Chapter 3 Reading Response

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Emily Baker

January 26, 2015

English 121

Reading Response

Chapter 3

      Chapter 3 of Patterns for College Writing is one of those chapters that I know I will be referring back to often throughout my English 121 course.  I always find that the hardest part of writing for me is figuring out how to structure my essays in a clean and coherent way.  This chapter easily explains the different parts of an essay and what is necessary in each part. I especially found the section about conclusions very helpful. I have always struggled trying to figure out how to wrap up the end of the essay. I appreciated the fact that they give examples of different ways to write a conclusion. This way I’m not stuck writing the same old boring conclusion for every essay, which I essentially did for my history papers. It was also very useful that the chapter adds what not to include in each section. I bet if I went back through every paper I have written throughout my lifetime, I have included at least one of the items in the list to my papers. Now knowing how to properly structure an essay, I am hoping that my writing will greatly improve throughout the semester.

      For any student struggling with writing their papers, I’d strongly recommend reading this chapter and memorizing it. This chapter explains the different types of essays and how to structure them. I like the fact that it has a helpful checklist to help you identify what type of essay you need to write. However, no matter what type of essay you need to write it has 3 basic parts, an introduction, a body and a conclusion. This chapter gives multiple examples of ways to start an introduction, which I believe is important to know so all your essays don’t start sounding redundant. This chapter also puts an emphasis on the idea that everything beginning with the introduction, the meat of the essay (the body) and the conclusion must flow coherently. It gives a page full of solid transition words to use to help keep the essay flowing nicely. One thing that this chapter lacked was explaining what a thesis statement is. It mentions the word thesis statement, but never mentioned the purpose or how to write a thesis. Other than that, this chapter is a very useful chapter for those beginning to learn how to write a good essay.