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Academic writing is a required skill for all the university students. As a student majoring in English Literature, I'm supposed to write critiques of novels and short stories in form of essays; therefore I studied the essay structure: the introduction,the body paragraphs and the conclusion

It was obvious for me that the information should be organized and that the reader must have a brief idea about the whole essay.First of all I included a statement that engaged the reader's attention which is called the hook. The hook must be followed by supporting sentences which are called background information. Background information gives a broader picture of the subject to our audience. I also knew that an introduction requires a thesis statement. To achieve this goal , I focused on what the entite essay wasabout.

The next step for organizing the information is the body paragraphs. Each body paragraph must have a topic sentence. The topic sentence states the contents of each paragraph by controlling our thesis statement. We can have one or two body paragraphs in short essays and three body paragraphs in five-paragraph essays.

My last focus was on bringing the essay to a close.This was possible by providing the conclusion. It is necessary that we restate the thesis of the introduction in other words in our conclusion . We should remember that the conclusion provides new insights or it gives us advices or warnings that the writer has stated.

Academic writing is not just about these three basic parts. It requires other skills such as coherence, unity, choice of vocabulary, grammar and as well as these three basic parts.