ESL/EFL exams may contain writing tasks that require students to write a review of a film or book.  This is an example of a film review intended to give candidates and teachers a springboard for vocabulary exercises and discussions about the organization of reviews.  The topic dealt with in this post is the following: 

In our previous essay-writing posts, we dealt with the the overall organization of an essay , the introductory paragraph , the main body paragraph's topic sentence , and lastly the supporting sentences of the main body. I stress once again, for those who haven't read my previous posts in this series, that the information contained within focuses mostly on English as a foreign language exam-type essay questions. This means the advice I give is there to help complete the Writing Section of an exam in approximately half an hour, so all parts of the essay have been whittled down to the bare essentials.  For those who need to work on longer papers of 400 words or more, simply follow the outline given but expand each section. Additionally, feel free to be more creative in adding more paragraphs to the introduction and conclusion. It is rarely possible to write over a paragraph for either the former or latter in an exam when time is pressing, but this is not case with ess...

Having discusse d the overall organization of an academic essay, the introductory paragraph and the topic sentence of main body paragraphs, let's ta ke a look at what we need to do to develop an argument .  As mentioned in the first article in this series, student s wr iting an essay as part of an assign ment or an ESL/EFL examination often find it difficult to elab orate on t he topic they have been given. One cause which can only be remedie d by reading newspapers, academic journals or discussin g current affairs and a variety of subjects with others, is a lack of ideas. The other is no t knowing how to expand an argument , but f ortunately this can be solved by putting into play the various types of supporting sentences available. Let's see what these six types of sentences are.

This is the third article in my essay-writing series which will clarify issues relating to the main body of an essay. In the two previous articles, I discussed the overall organization of an essay and how an introductory paragraph should be set down. I'd like to clarify once again that these articles can be useful to anyone who has to compose an essay but have main ly been aimed at giving test-takers a practical guide as to how they can manage to successfully complete the Writing Section of an EFL / ESL examination and so are in no way the definitive answer to all essay organization queries. Candidates who are studying to take the IELTS, MSU-CELC or CELP, ECPE, ECCE, ESB, LRN, TOEFL, CPE, FCE (First for Schools), PTE and need to write an essay in approximately half an hour can use the layout I propose to quickly structure their answer and not waste time having to come up with something more inventive.