In many ways, the analytical essay may be the most important essay type you learn in college. A component of the analytical essay is involved in the essays students are asked to write in every academic field. Further, students who are planning to become professionals will be regularly asked to write something akin to the analytical essay in the workplace. Quite often, for an English class, an analytical essay prompt asks students to analyze a poem in order to explain its theme. Students usually believe that this requires them to explain what a poem means. This assumption is somewhat misled,...

The five paragraph essay has an interesting and turbulent history. Long taught as the most handy way to explain the writing process to composition students, it has been both praised and criticized by representatives in higher education. Some professors have found that it limits students by forcing them to express themselves within an artificial structure. Others continue to argue that the five paragraph essay helps students - both in school and in life - by giving them an easy-to-apply device for saying what needs to be said clearly and concisely. Since the vast majority of professors in composition classes teach...

The comparison essay is one of the most commonly assigned English papers, usually appearing early in the semester. Comparison essay assignment prompts are easy to identify since they typically appear in the following form: "Compare and contrast X and Y. Discuss the similarities and differences between X and Y." In a college English class, X might be a poem and Y might be a short story or a brief quote. A comparison essay assignment that includes a short story and a poem is usually asking that the student compare and contrast the theme—or main idea—of each piece of writing. Since...

The typical prompt or assignment for the narrative essay will ask you to describe an event that affected or changed your life. In other words, in the narrative essay prompt, you are being asked to tell a story. Because of the basic structure of this assignment, students are often fooled into thinking that the stories that take place in a narrative essay have to be true, which often becomes a source of anxiety. "How can I write about myself in a way that will interest my professor?" you might find yourself asking. "After all, nothing interesting has happened to me....

The classification essay uses one of the key skills required not only for writing other essay types but for living life generally: the ability to sort ideas and things into categories. Fortunately, most students already have the skills required to write a classification essay, since almost all students are studying in a field that requires them to sort out concepts. For this reason, the classification essay, once a student has some control of academic writing, should come fairly easily. There are two steps involved in planning a classification essay. The first step is to decide what kind of thing you...