An essay is a piece of continuous, flowing, paragraph text that is (usually) uninterrupted
by headings, so it can appear to be unstructured. In fact, good essays need to be very carefully
structured indeed. Exactly how an individual essay is structured is very much the choice of the individual writer. There is no prescribed ‘recipe’ for structuring essays. Most essays, however, do follow the same very basic pattern. This pattern is described below.