The Five Paragraph Essay
The five paragraph essay, which is the form that you want to use for the CLAST, has five paragraphs:
(title)
1) Introduction
2) Body paragraph one
3) Body paragraph two
4) Body paragraph three
5) Conclusion
Title
Give the paper a title. The topic of your paper is not the title and don't pick something broad and/or overused. Here are some examples of unacceptable titles: The Perfect Day, Love, Butterflies, Heartbreak, Death, My Accident, Summer, My Favorite Song, Hazing as a Problem on College Campuses, and The Death Penalty. The title does not go in quotation marks and the first letter of each major word is capitalized. Do not steal your title from elsewhere.
Introduction
The introduction has two purposes. These are to get the reader's attention and state a thesis or advance the theme. An introduction may get the reader's attention, for example, by using a quote, a statistic, or a description, or a question.
A thesis is a one sentence explanation (never a question) of the paper's main point/argument. The thesis should be as specific as possible.
Bad thesis: "Love means many things."
or "people define love in many ways."
"Love is a special feeling." Yes, so is indigestion.
Better thesis: "Love is pain." This is better. We often want to think of only the good things and feelings about love. This thesis lets us know that the paper will take a different approach to defining love. Still, this thesis defines one abstraction with another.
Even better thesis: "Love is always putting someone or something before yourself no matter what the situation."
The thesis should never be a statement of fact.
Bad thesis: "September 11 was a horrible day." Yes, most of us would agree. What is the point of this thesis?
Better thesis: "Armed airline pilots could have prevented September 11." This is much more specific and give the paper something to argue and explain.
Body Paragraphs
Each paragraph should begin with a topic sentence that will let the reader know exactly what the paragraph will talk about. Everything in the paragraph should relate to the topic sentence and each topic sentence should relate to the thesis. One plan is to come up with three examples or points to support the thesis. Each body paragraph will consider/develop/explain one of these points. The thesis and topic sentences are the bones that comprise the skeleton of your paper.
Conclusion
You might go back over key points in the essay. If so, reword them. Don't just copy them verbatim. You do not need to repeat the thesis. Give the reader some final thoughts for consideration. There is a delicate balance between tying up loose ends and repeating yourself unnecessarily just as there is a delicate balance between trying to give the reader something new to to consider and writing an conclusion that looks more like the introduction for another paper.