Project III
Dividing your researched essay into sections—advanced

Consider that the most natural and logical way to determine what sections you will have in your essay is to begin with your thesis. A well written thesis statement should serve as a promise to the reader what you will explain, analyze, demonstrate, argue etc. and it can serve as a kind of roadmap for you.

For example, let’s use one of the topics from the suggested topics page : an olfactory history of your neighborhood. Let’s use as the thesis “When I walk through my neighborhood, specific smells trigger specific memories.” In order to make this essay compelling and informative rather than simply a memoir, you might research neurological connections between smell-memory, and how psychologists understand the function of smell in determining mood, and whether specific smells trigger similar responses in most people or whether the response to smell is learned based on experience with smell, and you might interview a few people about their own smell responses.

Now you have a lot of information and need to organize it. So: back to your thesis: “When I walk through my neighborhood, specific smells trigger specific memories.

And consider that a generic template for the structure of many types of writing is:

In this case, to create background for your thesis you need to describe or explain your neighborhood, its appearance, character, and some of the key places in it, as well as something about your own relationship to your neighborhood.

The problem or examples your thesis suggests requires you to give examples of specific smells of specific places and explain what memories they trigger for you. (Ex: Faint smell of pine in front of your house always makes you think of skiing, even in the summer, while the whiff of soap from the local Laundromat recalls for you the swimming pool at your old summer camp. If other people have given you examples, you might include them. You need to demonstrate that the situation you are writing about actually exists.

Possible solutions would be interpretations, the results of your research, that would pose explanations for WHY your belief that smell triggers memory might be supportable and not just some crazy idea of yours.

Evaluating: Be sure to analyze these solutions. For example, if the faintly charcoal smell of the park’s warming house reminds you of sledding in the park, how can you be sure it’s the smell and not the sight of the warming house that’s provoking the memory? You might NOT be able to definitively prove it, but at least you have to discuss the possibility so that it’s clear you’ve thought through problems with your thesis.

I encourage you to use notes/notecards for your non-researched information (for example, one notecard to describe each location, another for each smell and its memory, etc.) as well as for the researched information. That’s so you can experiment with the form of your paper.

The four categories we just looked at contain the information you need to include in your paper. But do you have to include it in those four sections in that order? Well, you could. But that’s likely to be a dry, dull essay.

What if you structured the essay so that it followed a walking path through your neighborhood? At each of several stops you could explain your smell memories, include any anecdotes or research that seemed to fit that particular example, and evaluate as you go. Or you might organize by types of smells (powerful, faint, pleasant, offensive) presenting one at a time, for each presenting the examples from your neighborhood, the appropriate research, the discussion of ideas. That would focus more on comparison. Or you might begin with smells that trigger memories from early childhood and work chronologically through smells with teenage memories, and smells with more adult associations. Again, some comparison would be involved. How you organize your essay should be determined by how you’d like to focus it.

The purpose of this reading is to show you that while there is certainly information you must present in your essay, there are many ways to plan its organization. If you are not certain now what your organization should be, definitely use as categories the background-problem-solution-evaluation model from above, since that will cover the information you need. You can always reorganize as you write, or as you revise.