How to Write Better Essays

ant directions for the examiners, who need to know which way you will

be taking them as they try to navigate the unfamiliar terrain of your

thinking. To take the city analogy again, they need to know at each

intersection and every turning, which way you intend to go, otherwise

you will leave them mystified and confused as to what you’re doing,

and they will be unable to award you marks, even though your work

may be good. So, if in doubt use one.

Paragraphs 191

Practice exercise 16

Write the topic sentence

Question

‘Authority amounts to no more than the possession of power.’

Discuss.

Look at the introduction we wrote for this question in the last chapter

and our interpretation of it in Chapter 2. It’s clear from the introduction

that we are going to start by arguing that the proposition is true, if

we take the concept of authority to imply someone ‘in’ authority. This

section of the essay could be represented by the notes below.

As you can see, we could probably write this in two paragraphs. The

first paragraph would deal with ‘official authority’, the sort given to

people like the police and government officials. Taking this as our first

paragraph after the introduction, write a topic sentence for it.

Once you’ve done this, compare your topic sentence with the one below.

The notes

Question

‘Authority amounts to no more than the possession of power.’

Discuss.

1. Proposition =True if authority is taken to mean ‘in’ authority:

=authority amounts to the power to make things worse – to

oblige people to comply with orders

HTW25 7/27/01 8:35 AM Page 191