Everything that is composed — a dance, a song, a story… or even a single paragraph — has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But there’s more than one way to make this structure.

We have been looking at simple paragraphs for the kind of writing you might do on a language test like IELTS or EIKEN or TOEFL.

1. Topic Sentence
   • Topic + a claim
2. Supporting Sentences
3. Concluding Sentence
   • Restate the topic sentence
   • A suggestion, prediction or opinion

This is the kind of “rhetorical structure” used in academic writing. But this kind of writing, important as it is, is not the most interesting to read (or write.)

In fact, if a journalist wants to attract a readers’ attention, he or she has to work much harder and use a much more interesting structure. Here’s one of the best EPIC articles ever written. My goal is to teach you how to write like this:

Our Town, Aterano Asahi

Read this article, then, with your team members, try to identify the beginning, middle, and end.