second," but then let the numbering go!

Explain each step of the process with details, thus giving the reader a better idea of how it works. I find that giving each step its own paragraph fits everything in nicely.

One of the most important things to remember about writing any essay is citing your sources. Cite means simply to mention (Incomplete 622). You are required to cite any material you gather information from and use in your paper. This is to make sure you have not made up the information, for one, and also to add credibility to your paper. People are more willing to believe your ideas when you tell them someone else said it first. When you cite a source, you give all the information you can. This includes the title of the source, the author, the publisher, the date, etc. (Example: Magoo, Mister. Blind Justice. New York: Printing Press, 1965)

Although you reserve a separate page for your works cited, it is also important to cite direct quotations from your source. This comes in the form of a parenthesized keyword and page number at the end of your quote.

When you have concluded the body of your essay, that is usually a good spot for a conclusion paragraph. A conclusion paragraph, like the introductory paragraph, merely sums up the paper. The conclusion paragraph contains a conclusion sentence, which is just a mirror of the thesis statement (Language).

And now, since I have reached the end of my essay, I will reach a conclusion. That conclusion being that if you follow these easy steps, you will be one step closer to describing, in essay form, the steps of a process in your own Process Analysis essay. Anyone can do it, and probably would if they knew how.

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