Hello everyone :) In this blog I wanted to cover English to help some of you grasp the nuances of the English language.

What I'm going to do is walk you all through the very basic, very preliminary steps to writing an introduction for an essay. Please feel free to use all the tips and tricks I mention here for your own essays/assignments/stories.



"50 000 people have diabetes, which is a disease."

50 000 people, where? Is this a percentage from a certain county, or is this the whole world? Are you sure that figure is correct? What do you mean by diabetes? Does the demographic "people" consist of children and adults, or just adults?

Do some research and answer your questions.

- 285 million people suffer from it
- Most third-world countries (low-middle income) are sufferers
- Diabetes is an illness
- Primarily adults between 40-59 suffer from it

Now rearrange these facts into a paragraph:

"Diabetes is an illness that 285 million people suffer from. Third-world countries, and places of low-middle income are the primary people affected by diabetes, with most sufferers being adults between the ages of 40-59."

Sounds better than it did before, but now think of how you could relate this *to the real world*, as this is what your teachers will want to see - they want to see that you understand your assignment is related *to the real world*. Compare these statistics to the whole of the world population, do some math and get some more real figures.

- 70% of diabetes occurs in third-world countries
- 285 million people (6.4% of the world's adult population) suffers from diabetes
- Some countries include Africa and India

Now weave those further statistics into the paragraph, don't forget you can rearrange things to make more sense:

"Diabetes is one of the major causes of premature illness and death worldwide. An estimated 285 million people, corresponding to 6.4% of the world's adult population, lived with diabetes in 2010. The largest age group currently affected by diabetes are those between the ages of 40-59. 70% of these cases of diabetes occur in low and middle income countries, such as India and Africa."

The last thing we want to do with this introductory paragraph is actually two things:

1) Add your references!
2) "Finish" the introduction with either a linking sentence to the next paragraph, or summarise what the rest of the essay is about.

I'm going to pretend my essay is about Diabetes in Australia, and how to counter the chance of falling ill to this disease.

One of my references is: http://www.worlddiabetesfoundation.org/composite-35.htm, but to use this reference properly, you have to look for the author and the year it was published. With a little searching, I found that the site used the IDF, Diabetes Atlas, 4th edition, written in 2009 to supplement their article.

To reference this source within your text you organise it like this: "(IDF, 2009)", or "the International Diabetes Foundation (2009) discovered that..."

So!

"Diabetes is one of the major causes of premature illness and death worldwide. An estimated 285 million people, corresponding to 6.4% of the world's adult population, lived with diabetes in 2010. According to the researchers from the International Diabetes Foundation (2009), the largest age group currently affected by diabetes are those between the ages of 40-59. 70% of these cases of diabetes occur in low and middle income countries, such as India and Africa. In Australia 7.4% of the adult population suffers from diabetes (Diabetes: Australian facts, 2008), that is more than 1 in every 14 people. However, this does not need to be the case, as diabetes can be prevented. In this essay I will cover the three main contributing factors towards diabetes, including weight management, substance abuse and blood pressure."

References:
Diabetes: Australian facts. 2008.
IDF, Diabetes Atlas, 4th edition. 2009.

^these references would be placed on a new page at the very end of your essay. You will want at least 5 references at the end of your essay to show that you have done a lot of research. Different schools have different policies about how to show your references, so if they only want an URL, just use the URL :)



Hope this helps someone :P

I should get back to writing my own 2500 word research essay =.=

<3

- jhoijhoi

PS: Next time I'll cover how to write a basic paragraph in a story :) Or, if you'd rather, I'll write up a quick "structure" of an essay and how to "link" the paragraphs together to create a really easy to read essay! :D