How can I structure an essay about friendships?

One of the first things you should do is look carefully at your assignment sheet to clarify the genre of the essay. There are many different types of essay, including personal, informative, and argumentative. Developing a topic and thesis depends to a degree on the type of essay you have been assigned.

Your next step in developing your essay is to narrow your topic. You won't be able to cover everything that can be said about friendship in three paragraphs. Instead, you might think about selecting a particular aspect of friendship or particular examples of friendship that has been important to you.

One possible topic would be to discuss the things you do with your friends and how your life would be less happy or interesting without friends. For an essay like this, you might start by introducing your topic, "things I do with my friends", then writing a paragraph with detailed examples, and concluding with a paragraph on how your friends enrich your life.

If you have a pet such as a dog or cat, you could write an essay about how your pet is a friend, and then follow the pattern of extended examples in the body paragraph and a conclusion showing how your pet improves your life.

How can I write an essay about the meaning of friendship?

Friendship may mean different things to different people. Further, we likely have different reasons at different periods in our life for forming friendships.

We may form friendships for solidarity in achieving shared objectives and overcoming shared challenges (as in school or work), as well as for emotional support in our daily lives. Some friendships may be limited in scope, whereas others are parts of many or all aspects of our lives. And some friendships may be of limited duration while others last a lifetime.

Regardless of the reason for forming friendships, the impetus for them is usually some commonality of experience. This differs from our relationships with our family members in many respects as family relationships exist independent of active choice, whereas we choose our friendships. Further, family members may also share a friendship that is apart from their family relationship. This would happen, just like non-familial friendships, when two people have shared experiences and interests.

Another way of looking at friendship is that our friends are the people whom we want to be around even when we are troubled. We find in them emotional support that is different from what we may obtain from our families. They are the people we choose to spend our time with because so doing makes us happier, or at the least more at ease.

Finally, we may also look at friendship as being those people whom we love by choice. We love such people not because we are supposed to love them on account of familial and societal constructs, but for who they are and how we feel when we are around them.

As Louie Armstrong sang in “What a Wonderful World” (written by Bob Thiele and George Weiss):

I see friends shakin' hands
Sayin', "How do you do?"
They're really sayin'
"I love you."

How do I write an essay on "friendship"?

If the prompt is simply to write about the subject of friendship, you have a couple of options for how to go about writing.  In my classroom, students would read a prompt like this and know to write either an extended definition essay or a compare-contrast essay.  In this case, extended definition might be easier.

In order to begin this paper, you must ask, "What does friendship mean to me?"  Follow this question with another, "Considering the idea of friendship, what have I experienced personally, observed, or read about, that would help me explain what it is?"  Then, make a long list of your experiences, observations, and things you've read that help you to explain friendship.  It is very important in this step (as well as in this essay) to explain friendship through examples.  Simply speaking from a philosophical (and therefore detached) point-of-view will be too generic.

Once you've brainstormed ideas in each of the above categories, consider a way to define friendship in one or two sentences.  This will be your thesis statement.  One way this essay could become a compare-contrast essay (in addition to definition) is by saying what friendship isn't as compared to what it is.  Once you've put down a one or two sentence definition (thesis) your three subtopics (and therefore, three body paragraphs) easily become 1) experiences, 2) observations, and 3) readings.

Remember to use plenty of real examples.  Elaborate on and explain your examples as they apply to your thesis statement.