Typically, an essay has five paragraphs: an introduction, a conclusion, and three body paragraphs. However, there is no set rule about the number of paragraphs in an essay.
The number of paragraphs can vary depending on the type and scope of your essay. An expository or argumentative essay may require more body paragraphs to include all the necessary information, whereas a narrative essay may need fewer.
To enhance the coherence and readability of your essay, it’s important to follow certain rules regarding the structure. Take a look:
1. Arrange your information from the most simple to the most complex bits. You can start the body paragraph off with a general statement and then move on to specifics.
2. Provide the necessary background information at the beginning of your essay to give the reader the context behind your thesis statement.
3. Select topic statements that provide value, more information, or evidence for your thesis statement.
There are also various essay structures , such as the compare and contrast structure, chronological structure, problem method solution structure, and signposting structure that you can follow to create an organized and impactful essay.
An impactful, well-structured essay comes down to three important parts: the introduction, body, and conclusion.
1. The introduction sets the stage for your essay and is typically a paragraph long. It should grab the reader’s attention and give them a clear idea of what your essay will be about.
2. The body is where you dive deeper into your topic and present your arguments and evidence. It usually consists of two paragraphs, but this can vary depending on the type of essay you’re writing.
3. The conclusion brings your essay to a close and is typically one paragraph long. It should summarize the main points of the essay and leave the reader with something to think about.
The length of your paragraphs can vary depending on the type of essay you’re writing. So, make sure you take the time to plan out your essay structure so each section flows smoothly into the next.
When it comes to writing an essay, the introduction is a critical component that sets the tone for the entire piece. A well-crafted introduction not only grabs the reader’s attention but also provides them with a clear understanding of what the essay is all about. An essay editor can help you achieve this, but it’s best to know the brief yourself!
Let’s take a look at how to write an attractive and informative introductory paragraph.
1. Construct an attractive hook
To grab the reader’s attention, an opening statement or hook is crucial. This can be achieved by incorporating a surprising statistic, a shocking fact, or an interesting anecdote into the beginning of your piece.
For example, if you’re writing an essay about water conservation you can begin your essay with, “Clean drinking water, a fundamental human need, remains out of reach for more than one billion people worldwide. It deprives them of a basic human right and jeopardizes their health and wellbeing.”
2. Provide sufficient context or background information
An effective introduction should begin with a brief description or background of your topic. This will help provide context and set the stage for your discussion.
For example, if you’re writing an essay about climate change, you start by describing the current state of the planet and the impact that human activity is having on it.
3. Construct a well-rounded and comprehensive thesis statement
A good introduction should also include the main message or thesis statement of your essay. This is the central argument that you’ll be making throughout the piece. It should be clear, concise, and ideally placed toward the end of the introduction.
By including these elements in your introduction, you’ll be setting yourself up for success in the rest of your essay.
Let’s take a look at an example.
The Wright Brothers’ invention of the airplane in 1903 revolutionized the way humans travel and explore the world. Prior to this invention, transportation relied on trains, boats, and cars, which limited the distance and speed of travel. However, the airplane made air travel a reality, allowing people to reach far-off destinations in mere hours. This breakthrough paved the way for modern-day air travel, transforming the world into a smaller, more connected place. In this essay, we will explore the impact of the Wright Brothers’ invention on modern-day travel, including the growth of the aviation industry, increased accessibility of air travel to the general public, and the economic and cultural benefits of air travel.
You can persuade your readers and make your thesis statement compelling by providing evidence, examples, and logical reasoning. To write a fool-proof and authoritative essay, you need to provide multiple well-structured, substantial arguments.
Let’s take a look at how this can be done:
1. Write a topic sentence for each paragraph
The beginning of each of your body paragraphs should contain the main arguments that you’d like to address. They should provide ground for your thesis statement and make it well-rounded. You can arrange these arguments in several formats depending on the type of essay you’re writing.
2. Provide the supporting information
The next point of your body paragraph should provide supporting information to back up your main argument. Depending on the type of essay, you can elaborate on your main argument with the help of relevant statistics, key information, examples, or even personal anecdotes.
3. Analyze the supporting information
After providing relevant details and supporting information, it is important to analyze it and link it back to your main argument.
End one body paragraph with a smooth transition to the next. There are many ways in which this can be done, but the most common way is to give a gist of your main argument along with the supporting information with transitory words such as “however” “in addition to” “therefore”.
Here’s an example of a body paragraph.
The Wright Brothers’ invention of the airplane revolutionized air travel. They achieved the first-ever successful powered flight with the Wright Flyer in 1903, after years of conducting experiments and studying flight principles. Despite their first flight lasting only 12 seconds, it was a significant milestone that paved the way for modern aviation. The Wright Brothers’ success can be attributed to their systematic approach to problem-solving, which included numerous experiments with gliders, the development of a wind tunnel to test their designs, and meticulous analysis and recording of their results. Their dedication and ingenuity forever changed the way we travel, making modern aviation possible.
A powerful concluding statement separates a good essay from a brilliant one. To create a powerful conclusion, you need to start with a strong foundation.
Let’s take a look at how to construct an impactful concluding statement.
1. Restructure your thesis statement
To conclude your essay effectively, don’t just restate your thesis statement. Instead, use what you’ve learned throughout your essay and modify your thesis statement accordingly. This will help you create a conclusion that ties together all of the arguments you’ve presented.
2. Summarize the main points of your essay
The next point of your conclusion consists of a summary of the main arguments of your essay. It is crucial to effectively summarize the gist of your essay into one, well-structured paragraph.
3. Create a lasting impression with your concluding statement
Conclude your essay by including a key takeaway, or a powerful statement that creates a lasting impression on the reader. This can include the broader implications or consequences of your essay topic.
Here’s an example of a concluding paragraph.
The Wright Brothers’ invention of the airplane forever changed history by paving the way for modern aviation and countless aerospace advancements. Their persistence, innovation, and dedication to problem-solving led to the first successful powered flight in 1903, sparking a revolution in transportation that transformed the world. Today, air travel remains an integral part of our globalized society, highlighting the undeniable impact of the Wright Brothers’ contribution to human civilization.
Most essays are derived from the combination or variation of these four main types of essays . let’s take a closer look at these types.
1. Narrative essay
A narrative essay is a type of writing that involves telling a story, often based on personal experiences. It is a form of creative nonfiction that allows you to use storytelling techniques to convey a message or a theme.
2. Descriptive essay
A descriptive essay aims to provide an immersive experience for the reader by using sensory descriptors. Unlike a narrative essay, which tells a story, a descriptive essay has a narrower scope and focuses on one particular aspect of a story.
3. Argumentative essays
An argumentative essay is a type of essay that aims to persuade the reader to adopt a particular stance based on factual evidence and is one of the most common forms of college essays.
4. Expository essays
An expository essay is a common format used in school and college exams to assess your understanding of a specific topic. The purpose of an expository essay is to present and explore a topic thoroughly without taking any particular stance or expressing personal opinions.
While this article demonstrates what is an essay and describes its types, you may also have other doubts. As experts who provide essay editing and proofreading services , we’re here to help.
Our team has created a list of resources to clarify any doubts about writing essays. Keep reading to write engaging and well-organized essays!
What is the difference between an argumentative and an expository essay, what is the difference between a narrative and a descriptive essay, what is an essay format, what is the meaning of essay, what is the purpose of writing an essay.
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Problem & motivation.
In the new world of developing AI usage, industries are facing new and unique challenges. In the classroom setting, MGT (machine-generated text) usage in student essays presents new and complex challenges that educators must navigate. 1) Educators need to use additional time to not only evaluate student essays, now they have to check if these essays were written by a machine or by them. And this is a very complicated task for them to manually check, especially since we should not expect them to have a strong background in MGT. 2) Millions of students have been suspected of using MGT in their essays. 3) Current MGT detection tools are not as reliable as they claim. This is especially important, since false positives can lead to students being accused of using MGT, when they haven't. Our capstone aim is to create an MGT detection tool that can determine if K-12 grade student essays are either MGT or human-written. Our ultimate aim is to uphold academic integrity and keep students accountable. Relieve educators the burden of manually checking every single essay for MGT and giving them back valuable time. And finally we aim to instill confidence to them regarding AI text detection tool's accuracy
Our project used a dataset including 160000 student essays. This dataset includes a mix of human-written and MGT essays. The MGT is generated from various generative text models (e.g. ChatGPT, Llama-70b, Falcon 180b). We used a Binoculars score model to determine the distinction between MGT and human-written. It works by computing scores for the LLM tokens and evaluates the text based on how "surprising" the tokens are. The more "surprising" the text, the more likely it is to be human. This model was evaluated to be robust with an AUC of 0.9933.
Upon initial testing, we found that the model was robust at distinguishing between purely human-written essays and MGT essays with recall score of 0.98. We primarily looked at the recall score, since we wanted to prioritize minimizing false negatives. Since this result meant that students would get away with using MGT on their essay. Based on feedback from an educator, we learned that students can try evading MGT detection tools by replacing only parts of their essay with MGT, instead of solely relying on MGT. So our team generated new datasets by replacing (rephrasing or fill-in-blank) parts of human-written essays based on set percentages of masking tokens with MGT to evaluate the binoculars score model. This is to replicate the real-world scenario of a student replacing parts of their essay with MGT.
While the model is robust at distinguishing between purely human-written essays and MGT essays, it falls short at determining partially MGT essays. We found that the more MGT present in a student essay, the better the model performed. binoculars is able to detect "Fill-in-blank" MGT more accurately than "Rephrase" MGT. To binoculars, there is more similarity between a completely human-written essay and an essay with a small amount of human text.
We want to give a major shoutout to Puya Vahabi and Kira Wetzel and our domain expert. Their feedback has been extremely helpful, and we cannot thank them enough.
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The Criterion Collection
By Peter Becker
Aug 8, 2024
The following is the introduction featured in CC40, a monumental forty-film box set that celebrates forty years of the Criterion Collection.
O ver the past forty years, the Criterion Collection offices have played host to a huge network of directors, actors, writers, artists, musicians, technicians, and scholars of all kinds. Many come in to collaborate with us on Criterion special-edition releases, others to work on original productions for our streaming service, the Criterion Channel. Little by little, our offices have become a kind of unofficial hub for film folks visiting New York. Word spread, and soon people started stopping in just because they had heard there was something special about this place.
Whenever luminaries arrive, we like to give them a little tour. People seem to enjoy floating through corridors lined with huge vintage film posters and Criterion’s original work, then turning a corner into the art department, where the next, yet-to-be-unveiled designs are pinned up on the walls. Only a few steps away is a book-lined conference room that, on any given day, might have been transformed into a professional studio and set up for a two-camera shoot. Down the hall, past producers’ offices rife with the relics of previous releases, the editorial team works on essays, not far from the rooms where new video interviews and introductions are in postproduction and the finishing touches are being made to the picture and sound of a 4K master. Channel programming, social media, and customer service all work in the same space where a group of students or journalists might be waiting for a film to start in our screening room. We like showing that everything Criterion makes is a team effort, that it all emanates from this one place, that it all happens right here.
In the back of the office is a big, open, sunlit kitchen where there is a wall of hand-signed Fujifilm Instax portraits (like widescreen Polaroids) pinned on a white board in a huge grid. There’s Agnès Varda, Bill Hader, Barry Jenkins, William Friedkin, Willem Dafoe, Cate Blanchett and Todd Field, Juliette Binoche, Alexander Payne, Greta Gerwig, Bong Joon Ho, Aubrey Plaza, Anna Karina, Flying Lotus, Chloë Sevigny . . . It’s dizzying. The more you look, the more familiar faces you see. And while some of the photos were taken in the kitchen, most were taken in a tiny room, the inevitable last stop on the tour, the Criterion closet.
The people who visit us have one thing in common. They all love movies, and the Criterion product-storage closet is one of the most concentrated doses of cinephile inspiration anywhere on the planet. In something like sixty square feet are nearly two thousand gems of world cinema, from the silent period to the present day. And for as long as I can remember, we’ve wrapped up every visit to the office with a little offer: Is there anything you’re pining for? Would you like to visit the closet? No one leaves empty-handed.
We’ve had many memorable conversations in the closet over the years. Spurred by the presence of so much cinematic stimulation, our guests have opened up about their most formative film experiences in casual, intimate, off-the-cuff ways. Learning someone’s movie taste turns out to be a great way to get to know them personally: what breaks their heart or blows their mind, feeds their guilty pleasures or triggers their pet peeves. And then, of course, there are the stories, the behind-the-scenes tales and details too trivial to chase down for a formal supplemental feature but just delicious when shared between friends.
Guillermo del Toro was not the first person to raid the closet, but he was the first to do it on camera. The most passionate, generous, and hardworking film fan you’ll ever meet, Guillermo was excited to have us shoot his closet visit when he stopped by one day in September 2010. He was in and out in under three minutes, for the most part offering little more than brief exclamations of enthusiasm for each new choice. But watching the video after he left, we knew it was something special. “A very small robbery,” he said, before ducking out the door with a black Criterion tote bag full of his favorite films. And with this, the Criterion Closet Picks video was born.
Today, the Criterion Closet Picks videos have taken on a life of their own, accumulating millions of views on YouTube. Publicists have made the Criterion closet a stop on many art-house filmmakers’ publicity tours. Now, more often than not, the first thing people say when they come to the office is, “Where’s the closet?” and then, when they see it, “My gosh, it’s so small!” and then, “It really is just a closet!” Watching these movie lovers championing their favorites from the collection and discovering new things to watch has introduced a new generation to Criterion, and to the array of important classic and contemporary films that we have published over the decades.
When it came time to choose a theme for this commemorative collection in honor of our fortieth anniversary, in 2024, we struggled. How could we choose forty editions from among the 1,200 we had so carefully selected, each on its own terms, each for the story it had to tell? Gradually we realized that the answer was in the closet itself and all the passionate choices that had been made in that space. In a sense, the closet is the heart of the collection in the world, the sum of our work in all departments for forty years, gathered in one place—with all its potential energy intact and ready to be unleashed. No single curator could make this choice, but what if we were guided by the passions of all those inspiring visitors, by their curiosity and hunger to choose new film experiences or to tell the world about the films they love most?
When we gathered the list of the films most frequently selected from the closet, there was a palpable sigh of relief. Here was a selection we could all get behind, at once iconic and adventurous, not obvious in any way, featuring many of the finest films ever made, handpicked by nearly two hundred of the most creative and thoughtful people we know. These movies are accompanied by all of the special features from their stand-alone editions, including the essays that follow in this book. The result is the collection you have in your hands, a labor of love, an archive of the work of our community, and a very partial record of four decades of dedication to cinema.
Made in an era when self-consciously postmodern takes on the Bard were popular, Gus Van Sant’s melancholy road movie mines the ambiguously queer tensions in the history play Henry IV.
By Shonni Enelow
During a tumultuous period in New York’s history, movies like Midnight Cowboy , Taxi Driver, and Shaft found excitement and squalor in one of the city’s most infamous tourist attractions.
By Nathaniel Rich
At their best, movies that showcase a sizable collective of virtuosic actors can give you the feeling of a rich ecosystem being brought to life.
By Isaac Butler
A collection on the Criterion Channel charts the evolution of the synthesizer—from its infancy in the 1950s to its maturity in the 1980s—and its transformative impact on film music.
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The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies.
Donald J. Trump intends to bring independent regulatory agencies under direct presidential control. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times
Supported by
By Jonathan Swan Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman
Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.
Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.
Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.
Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.
He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.
He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”
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Andrew s. jacobs , harvard divinity school. [email protected].
[Authors and titles are listed at the end of this review.]
“The world of late antiquity” as a field of study since the 1970s is, perhaps, too often associated with a few specific Anglophone sites of elaboration and primarily with the intersections of early Christian studies (or, in another register, “patristics”) and post-Roman history (or, in another register, “classics”). The present volume, a Festschrift for Hebrew University professor Oded Irshai, is a salutary reminder that creative and generative thinking about late antiquity emerges from other, polyglot sites and can just as easily center Jews and Judaism alongside their Christian and “pagan” neighbors. Every contributor to the present volume (apart from co-editor and introduction author Martin Goodman) is a student, recent student, or faculty member in Israel and their offerings here traverse the same complicated grounds as the many works of Irshai himself: the social histories of religious contact, conflict, competition, and conquest in late antiquity, particularly among Jews and Christians, most notably in the fraught spaces of the “holy land.”
In an “ode to Oded” that opens the volume, Paula Fredriksen (who has co-written and co-taught with Irshai) explores Irshai’s “intellectual versatility,” engendered, in part, by a “late antiquicizing” postdoctorate year at Cambridge where he studied with, among others, Arnaldo Momigliano. Fredrisken then surveys three primary areas of Irshai’s vast publications (sacred violence, eschatology, and local real estate and power politics) before dwelling with real warmth on Irshai’s “intellectual generosity” (which I, too, have experienced during my career).
Following a brief introduction by Martin Goodman, who co-edited the volume with one of Irshai’s current doctoral students, the compact and uniformly smart set of essays unfolds in four uneven sections.
Three essays comprise the first section on “Religion and the Visual.” Yonatan Moss proposes a new solution to the riddle of the Helios mosaic found in Hammat Tiberias and other late ancient synagogues. Moss argues that the era of this mosaic’s construction was also one in which imperial imagery was uncoupled from its “pagan” associations with Sol Invictus and instead was seen as a secular echo of imperial imagery. On the one hand (a “minimalist” argument), this desacralization of the sun image made astrological representation more readily available to anti-idolatry mosaicists and synagogue heads. On the other hand (a “maximalist” argument) the de-divinized association between Constantinian emperors and sun imagery (as on coins) provided Jewish communities an opportunity to signal their affiliation with the imperial household, an opportunity that would become less available in the increasingly anti-Jewish fifth and sixth centuries.
Next, Noa Yuval-Hacham explores the brief emergence of a “hand of God” motif in Jewish art (a motif that would remain much more plentiful in Christian imagery of Late Antiquity). Beginning with the fulsome use of God’s hand in the paintings of the Dura Europos synagogue, Yuval-Hacham posits a Syrian origin for the motif, adopted by Jewish artists as it allowed them to find a representational “middle path between the hidden, formless God, and the God who is represented in human scale.” Yuval-Hacham then follows the path of the dual hands of God in the Dura scene of the parting of the Red Sea down various imagistic and interpretive byways of the fifth and sixth century.
In the final essay of this section, Zeev Weiss takes readers on a tour of late ancient Sepphoris, particularly its religious buildings (“a temple, two churches, and several synagogues”), with particular attention to how the Jews of Sepphoris might have lived in a typically multicultural urban space. While Moss’s essay in this section lacks any Helios images, Yuval-Hacham’s and Weiss’s essay each have several black-and-white images and reconstructions to help readers.
The longest section, on “Christian Perspectives,” comprises six essays. Yonatan Livneh revisits Cyril of Jerusalem’s promotion of his city’s interests; contra Jan Willem Drijvers’ argument that Cyril leveraged both the sacred sites of the city and its episcopal tradition stretching back to James, Livneh finds distinct reticence on the latter count, owing perhaps to rising anti-Judaism in the fourth century: “Jerusalem’s early history… remained a minefield.” Jacob Ashkenazi triangulates the efforts to establish a Christian capital between Juvenal, bishop of Jerusalem, and the empresses Eudocia and Pulcheria in the fifth century. Eudocia’s and Juvenal’s rival efforts in Jerusalem are placed in tension with Pulcheria’s efforts in Constantinople.
We move from episcopal politics to reinterpretations of sacred history. Osnat Rance (co-editor of the volume) gives a concise and persuasive summary of her argument to reassign the authorship and origins of an Encomium for the Martyrs found with other texts of Eusebius of Caesarea in a fifth-century Syriac manuscript. Per Rance, the particular sweep of martyrial history, from Old Testament martyrs to the third century CE, puts the text somewhere around Antioch after Eusebius’s death. In one of the more ambitious short offerings, Aryeh Kofsky and Serge Ruzer survey texts in Greek, Latin, and Syriac from Acts of the Apostles to the Cave of Treasures to trace diverse ideas about “Eschatological Ingathering of Israel in Early Christianity.” Oscillating between literal anticipation and spiritualized hesitation, this variety of texts from church orders to apocalypses to hagiographies index attitudes to Jews and Judaism among Christian thinkers.
Ora Limor brings her considerable expertise on relics and pilgrimage to the question of Jesus’s footprints at the Church of the Ascension, which began appearing in texts in Late Antiquity before being viewed by pilgrims, etched in stone, in the Middle Ages. Limor follows this trail from “text to texture”; what began as a marvel—footprints imprinted in sand that could never be wiped away—reported secondhand in literary texts in Rome and Gaul materialized as a stone monument centuries later witnessed by the pilgrims themselves. At issue, Limor suggests in her conclusion, may be internal Christian anxieties about divine embodiment as well as external competition, especially with Muslims, for proof of God’s ongoing presence in the holy land.
This section concludes with the most precise and focused of the essays: Daniel Schwartz’s correction of much modern interpretation of the verb ἐπηγάγετο in the Testimonium Flavianum as a pejorative reference to Jesus that might bolster the authenticity of the passage in question. Schwartz tracks this modern misinterpretation to a misreading of a parenthetical note in the nineteenth-century version of a sixteenth-century Greek lexicon. Nonetheless, Schwartz does not find in this correction an argument against the Testimonium ’s authenticity.
We turn to two essays from “Jewish Perspectives,” both of which assess Jewish (in both cases, rabbinic) views of Rome. Joshua Levinson plumbs the complexities of imperialized identity—through mimicry, magic, and diaspora refraction—in narratives of Palestinian rabbis sojourning in the Eternal City: “The journey to the heart of the other culture reveals that the very distinctions that enable identity are more unstable and porous than they may wish to acknowledge. Each side wears the other’s mask.” Levinson attempts a complex, even postcolonial read of rabbis considering Rome; Eyal Ben-Eliyahu’s aim is more concrete: to identify the two huts mentioned in rabbinic literature built by Romulus at the founding of the city in the actual landscape of late ancient Rome. Triangulating rabbinic and non-rabbinic evidence, Ben-Eliyahu lands on the “Casa Romuli” on the Palatine and Capitoline Hills.
The collection concludes with two essays on “Influence and Competition.” Hillel Newman brings us into the world of late ancient Jewish apocalypticism by placing the Sefer Eliyahu in literal dialogue (through juxtaposition of pertinent passages) with the Latin poet Commodian, particularly his apocalyptic Carmen de duo populis (which scholars date anywhere from the third through fifth centuries). Newman’s larger goal is to show that certain references to the apocalyptic “king from the East” may draw on common apocalyptic motifs dating long before the sixth century (he also adduces Lactantius to a lesser extent) and should not be taken as instances of vaticinia ex eventu that place the Sefer Eliyahu in a seventh-century context (Newman prefers the sixth century). The final essay, on “rest” in competitive Christian and Jewish contexts by Israel Jacob Yuval, comprises a vast sweep, both philosophical (“How did the idea of rest evolve?”) and historical, from Enūma Eliš to the Middle Ages, from Christian attempts to wrest rest from Saturday to Sunday to the deep—and perhaps very subtly anti-Christian—meditations of the Havdala liturgy.
Most of the essays are tightly focused on individual texts or images (or even on a single Greek word, in the case of Schwartz’s essay); only a few essays (by Kofsky and Ruzer, Limor, and Yuval) take a longer view of their subjects. They are all carefully argued and written (mistakes are few: a bishop’s death off by a decade, a passage ascribed to Genesis instead of Exodus) and they are refreshingly accessible, if not necessarily of immediate relevance, to all manner of students of late antiquity, no matter our particular specialization.
Readers will find that the essays cover a tremendous amount of ground, from divine imagery to ecclesiastical competition to pilgrimage to Jewish responses to empire. Should such a vast array of offerings seem too broad to those readers, it should be noted that these are topics all covered by Irshai himself, as the footnotes amply attest: as good Festschrifters , the authors here build on their honoree’s intellectual versatility and generosity.
Authors and Titles
PAULA FREDRIKSEN, with OSNAT RANCE — Ode to Oded
MARTIN GOODMAN — Introduction
Religion and the Visual
YONATAN MOSS — The Emperor’s New Clothes: the ‘Jewish Helios’ Enigma in its Christian Imperial Context
NOA YUVAL-HACHAM — Between Heaven and Earth: The Hand of God in Ancient Jewish Visuality
ZEEV WEISS — Shaping Religious Space: Pagans, Jews and Christians in Ancient Sepphoris
Christian Perspectives
YONATAN LIVNEH — Cyril’s New Jerusalem and His Omission of Local Church History
JACOB ASHKENAZI — Eudocia, Pulcheria, and Juvenal: Competition in the Field of Religion and the Built Environment of Jerusalem in the Fifth Century CE
OSNAT RANCE — ‘Although Their Names Escaped Me’: Local Patriotism and Saints Commemoration in Late Antique Syria
ARYEH KOFSKY and SERGE RUZER — Rethinking the Eschatological Ingathering of Israel in Early Christianity
ORA LIMOR — Divina Vestigia : Tracking the Early History of Jesus’ Footprints at the Mount of Olives
DANIEL R. SCHWARTZ — Reinach and Stephanus, Philo and Josephus: A Note on the Testimonium Flavianum
Jewish Perspectives
JOSHUA LEVINSON — When in Rome
EYAL BEN-ELIYAHU — Where were the Two Huts of Remus and Romulus in Rome?
Influence and Competition
HILLEL NEWMAN — The Hebrew Book of Elijah and Commodian’s Carmen de duobus populis
ISRAEL JACOB YUVAL — And the Rest is History: Sabbath versus Sunday
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Step 1: Start with a question. You should come up with an initial thesis, sometimes called a working thesis, early in the writing process. As soon as you've decided on your essay topic, you need to work out what you want to say about it—a clear thesis will give your essay direction and structure.
It is a brief statement of your paper's main argument. Essentially, you are stating what you will be writing about. Organize your papers in one place. Try Paperpile. No credit card needed. Get 30 days free. You can see your thesis statement as an answer to a question. While it also contains the question, it should really give an answer to the ...
A good thesis has two parts. It should tell what you plan to argue, and it should "telegraph" how you plan to argue—that is, what particular support for your claim is going where in your essay. Steps in Constructing a Thesis. First, analyze your primary sources. Look for tension, interest, ambiguity, controversy, and/or complication.
Revised on April 16, 2024. A thesis is a type of research paper based on your original research. It is usually submitted as the final step of a master's program or a capstone to a bachelor's degree. Writing a thesis can be a daunting experience. Other than a dissertation, it is one of the longest pieces of writing students typically complete.
A thesis statement . . . Makes an argumentative assertion about a topic; it states the conclusions that you have reached about your topic. Makes a promise to the reader about the scope, purpose, and direction of your paper. Is focused and specific enough to be "proven" within the boundaries of your paper. Is generally located near the end ...
Thesis. Your thesis is the central claim in your essay—your main insight or idea about your source or topic. Your thesis should appear early in an academic essay, followed by a logically constructed argument that supports this central claim. A strong thesis is arguable, which means a thoughtful reader could disagree with it and therefore ...
The basic structure of an essay always consists of an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. But for many students, the most difficult part of structuring an essay is deciding how to organize information within the body. This article provides useful templates and tips to help you outline your essay, make decisions about your structure, and ...
2 Categories of Thesis Statements: Informative and Persuasive . Just as there are different types of essays, there are different types of thesis statements. The thesis should match the essay. For example, with an informative essay, you should compose an informative thesis (rather than argumentative). You want to declare your intentions in this ...
A thesis statement: tells the reader how you will interpret the significance of the subject matter under discussion. is a road map for the paper; in other words, it tells the reader what to expect from the rest of the paper. directly answers the question asked of you. A thesis is an interpretation of a question or subject, not the subject itself.
COM 5: Thesis Statements. Dynamic PDF: Thesis Statements The thesis statement is perhaps the most crucial part of your essay because it presents the main idea or main argument of the piece of writing.In academic essays, your thesis statement is often located in the introductory paragraph; however, this is not always the case.
The thesis statement is the one sentence that encapsulates the result of your thinking, as it offers your main insight or argument in condensed form. A basic thesis statement has two main parts: Topic: What you're writing about. Angle: What your main idea is about that topic.
Examples of a thesis statement for an analytical essay include: The criminal justice reform bill passed by the U.S. Senate in late 2018 ("The First Step Act") aims to reduce prison sentences that disproportionately fall on nonwhite criminal defendants.
An analytical paper breaks down an issue or an idea into its component parts, evaluates the issue or idea, and presents this breakdown and evaluation to the audience.; An expository (explanatory) paper explains something to the audience.; An argumentative paper makes a claim about a topic and justifies this claim with specific evidence. The claim could be an opinion, a policy proposal, an ...
A thesis is an in-depth research study that identifies a particular topic of inquiry and presents a clear argument or perspective about that topic using evidence and logic. Writing a thesis showcases your ability of critical thinking, gathering evidence, and making a compelling argument. Integral to these competencies is thorough research ...
The thesis statement is the brief articulation of your paper's central argument and purpose. You might hear it referred to as simply a "thesis." Every scholarly paper should have a thesis statement, and strong thesis statements are concise, specific, and arguable. Concise means the thesis is short: perhaps one or two sentences for a shorter paper.
What are the 5 parts of an essay? Explore how the introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion parts of an essay work together.
Overview. In a way, these academic essays are like a court trial. The attorney, whether prosecuting the case or defending it, begins with an opening statement explaining the background and telling the jury what he or she intends to prove (the thesis statement). Then, the attorney presents witnesses for proof (the body of the paragraphs).
The thesis needs to be narrow. Although the scope of your paper might seem overwhelming at the start, generally the narrower the thesis the more effective your argument will be. Your thesis or claim must be supported by evidence. The broader your claim is, the more evidence you will need to convince readers that your position is right.
Your essay introduction should include three main things, in this order: An opening hook to catch the reader's attention. Relevant background information that the reader needs to know. A thesis statement that presents your main point or argument. The length of each part depends on the length and complexity of your essay.
Parts of an essay. An impactful, well-structured essay comes down to three important parts: the introduction, body, and conclusion. 1. The introduction sets the stage for your essay and is typically a paragraph long. It should grab the reader's attention and give them a clear idea of what your essay will be about.
Putting work into coming up with the best ideas for the essay is the surest way to avoid this fate, saving time in the long run. ... the opening of an admissions essay is the part that's most ...
Columbia Business School requires that the work contained in your application (including essays) is completely accurate and exclusively your own. Columbia University permits the use of generative AI tools for idea generation and/or to edit a candidate's work; however, using these tools to generate complete responses violates the Honor Code.
In the classroom setting, MGT (machine-generated text) usage in student essays presents new and complex challenges that educators must navigate. 1) Educators need to use additional time to not only evaluate student essays, now they have to check if these essays were written by a machine or by them. And this is a very complicated task for them ...
The following is the introduction featured in CC40, a monumental forty-film box set that celebrates forty years of the Criterion Collection.. O ver the past forty years, the Criterion Collection offices have played host to a huge network of directors, actors, writers, artists, musicians, technicians, and scholars of all kinds. Many come in to collaborate with us on Criterion special-edition ...
Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of ...
[Authors and titles are listed at the end of this review.] "The world of late antiquity" as a field of study since the 1970s is, perhaps, too often associated with a few specific Anglophone sites of elaboration and primarily with the intersections of early Christian studies (or, in another register, "patristics") and post-Roman history (or, in another register, "classics"). The ...