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Body Paragraphs

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This resource outlines the generally accepted structure for introductions, body paragraphs, and conclusions in an academic argument paper. Keep in mind that this resource contains guidelines and not strict rules about organization. Your structure needs to be flexible enough to meet the requirements of your purpose and audience.

Body paragraphs: Moving from general to specific information

Your paper should be organized in a manner that moves from general to specific information. Every time you begin a new subject, think of an inverted pyramid - The broadest range of information sits at the top, and as the paragraph or paper progresses, the author becomes more and more focused on the argument ending with specific, detailed evidence supporting a claim. Lastly, the author explains how and why the information she has just provided connects to and supports her thesis (a brief wrap-up or warrant).

This image shows an inverted pyramid that contains the following text. At the wide top of the pyramid, the text reads general information introduction, topic sentence. Moving down the pyramid to the narrow point, the text reads focusing direction of paper, telling. Getting more specific, showing. Supporting details, data. Conclusions and brief wrap up, warrant.

Moving from General to Specific Information

The four elements of a good paragraph (TTEB)

A good paragraph should contain at least the following four elements: T ransition, T opic sentence, specific E vidence and analysis, and a B rief wrap-up sentence (also known as a warrant ) –TTEB!

  • A T ransition sentence leading in from a previous paragraph to assure smooth reading. This acts as a hand-off from one idea to the next.
  • A T opic sentence that tells the reader what you will be discussing in the paragraph.
  • Specific E vidence and analysis that supports one of your claims and that provides a deeper level of detail than your topic sentence.
  • A B rief wrap-up sentence that tells the reader how and why this information supports the paper’s thesis. The brief wrap-up is also known as the warrant. The warrant is important to your argument because it connects your reasoning and support to your thesis, and it shows that the information in the paragraph is related to your thesis and helps defend it.

Supporting evidence (induction and deduction)

Induction is the type of reasoning that moves from specific facts to a general conclusion. When you use induction in your paper, you will state your thesis (which is actually the conclusion you have come to after looking at all the facts) and then support your thesis with the facts. The following is an example of induction taken from Dorothy U. Seyler’s Understanding Argument :

There is the dead body of Smith. Smith was shot in his bedroom between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., according to the coroner. Smith was shot with a .32 caliber pistol. The pistol left in the bedroom contains Jones’s fingerprints. Jones was seen, by a neighbor, entering the Smith home at around 11:00 p.m. the night of Smith’s death. A coworker heard Smith and Jones arguing in Smith’s office the morning of the day Smith died.

Conclusion: Jones killed Smith.

Here, then, is the example in bullet form:

  • Conclusion: Jones killed Smith
  • Support: Smith was shot by Jones’ gun, Jones was seen entering the scene of the crime, Jones and Smith argued earlier in the day Smith died.
  • Assumption: The facts are representative, not isolated incidents, and thus reveal a trend, justifying the conclusion drawn.

When you use deduction in an argument, you begin with general premises and move to a specific conclusion. There is a precise pattern you must use when you reason deductively. This pattern is called syllogistic reasoning (the syllogism). Syllogistic reasoning (deduction) is organized in three steps:

  • Major premise
  • Minor premise

In order for the syllogism (deduction) to work, you must accept that the relationship of the two premises lead, logically, to the conclusion. Here are two examples of deduction or syllogistic reasoning:

  • Major premise: All men are mortal.
  • Minor premise: Socrates is a man.
  • Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.
  • Major premise: People who perform with courage and clear purpose in a crisis are great leaders.
  • Minor premise: Lincoln was a person who performed with courage and a clear purpose in a crisis.
  • Conclusion: Lincoln was a great leader.

So in order for deduction to work in the example involving Socrates, you must agree that (1) all men are mortal (they all die); and (2) Socrates is a man. If you disagree with either of these premises, the conclusion is invalid. The example using Socrates isn’t so difficult to validate. But when you move into more murky water (when you use terms such as courage , clear purpose , and great ), the connections get tenuous.

For example, some historians might argue that Lincoln didn’t really shine until a few years into the Civil War, after many Union losses to Southern leaders such as Robert E. Lee.

The following is a clear example of deduction gone awry:

  • Major premise: All dogs make good pets.
  • Minor premise: Doogle is a dog.
  • Conclusion: Doogle will make a good pet.

If you don’t agree that all dogs make good pets, then the conclusion that Doogle will make a good pet is invalid.

When a premise in a syllogism is missing, the syllogism becomes an enthymeme. Enthymemes can be very effective in argument, but they can also be unethical and lead to invalid conclusions. Authors often use enthymemes to persuade audiences. The following is an example of an enthymeme:

If you have a plasma TV, you are not poor.

The first part of the enthymeme (If you have a plasma TV) is the stated premise. The second part of the statement (you are not poor) is the conclusion. Therefore, the unstated premise is “Only rich people have plasma TVs.” The enthymeme above leads us to an invalid conclusion (people who own plasma TVs are not poor) because there are plenty of people who own plasma TVs who are poor. Let’s look at this enthymeme in a syllogistic structure:

  • Major premise: People who own plasma TVs are rich (unstated above).
  • Minor premise: You own a plasma TV.
  • Conclusion: You are not poor.

To help you understand how induction and deduction can work together to form a solid argument, you may want to look at the United States Declaration of Independence. The first section of the Declaration contains a series of syllogisms, while the middle section is an inductive list of examples. The final section brings the first and second sections together in a compelling conclusion.

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body writing in english

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When you write strong, clear paragraphs, you are guiding your readers through your argument by showing them how your points fit together to support your thesis. The number of paragraphs in your essay should be determined by the number of steps you need to take to build your argument. To write strong paragraphs, try to focus each paragraph on one main point—and begin a new paragraph when you are moving to a new point or example.

A strong paragraph in an academic essay will usually include these three elements:

  • A topic sentence. The topic sentence does double duty for a paragraph. First, a strong topic sentence makes a claim or states a main idea that is then developed in the rest of the paragraph. Second, the topic sentence signals to readers how the paragraph is connected to the larger argument in your paper. Below is an example of a topic sentence from a paper by Laura Connor ‘23 that analyzes rhetoric used by Frederic Douglass, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Karl Marx. In her paper, Connor argues that Marx’s rhetoric was most effective in driving social change. In his numerous writings, Marx critiques capitalism by identifying its flaws. This topic sentence makes a claim that will then need to be supported with evidence: readers can expect that the sentence will be followed by a discussion of what Marx saw as the flaws in capitalism, which will in turn help them understand Connor’s thesis about how these three authors used their rhetoric to effect social change. A topic sentence signals to your readers what idea is most important in that paragraph—and it also helps you know if you’ve effectively made your point. In this case, Connor has set up the expectation for readers that by the end of the paragraph, they will understand Marx’s view of the flaws in capitalism. Imagine that, instead of writing “Marx critiques capitalism by identifying its flaws,” Connor had begun that paragraph with a descriptive sentence. For example, she could have written something like this: “Marx wrote a critique of capitalism.” While that sentence describes something that happened, it does not give readers information about what will be in the rest of the paragraph—and it would not have helped Connor figure out how to organize the paragraph.
  • Evidence. Once you’ve made a claim in your topic sentence, you’ll need to help your readers see how you arrived at that claim from the evidence that you examined. That evidence may include quotations or paraphrased material from a source, or it may include data, results, or primary source material. In the paragraph that follows Connor’s topic sentence above, she offers several quotations from Marx that demonstrate how he viewed the flaws in capitalism.
  • Analysis. It’s not enough to provide evidence to support a claim. You have to tell your readers what you want them to understand about that evidence. In other words, you have to analyze it. How does this evidence support your claim? In Connor’s paragraph, she follows her presentation of evidence with sentences that tell readers what they need to understand about that evidence—specifically that it shows how Marx pointed to the flaws in capitalism without telling his own readers what to think about it, and that this was his strategy. It might be tempting to end your paragraph with either a sentence summarizing everything you’ve just written or the introduction of a new idea. But in a short paragraph, your readers don’t need a summary of all that you’ve just said. And introducing a new point in the final sentence can confuse readers by leaving them without evidence to support that new point. Instead, try to end your paragraph with a sentence that tells readers something that they can now understand because they’ve read your paragraph. In Connor’s paragraph, the final sentence doesn’t summarize all of Marx’s specific claims but instead tells readers what to take away from that evidence. After seeing what Marx says about capitalism, Connor explains what the evidence she has just offered suggests about Marx’s beliefs.

Below, you’ll find Connor’s complete paragraph. The topic sentence appears in blue . The evidence appears in green . Connor’s analysis of the evidence appears in yellow .  

Example paragraph  

In his numerous writings, Marx critiques capitalism by identifying its flaws. By critiquing the political economy and capitalism, Marx implores his reader to think critically about their position in society and restores awareness in the proletariat class. T o Marx, capitalism is a system characterized by the “exploitation of the many by the few,” in which workers accept the exploitation of their labor and receive only harm of “alienation,” rather than true benefits ( MER 487). He writes that “labour produces for the rich wonderful things – but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces—but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty—but for the worker, deformity” (MER 73). Marx argues capitalism is a system in which the laborer is repeatedly harmed and estranged from himself, his labor, and other people, while the owner of his labor – the capitalist – receives the benefits ( MER 74). And while industry progresses, the worker “sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class” ( MER 483). But while Marx critiques the political economy, he does not explicitly say “capitalism is wrong.” Rather, his close examination of the system makes its flaws obvious. Only once the working class realizes the flaws of the system, Marx believes, will they - must they - rise up against their bourgeois masters and achieve the necessary and inevitable communist revolution.

Not every paragraph will be structured exactly like this one, of course. But as you draft your own paragraphs, look for all three of these elements: topic sentence, evidence, and analysis.

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How to Write a Body Paragraph

Last Updated: June 4, 2023

This article was co-authored by Christopher Taylor, PhD and by wikiHow staff writer, Christopher M. Osborne, PhD . Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. This article has been viewed 27,107 times.

Writing a paragraph might seem simple on the surface—it just needs a starting point, an ending point, and some related sentences in between to fill it out. However, a quality paragraph states a clear main idea, supports and analyzes this main idea based on strong evidence, and ties it all into the overall focus of your essay. This is especially true of body paragraphs, which make up the heart of your essay between the introduction and conclusion.

Planning Before Writing

Step 1 View each body paragraph as a mini essay.

  • As a mini essay, each paragraph needs to have a main point (or thesis), supporting evidence, analysis of that evidence, commentary, and a recap of the main point based on the evidence and analysis. Your topic sentence acts as the thesis for the paragraph, providing a road map of what you'll discuss.
  • Each paragraph should feel complete if you read it on its own, but also logically connect to the other paragraphs in the essay.
  • For instance, a topic sentence might look like this: "As the length of playoff games expand, baseball fans lose interest in the game."
  • Supporting evidence for this topic sentence could include statistics of how many fans watched the games, results of fan polls, and quotes from reliable sports articles.

Step 2 Build momentum with each sentence by pushing your ideas forward.

  • Like that freight train, your paragraph should move in only one direction—forward toward your end point. Each sentence needs to build on the last.
  • So, before you start writing, jot down the concept for the paragraph’s main idea and start thinking how the paragraph will advance it forward.

Step 3 Gather the supporting materials you’ll draw from.

  • A body paragraph is only as good as its evidence. Your main idea will fall flat if you have flimsy evidence—or no evidence—to advance it forward.
  • If you don’t have adequate evidence to support your proposed main idea for the paragraph, you’ll either have to do additional research or adjust your claim to suit your evidence.
  • Great sources of evidence include books, journal articles, reliable websites, and newspaper articles.

Writing the Paragraph

Step 1 Build a transition from the previous paragraph.

  • For instance, if your previous paragraph focused on revealing how exciting baseball’s World Series has been in recent years, you might start by writing, “While there’s no doubt the World Series has provided numerous exciting moments recently,...”
  • Repeating a key phrase can also make a good transition. To keep with the baseball theme, you might repeat the phrase “big hit” in the last sentence of the previous paragraph and the first sentence of the current one.

Step 2 Express the paragraph’s main idea very early on.

  • The main idea should be a claim that you can make a convincing argument to support, not a statement of fact.
  • For instance: “While there’s no doubt the World Series has provided numerous exciting moments recently, the increasing amount of time it takes to complete each game likely decreases overall interest.”

Step 3 Present the evidence for your main idea.

  • For example: “The average Major League Baseball playoff game (as of 2017) takes over three-and-a-half hours to complete, an increase in more than thirty minutes from the average length of World Series games in 1988.” [5] X Research source
  • Also: “Since World Series games start after 8 pm in the Eastern Time Zone, they often don’t end until midnight or later for many viewers in the U.S.”

Step 4 Add quotations as a powerful form of evidence.

  • While including longer quotes can sometimes be helpful, it’s usually best to incorporate smaller snippets from quotations into your own sentence.
  • Introduce the quote with “asserts,” “claims,” “proposes,” or similar: “As 12-year old Boston Red Sox fan Tim Green bemoans, ‘I haven’t been able to watch the end of a single game of the World Series,’ due to the length of the games.”
  • Make sure to provide a citation with the source of the quotation, according to the citation style you’re using.

Step 5 Analyze how the evidence supports your main idea.

  • Your analysis might include anticipating counter-perspectives to your evidence: “While many baseball fans embrace the notion that it’s one of few sports without a game clock, it’s hard to imagine that anyone finds it easy to stay engaged and enthused—if tuned in at all—to a four-plus hour game.”

Step 6 Evaluate your main idea’s impact as the paragraph ends.

  • Imagine that you're answering the question, "So what?" What should people take from your paragraph? How should they feel about your topic?
  • For instance: “The long games and late conclusions during baseball’s showcase time of year threaten to alienate fans, especially the younger ones who are essential to the sport’s future.”
  • Closing the current paragraph with an enhancement of your main idea provides a solid transition into the next paragraph, without having to write an actual transition (as you did at the start of the paragraph).

Revising Your Work

Step 1 Confirm that the main idea is clearly stated.

  • Try having a friend or family member read the paragraph, then ask them, “What’s it about?” They should answer with some version of your main idea.

Step 2 Make sure each sentence supports the paragraph’s focus.

  • Try cutting sentences or sections you’re not sure about and see if they are missed—if not, get rid of them permanently.

Step 3 Strengthen the “bridges” between related elements.

  • Make sure each sentence builds logically from the one before it, and leads logically into the one after it. Try rearranging content if necessary.
  • Verbal bridges can be transitions (“Also,” “However,” “So,” etc.), or you can use strategies like repetition or synonyms to link each sentence to the next.

Step 4 Proofread

  • It’s very easy to miss mistakes in your own writing, so have a fresh set of eyes look over your work whenever possible.

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  • ↑ https://slc.berkeley.edu/some-tips-writing-efficient-effective-body-paragraphs
  • ↑ https://ctl.yale.edu/sites/default/files/basic-page-supplementary-materials-files/body_paragraph_analysis_0.pdf
  • ↑ https://lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/undergraduates/writing-guides/how-do-i-write-an-intro--conclusion----body-paragraph.html
  • ↑ https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2017/10/23/pace-of-play-playoffs/791927001/

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Writing Beginner

Body Writing 101 (Ultimate Guide for Beginners)

Body writing is a way to connect with a partner or other significant other.

If you haven’t tried it or are new to the practice, this is your ultimate guide to body writing 101. In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know.

What Is Body Writing?

Body writing is the act of writing or drawing on someone’s body with a pen, pencil, or another instrument. It can be used as a form of communication, to show affection, or for personal empowerment and gratification. Body writing is also a common fetish in BDSM.

Example of body writing—words written on a man

Writing on the body can be cute, innocent, powerful, or humiliating. It can also be quite provocative.

It really depends on the two (or more) people involved—and what you write on the body.

Types of Body Writing

There are several types of body scribbling. Since this is the ultimate guide, I want to share a shortlist and then dive into the details.

The shortlist of types:

  • Long-Distance Relationship, or LDR
  • Humiliation

What Is BDSM Body Writing?

This is a type of writing on the body used in Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, Sadochism and Masochism (BDSM) relationships.

It is usually more erotic than other types.

It tends to include possessive language like “owned” and “property of.” There may even be roles and labels of “daddy,” “little,” and even a metaphorical “slave” (all with consent).

Here is a good video that goes over BDSM writing on the body in more detail:

What Is Hentai Body Writing?

This type of writing on the body usually involves anime or Manga characters in various states of undress.

The anime characters might be alone or with other characters.

Note: The images can get pretty explicit.

You can read a great article about general anime writing over here.

What Is Long-Distance Body Writing?

Long-distance writing on the body mostly happens in long-distance relationships (LDRs).

One person requests that the other partner write a word or a phrase on their body. Subsequently, one partner might write a word or phrase on their own body.

The words can range from romantic (dream girl) to more personal and intimate messages (I love you).

Long-distance body writing can be a way for two partners to connect.

This can be very helpful in LDRs because of the physical distance. Partners understandably want to connect with each other in any way possible.

What Is Humiliation Body Writing?

In this form of writing on the body, one person is the dominant partner and the other is the submissive partner.

The dominant decides what will be written on the body of the submissive. This type of writing can be a form of erotic humiliation or done simply for fun.

It’s important to note that both partners must be comfortable with this type of body writing.

Also, be sure that the writing is temporary and quickly removable.

What Is Cute Body Writing?

Cute or innocent writing on the body is non-erotic and sometimes non-romantic.

It involves writing with positive, friendly intent.

Unlike the more adult-themed body scribbling, this type can be done between partners, friends, family members, and even co-workers.

For example:

  • A father might temporarily write “I love you” on his son or daughter.
  • A co-worker might write “stressed” on their own body during a team-building activity.
  • Two friends might scribble “besties” on each other.
  • A teenager might write, “Will you go to prom with me?” on their arm.

What Is Empowering Body Writing?

This is when you write on your body or someone else’s body with the purpose of empowerment.

Writing on your body can be a way to reclaim yourself, your body, and/or sexuality.

It can also be a way to increase self-esteem or confidence.

  • A woman who undergoes surgery to reconstruct her upper chest might write “I am beautiful” across her scars.
  • A person who is feeling insecure about their weight might write “I am worthy” all over their body.

What Is Permanent Body Writing?

Most of the time, writing on the body is temporary.

Body writers use pens or markers that easily wash off in a few hours or days. Permanent body writing is just that: more permanent.

For example, it can be written in the form of a temporary or permanent tattoo.

What Is Public Body Writing?

Public writing on the body is when someone writes or draws on someone else’s body in a public setting.

This could be at a party, during a performance, or in any other social situation.

Public body writing can be cute, erotic, or empowering.

What Is the Purpose?

There are many purposes of body scribbling.

Some people do it for fun, some do it as a form of communication, and some do it to empower themselves or others.

The main purpose is to express something in a visual way.

Here is a list of possible purposes:

  • Dominance/Submission
  • Self-flagellation
  • Self-empowerment

Some people write things on their bodies to remember them for later.

For example, I might write a phone number on my hand.

If I don’t have a piece of paper or note-taking utensil, a quick note on my body might jog my memory later.

How Do I Get Started?

The best way to get started is by picking a comfortable spot on your body or your partner’s body.

Almost anywhere can work.

However, keep in mind where you or your partner needs to go. If your partner is headed to work later, be sure to write somewhere they can easily conceal.

There is no reason to get in trouble on the job.

Another tip is to moisturize the body part before writing to make removal much easier.

Next, choose a writing utensil.

  • Waterproof eye-liner
  • Watercolor markers
  • Whiteboard marker
  • Or choose one of these fun writing utensils

Choose what you want to say. If someone else is involved, make sure they consent to the message.

I’ve found the best way to write clearly is if my partner is sitting, standing, or lying still. Any movement can lead to sloppy, incoherent words.

Once you’ve written your message, take a picture.

This is a great way to remember the moment.

What Materials Do You Need?

All you need is a body, a writing implement, and somewhere to write without interruption.

However, there are some materials that can make the experience more fun or interesting:

  • Body stamps
  • Temporary Tattoos

Best Markers for Body Writing

Here are my favorite markers for writing on my body or my partner’s body:

  • BodyMark by BIC
  • Looney Zoo Markers
  • Mehron Makeup Paradise AQ Face & Body Paint
  • Winged Eyeliner Stamp – The Flick Stick by Lovoir

How Do I Clean Up?

There are a few ways to clean up body writing:

  • Body Wipes —These are wet wipes that are specifically designed to clean up body messes. They usually come in a pack of 30-60 wipes.
  • Water —If you’re near a sink, you can use water and soap to clean up your body.
  • Dishwashing Soap —Dawn works wonders on most body scribbling.
  • Rubbing Alcohol —I have found this to be an excellent way to clean the ink off of your skin.

How Long Does Body Writing Last?

Most writing on your body only lasts a few hours or days.

However, if you use a permanent marker or tattoo, the writing can anywhere from a few weeks to a lifetime.

Before you write on a body, make sure you know the timeframe.

It’s bad luck to need to go to work or to a family wedding with words scrawled all over your body.

What are the Risks?

There are very few risks involved with body writing.

The most common (but rare) risks are infection and skin irritation. If you’re using a pen or marker, it’s important not to let the ink bleed.

In addition, be mindful of what you write.

Make sure the message is consensual and accepted by everyone involved.

Some people feel self-conscious or uncomfortable with body writing. Others absolutely love it.

Body Writing vs. Body Swap Writing

These are two very different types of writing. One is writing on the body and the other is a genre or form of fiction.

For example, body swap writing is a popular subgenre in fanfiction.

It could be a fanfiction body swap between Harry Potter and the Power Rangers . Or Spider-Man and Captain Kirk.

Essentially, body swap writing is when two characters trade bodies.

This can be a fun way to explore different character traits or just have some laughs.

Is Body Writing Fun?

Yes, it can be a lot of fun.

You can experiment with different inks, stamps, and materials. You can also play body writing roulette or do a body writing dare.

Body writing roulette is when each player takes a turn writing on the other player’s body.

It can be a playful way to get creative with your messages or just have some innocent fun.

Dares can also be a lot of fun.

For example, you can dare your partner to write a specific word in a particular place.

Body Writing Ideas

To make this a complete guide, I want to give you as many ideas for body scribbling as possible.

Enjoy this list of ideas:

  • You make me happy
  • I belong to you
  • I belong to _______
  • (Name) has my heart
  • I trust you
  • You’re my everything
  • My life depends on you
  • I’m sorry
  • You’re beautiful

Final Thoughts

I encourage you to try this practice. You might be surprised at how much you enjoy writing on yourself and your significant other.

Before you go, here are a few related posts hand-picked just for you:

  • How to Write Erotica: The NEW Ultimate Guide
  • Is Writing a Hobby? (Answered & Explained)
  • What Is Jingle Writing? (Explained for Beginners)
  • What Is Considered a Long-Distance Relationship?

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The Beginner's Guide to Writing an Essay | Steps & Examples

An academic essay is a focused piece of writing that develops an idea or argument using evidence, analysis, and interpretation.

There are many types of essays you might write as a student. The content and length of an essay depends on your level, subject of study, and course requirements. However, most essays at university level are argumentative — they aim to persuade the reader of a particular position or perspective on a topic.

The essay writing process consists of three main stages:

  • Preparation: Decide on your topic, do your research, and create an essay outline.
  • Writing : Set out your argument in the introduction, develop it with evidence in the main body, and wrap it up with a conclusion.
  • Revision:  Check your essay on the content, organization, grammar, spelling, and formatting of your essay.

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Essay writing process, preparation for writing an essay, writing the introduction, writing the main body, writing the conclusion, essay checklist, lecture slides, frequently asked questions about writing an essay.

The writing process of preparation, writing, and revisions applies to every essay or paper, but the time and effort spent on each stage depends on the type of essay .

For example, if you’ve been assigned a five-paragraph expository essay for a high school class, you’ll probably spend the most time on the writing stage; for a college-level argumentative essay , on the other hand, you’ll need to spend more time researching your topic and developing an original argument before you start writing.

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Before you start writing, you should make sure you have a clear idea of what you want to say and how you’re going to say it. There are a few key steps you can follow to make sure you’re prepared:

  • Understand your assignment: What is the goal of this essay? What is the length and deadline of the assignment? Is there anything you need to clarify with your teacher or professor?
  • Define a topic: If you’re allowed to choose your own topic , try to pick something that you already know a bit about and that will hold your interest.
  • Do your research: Read  primary and secondary sources and take notes to help you work out your position and angle on the topic. You’ll use these as evidence for your points.
  • Come up with a thesis:  The thesis is the central point or argument that you want to make. A clear thesis is essential for a focused essay—you should keep referring back to it as you write.
  • Create an outline: Map out the rough structure of your essay in an outline . This makes it easier to start writing and keeps you on track as you go.

Once you’ve got a clear idea of what you want to discuss, in what order, and what evidence you’ll use, you’re ready to start writing.

The introduction sets the tone for your essay. It should grab the reader’s interest and inform them of what to expect. The introduction generally comprises 10–20% of the text.

1. Hook your reader

The first sentence of the introduction should pique your reader’s interest and curiosity. This sentence is sometimes called the hook. It might be an intriguing question, a surprising fact, or a bold statement emphasizing the relevance of the topic.

Let’s say we’re writing an essay about the development of Braille (the raised-dot reading and writing system used by visually impaired people). Our hook can make a strong statement about the topic:

The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability.

2. Provide background on your topic

Next, it’s important to give context that will help your reader understand your argument. This might involve providing background information, giving an overview of important academic work or debates on the topic, and explaining difficult terms. Don’t provide too much detail in the introduction—you can elaborate in the body of your essay.

3. Present the thesis statement

Next, you should formulate your thesis statement— the central argument you’re going to make. The thesis statement provides focus and signals your position on the topic. It is usually one or two sentences long. The thesis statement for our essay on Braille could look like this:

As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness.

4. Map the structure

In longer essays, you can end the introduction by briefly describing what will be covered in each part of the essay. This guides the reader through your structure and gives a preview of how your argument will develop.

The invention of Braille marked a major turning point in the history of disability. The writing system of raised dots used by blind and visually impaired people was developed by Louis Braille in nineteenth-century France. In a society that did not value disabled people in general, blindness was particularly stigmatized, and lack of access to reading and writing was a significant barrier to social participation. The idea of tactile reading was not entirely new, but existing methods based on sighted systems were difficult to learn and use. As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness. This essay begins by discussing the situation of blind people in nineteenth-century Europe. It then describes the invention of Braille and the gradual process of its acceptance within blind education. Subsequently, it explores the wide-ranging effects of this invention on blind people’s social and cultural lives.

Write your essay introduction

The body of your essay is where you make arguments supporting your thesis, provide evidence, and develop your ideas. Its purpose is to present, interpret, and analyze the information and sources you have gathered to support your argument.

Length of the body text

The length of the body depends on the type of essay. On average, the body comprises 60–80% of your essay. For a high school essay, this could be just three paragraphs, but for a graduate school essay of 6,000 words, the body could take up 8–10 pages.

Paragraph structure

To give your essay a clear structure , it is important to organize it into paragraphs . Each paragraph should be centered around one main point or idea.

That idea is introduced in a  topic sentence . The topic sentence should generally lead on from the previous paragraph and introduce the point to be made in this paragraph. Transition words can be used to create clear connections between sentences.

After the topic sentence, present evidence such as data, examples, or quotes from relevant sources. Be sure to interpret and explain the evidence, and show how it helps develop your overall argument.

Lack of access to reading and writing put blind people at a serious disadvantage in nineteenth-century society. Text was one of the primary methods through which people engaged with culture, communicated with others, and accessed information; without a well-developed reading system that did not rely on sight, blind people were excluded from social participation (Weygand, 2009). While disabled people in general suffered from discrimination, blindness was widely viewed as the worst disability, and it was commonly believed that blind people were incapable of pursuing a profession or improving themselves through culture (Weygand, 2009). This demonstrates the importance of reading and writing to social status at the time: without access to text, it was considered impossible to fully participate in society. Blind people were excluded from the sighted world, but also entirely dependent on sighted people for information and education.

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The conclusion is the final paragraph of an essay. It should generally take up no more than 10–15% of the text . A strong essay conclusion :

  • Returns to your thesis
  • Ties together your main points
  • Shows why your argument matters

A great conclusion should finish with a memorable or impactful sentence that leaves the reader with a strong final impression.

What not to include in a conclusion

To make your essay’s conclusion as strong as possible, there are a few things you should avoid. The most common mistakes are:

  • Including new arguments or evidence
  • Undermining your arguments (e.g. “This is just one approach of many”)
  • Using concluding phrases like “To sum up…” or “In conclusion…”

Braille paved the way for dramatic cultural changes in the way blind people were treated and the opportunities available to them. Louis Braille’s innovation was to reimagine existing reading systems from a blind perspective, and the success of this invention required sighted teachers to adapt to their students’ reality instead of the other way around. In this sense, Braille helped drive broader social changes in the status of blindness. New accessibility tools provide practical advantages to those who need them, but they can also change the perspectives and attitudes of those who do not.

Write your essay conclusion

Checklist: Essay

My essay follows the requirements of the assignment (topic and length ).

My introduction sparks the reader’s interest and provides any necessary background information on the topic.

My introduction contains a thesis statement that states the focus and position of the essay.

I use paragraphs to structure the essay.

I use topic sentences to introduce each paragraph.

Each paragraph has a single focus and a clear connection to the thesis statement.

I make clear transitions between paragraphs and ideas.

My conclusion doesn’t just repeat my points, but draws connections between arguments.

I don’t introduce new arguments or evidence in the conclusion.

I have given an in-text citation for every quote or piece of information I got from another source.

I have included a reference page at the end of my essay, listing full details of all my sources.

My citations and references are correctly formatted according to the required citation style .

My essay has an interesting and informative title.

I have followed all formatting guidelines (e.g. font, page numbers, line spacing).

Your essay meets all the most important requirements. Our editors can give it a final check to help you submit with confidence.

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An essay is a focused piece of writing that explains, argues, describes, or narrates.

In high school, you may have to write many different types of essays to develop your writing skills.

Academic essays at college level are usually argumentative : you develop a clear thesis about your topic and make a case for your position using evidence, analysis and interpretation.

The structure of an essay is divided into an introduction that presents your topic and thesis statement , a body containing your in-depth analysis and arguments, and a conclusion wrapping up your ideas.

The structure of the body is flexible, but you should always spend some time thinking about how you can organize your essay to best serve your ideas.

Your essay introduction should include three main things, in this order:

  • An opening hook to catch the reader’s attention.
  • Relevant background information that the reader needs to know.
  • A thesis statement that presents your main point or argument.

The length of each part depends on the length and complexity of your essay .

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:

  • It gives your writing direction and focus.
  • It gives the reader a concise summary of your main point.

Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.

A topic sentence is a sentence that expresses the main point of a paragraph . Everything else in the paragraph should relate to the topic sentence.

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

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Reading and Writing Haven; English Teaching Ideas

5 Ways to Use Body Paragraph Examples

Teaching writing is hard. It just is. For a handful of students, writing is second nature; still, most need support and guidance. Once students get passed the introduction paragraph , they begin to breathe more easily. Yet, body paragraphs can present their own issues. It’s obvious that using body paragraph examples is important. What’s less obvious is figuring out how to use them well. Here, we’ll explore some specific ideas.

HOW TO USE BODY PARAGRAPH EXAMPLES

Differentiation.

When students enter the room, give them a slip of paper (or a digital form), and ask them to choose how they would prefer to learn about writing body paragraphs. I’ve offered students the option to work with a partner or small group to analyze examples or to work with me as I model how to write a body paragraph for a smaller group.

You can do this same thing at the end of the period as an exit slip. Ask students to write part of a body paragraph for you (just so that you have some specific data), and then pose the question: Do you want to evaluate examples in small groups tomorrow or work with me at the board to write a paragraph as a group? You can also add other options. For instance, you might add a choice about color-coding the elements of a body paragraph for identification purposes. Based upon students’ choice  and the data from their writing sample, you can put them into groups for the next day’s lesson.

Scaffolding

Anticipate areas of confusion for students, and try to scaffold those complexities with examples. For instance, my students often struggle to understand how to use an entire sentence to transition between ideas. I want them to move away from single-word transitions to a variety of words, phrases, clauses, and entire sentences. I encourage students to use transitional sentences to begin or end a body paragraph, but I have to show them examples and write examples with them in order for it to make sense.

Another skill students find difficult is blending their own ideas with that from research. They can often cite sources either by summarizing or directly quoting, but expanding upon that information with their own thoughts is difficult. I try to teach my students different methods for building upon research so that if they aren’t sure what to do, they have specific examples to which they can refer.

5 ways to use body paragraph examples in secondary #ELA #argumentativewriting #highschoolela

Embedding Quotations

Use body paragraph examples to show students how to embed quotations. The more practice students get, the better they will become at this skill. One way I’ve found successful is to give them a paragraph that is already written along with sources that would support the arguments in the paragraph. However, I omit the research. Students read the topic sentence and plug in research where it makes sense. As they do, they practice MLA stipulations for embedding quotations .

Citing Sources

Use body paragraphs to demonstrate the difference between correct citations and plagiarism. I write with students as they learn this concept or review from the previous year. As we decide what to write, I make purposeful mistakes with citations. After typing, if no one corrects me, I read back through the current version of the paragraph, and I ask students to make careful observations about the citations. Usually, they are able to tell me what needs to be changed, which builds their confidence. This is the plagiarism refresher mini unit I like to use to review rules for MLA citation.

I always use the hamburger or sandwich metaphor when I cover body paragraphs, but tomato doesn’t necessarily translate to “analyze the research” in students’ minds. So, I came up with an acronym: MEAT.

M – MAIN POINT

E – evidence from research, a – analyze the research, t – transition to next idea.

I like to use body paragraph examples to have students identify the MEAT y elements. As they write their own, they use a graphic organizer that reminds them of the necessary ingredients. Not all students need this structure, but the ones who do appreciate the guidance.

If you have body paragraph examples, hopefully this post has given you some ideas for how you can expand your uses for them. If you need body paragraph examples , you can find some of the ones I like to use with argumentative writing units in the resource below (along with a whole slew of other good stuff for scaffolding the body paragraph writing process). Click on the image to view the details, or see them here .

Use this body paragraph unit to differentiate, scaffold, and increase success with writing argumentative essays. #argumentativewriting #highschoolela

Ready to read about some strategies for scaffolding conclusion paragraphs ?

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Body Parts in English: 71 Parts of the Body You Might Not Know

Body Parts in English: 71 Parts of the Body You Might Not Know

You’re about to learn 71 body parts in English. Also check out 27 Words for Facial Expressions in English .

The human body is an amazing thing.

It grows and shrinks and even makes noises depending on what we do to it.

We can use it to write great works of literature and to impress people with our juggling skills.

We can use it to climb mountains and to make machines that go to the bottom of the ocean, where you can see some truly weird and terrifying stuff.

So, it’s a good idea to be able to talk about different body parts in English, right?

I know you probably did a whole lesson or two on this stuff at school, but how much detail did you get into?

Today, we’re going to take a detailed look at human body parts (don’t worry … not THAT detailed).

And to make it easier, I’ve broken everything down into three sections:

Cartoon sketch of a man with labels head, upper body, lower body

Body Parts in English: The Head

Head with labels eye, ear, nose, mouth

OK. Let’s go straight ahead with the head! (See what I did there?)

Eyes with labels eyebrow, eyelash, pupil, whites of your eyes, iris

Ah yes! The eyes!

The window to the soul!

The things we see with and that leak when we feel sad or happy or spend too much time cutting onions.

The hairy stuff above the eyes.

You raise your eyebrows when you look surprised.

Some people aren’t very happy with the way their eyebrows look and like to take matters into their own hands by shaving them off and drawing new ones on.

Which reminds me of a terrible, but hilarious, joke:

“I told my wife she was drawing her eyebrows on too high; she looked surprised!”

More hair around the eyes.

These are the ones that stick out right above (and a bit below) the eye — some people like putting mascara on theirs to make them stand out more.

I always thought that eyelashes were kind of pointless until I was about 14 years old and my friend managed to drop superglue on my eye. (Thanks, Phil — I still remember.)

Anyway, my eyelashes saved my eye that day as they caught the glue before it reached it.

The small, black parts in the middle of the eyes.

One very cool thing about them is how they get bigger and smaller depending on how much light there is around.

When they get bigger, you can say that your pupils are dilated .

This is such a cool word, but what is it?

The iris is the part around the pupil — it comes in different colours, chiefly green, brown and blue.

Some people, like David Bowie and some Instagram cats, are lucky enough to have one brown and one blue iris. So cool …

The whites of your eyes

OK, as you’ll see below, there are some parts of the body – really important parts – that don’t really have an everyday word.

So we just end up describing them.

And the whites of your eyes are one of these.

I was going to suggest that we should come up with a good name for this part of the body, but then I Googled it and found the scientific name for it — and it’s awesome:

The whites of your eyes are technically called your sclera .

Why don’t we use this word? It sounds great AND would make a fabulous band name.

Ear with labels ear drum, earlobe

OK — we know what ears are, time to move on.

Just a quick note, though. Isn’t it nice that “hear” contains “ear”?

The soft, wobbly part at the bottom of the ear.

You know, the part that many people get pierced so they can wear earrings.

Today’s post is mostly focusing on external body parts, but I’m including a few internal ones.

Why? Well, some internal body parts are so much part of everyday English that they kind of “feel” external, if you know what I mean.

The eardrum is basically the part of the ear that transmits sound — and that’s really all that most non-sciency people know about it.

When we use this word, it’s usually to warn people not to listen to music too loud, or to wear ear protection in noisy environments:

“Make sure you take your earplugs to the gig. That band gets really loud, and you don’t wanna burst your eardrums .”

Mouth with labels cupid's bow, gum, lip, tooth, tongue

The pink/red things around your mouth.

You know — the things you use to kiss with.

When you make a kissing face, you’re pouting your lips .

When you press your lips together when you’re angry, you purse your lips .

And when you’re John Major, you have no lips.

A photo of John Major's face; his lips are barely visible

Cupid’s bow

The part of the upper lip that kind of goes down in the middle.

Cupid was the Roman god of love — you know the one — the guy who went around shooting people with “love arrows” and forcing them to fall in love with each other.

These days, you only really see him on Valentine’s Day cards:

Pink cupid on a heart with text Happy Valentine's Day

Yeah — we all know what these are.

Want to eat an apple? Then you’ll need teeth.

Also, in some countries, when you lose your milk teeth (the teeth you had as a kid) and put one under your pillow, some fairy comes into your room while you’re sleeping (creepy) and pays you for your tooth (also creepy).

Would be so much easier to post it to her, right?

Also — what does she do with all those teeth? Is she constructing a tooth monster? Or maybe she’s grinding them all down to powder and selling it as a kind of white cement to construction companies?

I should stop thinking about this now.

Tongues are pretty creepy if you think about it.

I mean, imagine just seeing a tongue by itself. Straight out of a horror film!

Your tongue is covered in taste buds . That’s why you can taste the food you eat.

Also — where does the tongue actually start? It just sort of disappears down the mouth.

Gums are the red stuff that your teeth are attached to.

Nose with labels bridge, septum, nostril

The holes in your nose — the ones you breathe through.

When some people get angry, they sort of move their nostrils in an almost animal-like way.

That’s when they flare their nostrils .

The bit of muscle in between the nostrils that separates them.

Some people have it pierced.

Bridge of the nose

The top of the nose where it meets the head.

Other parts of the head

Head with labels cheekbone, temple, cheek, chin, neck, jaw

The bottom front part of your head. It moves up and down when you speak or when you eat.

Sometimes, when I’m listening to something with a lot of interest, I find myself resting my chin on my hand.

The soft sides of your face.

Above the cheeks are your cheekbones.

Some people have very strongly defined cheekbones — like David Bowie.

When you see a human skull, the jaw is one of the most identifiable parts of it.

Basically, the jaw is the part that contains the bottom row of teeth.

And that’s probably why they named the film about a killer shark Jaws . Most of the people being eaten by it were primarily concerned about the teeth and the strong bone that powered them. They were also worried about their legs, which were rapidly disappearing.

Put your fingers on the side of your head, between your eye and your ear.

Can you feel it? That little area that’s quite soft — about two square centimetres?

That’s your temple!

People sometimes rub their temples when they’re stressed.

Forehead / Brow

The part between the eyebrows and the hair.

When someone’s trying to explain to you the plot to Game of Thrones and is confusing you so much that you’ve forgotten your own name, you probably have a furrowed brow — your eyebrows are low and your forehead has more lines on it than normal.

We tend to furrow our brows when we’re confused or when we’re angry.

And here is where we leave the head — say “Goodbye, head!”

The neck takes us from the head to the upper body.

Body Parts in English: The Upper Body

Upper body with labels arm, chest area, stomach area, hand

Tell me, what kind of bag do you have for your everyday stuff?

I reckon that there’s at least a 50 percent chance that you’re a backpack kind of person. Most people (including myself) seem to be these days.

If you are, then where does all the weight of the backpack go?

On your shoulders – the very top of the arms.

If you have to take on a difficult responsibility, you can say that you’re shouldering the responsibility for something.

Quick question: where do you apply deodorant?

Probable answer: “To my armpits, of course!”

Your armpits are the dark, sweaty, usually hairy, parts of your body that you kind of need to keep clean as much as you can.

You know the one — let’s move on!

It’s a nice word, isn’t it?

The elbow is the part right in the middle of your arm that you can bend and that stops your whole arm being one inconveniently straight thing.

It also sounds like “L-bow,” which kind of makes sense because when we bend our arm 90 degrees, it looks a bit like the letter “L.”

Just don’t hit it too hard — there’s what we call the funny bone in your elbow, and if you hit it, it’ll send pins and needles up your arm.

I’m going to leave you to guess this one.

Really? You want me to say?

OK — your upper arms are the parts between your elbows and your shoulders.

It’s the part that big, muscly men like showing off after they’ve been working out loads.

Your forearms are the lower part of the arm — between the elbow and the hand.

And now we reach the end of the arms!

The joint between your arm and your hand is your wrist — it’s where you have your watch (if you’re the kind of person who still uses one) and possibly some attractive bracelets.

Hand with labels finger, fingernail, knuckle, back of your hand, palm, thumb

You know about the fingers, right? But can you name them?

OK. Here we go …

Your smallest finger is your little finger , sometimes also called your pinky or pinky finger .

The next one is called your ring finger . That’s probably because it’s the finger traditionally used for your wedding ring.

The middle finger? Guess what that one’s called? That’s right — it’s called your middle finger . Please be careful about waving this one around, yeah?

The next one is called the index finger . Use it to point at things and swipe your phone.

Quick! Answer this question: How many fingers do you have?

Did you say ten? Well, you’re wrong! You have eight! Your thumbs aren’t fingers! Ha ha ha!

But only technically speaking — most people just categorise the thumbs as fingers.

You know what this is, right? It’s the strange one on the end of the hand.

The fact that we have opposable thumbs is one of the reasons humans have become so dominant in nature as they allow us to use tools like knives and spears and Instagram.

Fingernails

The hard parts that keep growing at the end of your fingers.

If you feel flashy, you might get a manicure and have them painted and shaped and sharpened and whatever else happens in a nail salon.

Your knuckles are the hard bones that allow you to bend your fingers.

Each finger has three knuckles. (The thumb just has two.)

If you’re really, really angry with someone, and you want to warn them that you might hit them soon, you can say, “Careful, mate. You’re asking for a knuckle sandwich.”

It means “a punch.”

No — not a tree. You don’t have a tree in your hand, no matter how weird your life is.

The palm of your hand is the smoother inside part below the fingers.

It’s the bit with lots of lines on it that some people believe can predict how long you’re going to live and how many kids you’re going to have and whether you’re about to pay a mystic far too much money for looking at your hand and talking rubbish.

Back of the hand

I warned you that there would be some parts of the body that simply don’t have a proper word.

And this is one of them.

And now you know.

When you know something really well, you can say you know it like the back of your hand .

OK — this isn’t technically a body part, but it’s kind of useful.

Think about the last time you got angry and wanted to punch something (and hopefully not someone) — what shape did you make your hand?

That’s right — you made your hand into a fist.

Sketch of the chest area

So the front upper part of the upper body is called the chest.

And that’s all there is to it!

One of the more amusing body parts today.

Nipples are used by mothers to provide milk to their babies and help them stay healthy and strong.

Nipples are used by men for … nothing. Totally pointless. They’re just there, being awkward.

Breasts and are only found on women and men who drink too much beer. They’re what mothers use to feed milk to their babies.

There are lots of informal, and slightly sweary, words for breast, but if you want to know what they are, I’m sure you can find out.

Stomach area

Stomach with labels waist, stomach, belly, belly button, hip

The stomach is actually the internal organ that collects your food when you eat.

But we just use this word to mean the general external area where the stomach is.

We also use the word “belly.”

That’s where we get the term “belly dancer.”

Belly button

You can guess this one, right?

The little circle (going in for some and going out for others) in the middle of your belly, where your umbilical cord used to connect you to your mother while she was pregnant.

I always used to get “waist” and “hip” mixed up for ages.

But I know now!

Your waist is the area around your body at about the level of your belly button. If you’re lucky and in good shape, it’s probably the narrowest part of your upper body.

… and your hips are below your waist and above your legs, at the sides of your body. Women typically have wider hips than men … because babies.

Back with labels shoulder blade, small of the back, spine

Shoulder blades

On your back, near the top and near (and connected to) your shoulders, are your shoulder blades.

Some people have really sharp shoulder blades that stick out and look a little bit like something from the film Alien .

Again, it’s not an external body part, but we talk about it a lot — especially as we get older.

It’s the long set of bones that goes from your neck all the way to the bottom of your back.

If you have back problems, it’s usually related to the spine.

Small of the back

Why, oh why is it called “the small of the back” and not “the bottom of the back”?

I mean — it’s literally the bottom of the back.

It’s where the spine ends.

And this is where our section on the upper body ends.

Let’s move on to the lower body!

Body Parts in English: The Lower Body

Lower body with labels legs, feet

The rude bits (Private parts)

Sketch of the body from the waist down

Bottom / Backside

Lots of words for this one!

Why? Because it’s rude — and humans get pretty creative with language when it comes to the rude things.

None of these words is extremely offensive, but if you want to play it safe, stick to “bottom” or “backside.”

Yep — I’m going for the technical term for this bit.

And guess what? That’s all I’m saying on the matter.

Legs with labels thigh, knee, shin, calf

Your thigh is the upper half of your leg.

Remember the elbow?

Well, the knee is the leg’s elbow — the joint in the middle that allows you to bend it.

The bones that protect the knee.

Apparently, these are the most painful parts of the body where you can be shot.

I’m not sure about that fact, though — I’m imagining other parts of the body that would be more painful.

I’m sure you can, too …

The lower part of your leg has a different word depending on whether you’re referring to the front or the back.

The back part — the fleshy part — is your calf.

The front part — the bony part — is your shin.

If the knee is the leg’s elbow, then the ankles are the leg’s wrists.

They’re what connects the leg to the foot.

For some reason, the ankle has been singled out as a reasonable place to have a tattoo.

I have no idea why.

Feet with labels ankle, toe, toenail, heel, arch, sole

OK. So the toes are like fingers, but on the leg.

Unfortunately, the toes don’t get quite as much attention as the fingers, so we don’t really have a name for each toe.

Just the big toe , which is … erm … the biggest toe.

And the little toe , which is — you guessed it — carrot cake. No, I mean the smallest toe. But you can also call it the pinky toe .

Also, if you write the word “toe” too many times, it just starts to look really weird.

The fingers have nails.

And so do the toes.

This shouldn’t be shocking news.

Soles of the feet

The soles of your feet are the bottom parts of your feet.

You know, the part that’s touching the ground if you don’t have shoes on and that gets crazy hot when you have to walk on the beach in 38-degree heat.

Your heels are the parts at the back of the sole.

If you’re familiar with high heel shoes, then you’ll remember this easily.

The arches of your feet are the parts that don’t actually touch the ground.

An arch is also a type of shape — like a bridge. The arch of the foot lifts away from the ground and kind of looks like a bridge.

There we have it — common body parts for human bodies in English!

You can now talk about the human body with more confidence and in more detail.

Were any of these surprising?

Did I miss anything important?

If so, let me know in the comments, and we can talk more about body parts in English!

Did you like this post? Then be awesome and share by clicking the blue button below.

5 thoughts on “ Body Parts in English: 71 Parts of the Body You Might Not Know ”

Do you recall a song, your hip bone connected to xyz bone your xyz bone connected to abc bone, now here’s the word of the Lord. A gospel song from the 192ps 1930s.

Thank you very much for these helpful informationMohammad

Brilliant intro to the body parts for infant/middle stages.

Hi, Mr. Clark! That’s awesome! What such an outstanding article you’ve posted here. Thank you ever so much for that! Best wishes! A big hug from Brazil 🙂

so detailed thanks

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Parts of the Body for English Learners

  • Basic Conversations for English Language Learners
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The words below are the most important words used when talking about all things related to the body. All of the words are categorized into different sections of the body such as the torso, head, legs, etc. You'll find example sentences for each word to help provide context for learning. There is also a list of body movement verbs including which body part completes each action. 

The Body - Arms and Hands

  • elbow - Don't jab your elbow into me. It hurts!
  • finger - He pointed his finger at her and shouted "I love you!"
  • index finger/middle/little/ring - Many people wear their marriage band on their ring finger.
  • finger nail - Have you ever painted your finger nails?
  • fist - Make your hand into a fist and then pound it on the table for more food.
  • forearm - You should put some sunscreen on your exposed forearm.
  • hand/left and right - I write with my right hand. That makes me right-handed.
  • palm - Show me the palm of your hand, and I'll read your future .
  • thumb - Our thumb might be the most valuable digit we have.
  • wrist - That's a beautiful bracelet on your wrist.

The Body - Heads and Shoulders

  • chin - He has a very strong chin. He should become an actor.
  • cheek - She brushed her daughter's cheek and sang a lullaby.
  • ear - You need to clean out your ears! You can't hear anything.
  • eye - Does she have blue eyes or green?
  • eyebrow - Jennifer spends a lot of time making her eyebrows stand out.
  • eyelash - She has very thick eyelashes.
  • forehead - Look at that forehead. He must be a genius.
  • hair - Susan has light brown hair and blue eyes.
  • head - His head is rather large, isn't it?
  • lip - Her lips are like soft pillows.
  • mouth - He's got a big mouth!
  • neck - I love her long neck.
  • nose - She's got a beautiful petite nose.
  • nostril - He flairs his nostrils when he is angry.
  • jaw - You chew your food with your jaw.
  • shoulder - Dennis had broad shoulders.
  • tooth (teeth) - How many teeth have you lost?
  • tongue - Stick your tongue back in your mouth!
  • throat - The beer flowed down my throat easily on the hot day.

The Body - Legs and Feet

  • ankle - Your ankle connects your foot to your leg.
  • calf - Her calf muscles are very strong from all the running.
  • foot (feet) - Put your shoes on your feet and let's go.
  • heel - As you walk down the hill, dig your heels into the dirt to help balance you.
  • hips - I think I've put some weight onto my hips. I'm thick around the waist.
  • knee - Your leg bends at the knee.
  • leg - Put on your pants one leg at a time.
  • shin - Be sure to protect your shins when you play soccer.
  • thigh - His thighs are huge!
  • toe - A toe is like a finger on the foot.
  • toenail - She likes to paint her toenails pink.

The Body - The Trunk or Torso

  • bottom - Your bottom is used for sitting.
  • chest - He has a broad chest because he swims a lot.
  • back - Are you experiencing any pain in the back?
  • stomach - I'm eating too much and my stomach is growing!
  • waist - She has a slim waist and will fit into anything!

All Parts of the Body

  • blood - The hospital needs more blood.
  • bone - Our skeleton is made of bone. 
  • hair - It's amazing how much hair is on the floor after a haircut.
  • muscle - You should always stretch your muscles before you go running. 
  • skin - Make sure to put on sunscreen to protect your skin. 

The Body - Verbs 

Here is a list of verbs that are used with different parts of the body. Each verb is listed with the specific body party part which completes the action .

  • blink   eyes
  • glance   eyes
  • stare   eyes
  • point   finger
  • scratch   finger
  • kick   foot
  • clap   hands
  • punch   hands
  • shake   hands
  • slap   hands
  • smack   hands
  • shake   head
  • kiss   lips
  • whistle   lips/mouth
  • eat   mouth
  • mutter   mouth
  • talk   mouth
  • taste   mouth
  • whisper   mouth
  • breathe   mouth/nose
  • smell   nose
  • sniff   nose
  • shrug   shoulders
  • bite   mouth
  • chew   mouth
  • lick   tongue
  • swallow   throat
  • Brain Gym Exercises
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  • Gender in English: He, She or It?
  • 6 Steps to Master Small Talk
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  • Describing Friends

When You Write

How to Describe Body Language in Writing

The body can speak without uttering a word. In some real-life situations, body language is used to save lives or sign death penalties—i.e., a kidnapping victim can use facial expressions or hand gestures to signal to police or civilians that they’re in trouble.

In fiction writing, which is what we’ll be talking about in this post, body language has numerous uses, some of which the writer does not originally intend on when writing.

Body language is an effective non-verbal form of communication, and it adds depth and brings realism to a fictional story as the characters seem a little bit more alive when they use their bodies to communicate.

What Is Body Language?

Body language includes facial expressions, body posture, hand gestures, and other body cues that can be used to nonverbally communicate with other people.

These actions may be intentional or unplanned, but they have an impact on other people’s perceptions of us.

Body Language is Important, this is Why

So, why use body language?

We indeed talk a lot when trying to communicate with others but people mostly communicate using body language (like more than half of the time). When we are writing fiction, we use dialogue to insert breaks into the narration and body language is another great way of doing that. With body language, the characters aren’t just speaking, but they’re also revealing their personalities to the reader.

That adds a lot of depth to your fiction writing; the reader is shown—not told—how the characters show their emotions, and the body language reveals the characters’ distinct mannerisms.

Show, Don’t Tell!

The sacred rule of fiction writing—you’re allowed to be fluid, exercise some anarchy, or be divergent, but you CAN’T break this rule.

That’s a NO-NO. A cardinal sin!

Even with body language, you don’t have to tell the reader what’s happening; you have to show it! You have to get the reader into the story’s environment and give the precise feelings of the characters.

Almost impossible, right?

If you think that’s impossible, then you shouldn’t be a writer (at least not a fiction writer). You can only add depth using body language if you let the characters own those body cues, not the narrator.

I’ve written some words and phrases for you in a later section, jump to this section to see what words can be used to incorporate body language in your writing.

How to Use Body Language in Your Writing

1. facial expressions.

The face is the first body part when we think about communication. Even in real life, facial expressions are easier to read than other types of gestures and body cues (maybe that’s why “clowns at a kids’ party” is usually a good idea).

You can use facial expressions to show sadism, astonishment, anger, and a lot of other things.

2. Gestures

I know a lot of people that talk with their hands and sometimes they use their hands to do things without uttering a word. Characters are fashioned after real people so your readers would understand if your characters spoke using hand gestures.

One example would be when a villain uses a finger gun to tell a character that they were going to get killed.

The thing with hand gestures is that they can be interpreted differently in different cultural contexts. For example, you could use the middle finger in a certain cultural space and it wouldn’t have some vulgar implication.

Posture refers to the way our bodies are fixed when sitting or standing. Posture can also be used to show how a character behaves as himself as his bodily stances.

You can use posture to show the reader whether your character likes to sprawl or sit with legs crossed, assume a drooping posture, or stand tall.

Posture can be used to tell your readers a lot about your characters. For example, Straight posture indicates that you are interested in a conversation.

You can use implications like that to show one character’s reaction to another character’s speech or a group discussion.

A person might be saying something and the tone or pitch of their voice might be saying a completely different thing. That’s how important a person’s tone of voice is.

For instance, if a talkative person says “I’m happy” or “I’m okay” in a very slow, low pitch,  they’re probably lying—they’re not okay and surely not happy.

You can change your characters’ tones to show the readers that the character’s mood has changed or that they’re hiding something.

5. Physical appearance

The way we look says a lot about us. Someone whose ‘house is in order’ is usually clean, clean-shaven, and looks smart. Bad times can be reflected in a character’s appearance.

Imagine seeing an ex-coworker, say an accountant, with a huge beard and in dirty clothes, would think that they are still employed?

So you can use physical appearances to show your readers what kind of characters are in your story. You can also use physical appearance to twist the narrative and unravel some truths at the end of the story—like a homeless person turning out to be an undercover rich guy.

You can use tattoos, pants sagging, hairstyles, facial hair to paint a picture of your character.

Touch can be used to show a lot of emotions and actions. You can use gestures that relate to touch to show aggression, tenderness, or other actions.

There’s so much information that a single touch can convey.

A soft continuous caressing of a lover’s hand or other body parts might indicate affection and set the mood for romance in some instances, and a punch in the face shows aggression and sets the mood for a fight.

Tips for Using Body Language

1. use it to strengthen dialogue/add depth.

 I’ve already said that we speak more with our body than our mouth—more nonverbally than verbally. So if you hugely rely on dialogue to demonstrate how your characters communicate, you’re making your story less realistic (Not that it’s a must that a story should follow real-life patterns).

Body language helps you give your characters more depth and sets up a relatable, interactive feel for the readers.

In my other posts, I’ve also said using the simple ‘he said, she said’ dialogue tags is always effective . But… It’s also good to show who is speaking instead of telling your readers, and you can use body language to show how the character spoke.

You need to have a realistic balance between dialogue and description in your fiction writing.

2. Use It to Show Rather Than Tell

You may feel like I’m overstressing this point because I said it at the beginning of the post and in the first part of this section.

But it’s the sacred rule, and once you break it, you’re no longer a good writer. Simple!

So, always observe this rule.

3. Don’t Overexploit Body Language

If you use body language unconscionably, you will realize diminishing returns. Too much body language will slow your story down.

Everything has to advance your story, so you don’t need body language if it’s retarding the story’s development. Body language should be added to add something to the story, not take something from it, although it’s okay if you intentionally use body language to slow down your story.

4. Use Body Language to Connect Your Character’s Emotions with Their Actions

If you want your characters to be as realistic as possible, you have to show your reader that the characters’ emotions, thoughts, and actions are linked.

Body language has to correlate with the way your character acts or reacts to situations and set the reader for the impending actions.

Body Language Words and Phrases

Here are some of the phrases and words you can use to describe body language in your writing. These are just a few but a lot of them, and you can also make your own phrases.

  • Arms akimbo
  • A vicious yank
  • Arm curled around his waist
  • Bit her lip
  • Fast, shallow breathing
  • Clenched his dirty little fists
  • A deadpan expression
  • A lackluster smile
  • A toothy smile
  • Crossed his arms over his chest
  • Palm to palm handshake
  • Gritted his teeth
  • Fists shaking
  • Darting eyes
  • Blood rushing to head
  • Laid her chin in her palm
  • Fingers spread like claws
  • Tensed muscles
  • Eyes burned with hatred
  • Pursed her lips
  • Ambled away
  • He shivered
  • She cowered
  • Hunched over
  • Rubbing temples
  • She rubbed her forehead
  • Clenched jaw
  • Tall erect posture
  • Sketched a brief bow
  • He balled his fists
  • His body shook
  • She trembled
  • Swaggered into the hall
  • Blitzed into the room
  • Eyes flashed
  • He stroked his beard
  • He scratched his nose
  • He scratched his head
  • He tapped his fingers on the table

Books On Writing Body Language

I don’t think you can master the art of writing body language by reading a couple of blog posts or by using tips from other authors. There are books that can help you learn and become good at writing body language.

Here are some of them:

1. The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression

2. The Writer’s A-Z of Body Language Paperback

Final Words

Over the years, I have come to realize that to become a good writer, there are a lot of things that you have to learn and master. You don’t have to go to a special school, but you still have to learn aspects of writing that improve you as a writer.

Using body language to express emotions, reactions, and add depth is one such aspect that you have to master. If you separate yourself from the characters, it’s going to be harder to express or use body language. But if you put yourself into the character’s state of mind and try to behave like they would, figuring out how they’d use body language to react to things or communicate is going to be easy.

One thing you must do is let your characters speak, whether by acting out some scenes or using the personalities.

If you nail the body cues, your readers will instinctively understand the characters’ impressions and will be able to understand what’s going on without needing your narrations.

Easier shown than said.

Recommended Reading...

How long does it take to write 1000 words from start to finish, author vs writer – are they the same or is there a difference, how to add more detail to writing, how to write a russian accent.

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Writers in the Storm

A blog about writing.

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A Look at Body Language in Writing

by Ellen Buikema

body writing in english

More than half of human communication consists of body language, which we use to communicate feelings, thought, and ideas without speech. Body language impacts other people’s perception and conveys our emotions far more than we think it does. Physical descriptions of what our characters are doing allows us to show-not-tell what is happening to them internally. It is one of the simplest ways to give the reader a feel for characters’ depth of mood and attitude.

Can you communicate well with others if you sit on your hands? I tried to and discovered that I don’t express myself as well.  I’m a hand-gesturer. Plus, with COVID-19 upon us, I’ve realized how often I touch my face!

I also move around a lot, especially if I’m nervous. The first time I taught a classroom full of adults, I paced the entire time. Thinking back, I wonder if I made anyone dizzy.

Simple tasks require a surprising amount of movement.

Here’s a quick exercise that will give you a feel for how many movements you actually make. It will help you determine the balance needed between dialogue and description in your writing.

Choose an activity you commonly do at home or at work. It can be as small a task as sitting in a chair, working on the laptop, or other computer keyboard. Here are a few possible questions to get you started.

  • Where are your hands when not on the keyboard?
  • Are you leaning in, or away?
  • Do you cross your legs?
  • Crane your neck?
  • Arch your back?
  • Tap your finger on the mouse?
  • Use the dog as a footrest?
  • Lift the cat off the keyboard?
  • Roll your eyes?

Write out what you are physically doing, making a conscious effort to write all the steps you take. The first time I tried this I was shocked at how many little steps are involved in doing even simple tasks. Weave these descriptions into your manuscripts to help your characters come alive.

Other Body Language Recommendations

Showing Emotion

Make a list of the emotions your main characters exhibit along with the accompanying body language. Think about how your main characters move and react. How does your antagonist look when she is amused? What body language does your protagonist use when angered?

Avoid repetitive gestures.

Repeating gestures can be annoying. Certainly, it feels forced. Not every character should clench their fists or waggle their eyebrows. One character can habitually use the same gesture now and then, but not everyone. (Although thinking about a town full of people waggling their eyebrows makes me chuckle.)

Use vivid action verbs.

Choosing the right verb helps express the emotion you want to convey. For example, there are many ways to walk and each alternative verb implies an emotion. We can:

  • stride into a room
  • sashay down the boardwalk
  • lumber across the floor.

Each of the three verbs is a form of walking, all with different nuances. Each paints a distinct picture.

For dialogue tags, said is never wrong. Unfortunately, I find myself using smile, laugh, and nod. My current Work In Progress had a whole lot of nodding going on. After someone brought this to my attention, I did a "nod search" on my Word document and was appalled by the many cheerful yellow highlights.

Wise words from my editor about empty words and gestures. (Those are pauses between lines of dialogue that don’t advance a scene or characterize.) She said, “If you point something out by putting it down on the page, it needs a reason to be there. Your job during your editing phase is to second guess every image you put down on the page and make sure it’s clearly what you mean.”

Don’t overdo.

Too many descriptors make readers focus on the details instead of the feelings you want them to experience. Or worse, it gives readers a chance to trip on the details and get pulled out of the story. Meaningless details interrupt the flow.

As with all else in writing, put just enough body language in your prose to get your point across.

Further reading:

  • For a great list of body language phrases, see Sharla Rae's post .
  • Margie Lawson also gave us tips on writing FRESH body language .
Do you struggle with writing effective body language? Do you have a gesture like nodding that you overuse? Share your body language tips and questions with us down in the comments!

*  *  *  *  *  *

About Ellen

body writing in english

Author, speaker, and former teacher, Ellen L. Buikema has written non-fiction for parents and a series of chapter books for children with stories encouraging the development of empathy—sprinkling humor wherever possible. Her Work In Progress,  The Hobo Code , is YA historical fiction.

Find her at  http://ellenbuikema.com  or on  Amazon .

body writing in english

Image by Ri Butov from Pixabay

18 comments on “A Look at Body Language in Writing”

Such a great topic! I often find myself getting up and acting out a scene when I'm writing so I can know what the movements and sensations are! I also struggle with finding ways to convey body language that are concise and accessible, but not over-used. My characters always seem to shrug, nod, and raise their eyebrows LOL. Thank goodness for that "search" box that shows me how often they do that! On the other hand, sometimes those "standard" words are just fine because they get the job done without drawing attention to themselves. Being too creative can break the flow of the scene. Another aspect of our craft that requires a balancing act!

Being too "flowery" can definitely pull me out of the story I'm reading.

Acting out the scenes makes a big difference!

Smiling, shrugging, and nodding are on my hit list for my first editing pass.

Our eldest daughter's Freshman year English teacher gave her class a list of forbidden words. This made writing more difficult, but seriously improved her writing.

Hit list! The perfect term.

My characters smile all over the place as well. That find feature is humbling.

Excellent post. I find that my cozy characters roll their eyes and shrug, whereas my Gothic characters glance nervously and have racing hearts. And even nonverbal cues that might look the same--I'm thinking smiling and grinning--have different connotations depending on which word we use.

I love The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. It really gets me thinking about all the different ways we express our emotions and it's a treasure trove for writers who need new words to describe how a character is thinking or feeling.

Thanks for the great post!

And you have the second edition, right? They added 30÷ things!

The Emotion Thesaurus is a go to resource for me as well. It helps me get unstuck when I discover a repeated descriptions in my writing: batting eyelashes and hand on hip moments overplayed!

When we say, "show not tell" body language is definitely a HUGE part of that.

Absolutely. The show is all about body language.

Amy, thank you for your recommendation. I'll check out The Emotional Thesaurus.

It's interesting to note the different uses of body language in various genres. I'm glad you brought that up.

Sometimes, if I'm trying to vary action tags, I'll give characters an object, like a pencil, to tap, throw, or doodle with, depending on emotion. Or, they might be doing a task in a location but they'll be stomping around the room and talking or slamming drawers if angry. If sad or reflective, maybe they're sitting and twisting their coffee cup rather than drinking, etc. It's interesting to see how other authors do this.

I enjoy seeing how other writers use body language to express emotions. Reading other's work shows us different directions to go. Currently I'm reading a SciFi novel. The author did extensive research and wove that into her book. One of the characters has significant bodily damage and uses an exoskeleton, making for unusual body language.

Thanks, Ellen, great post. It made me think of my WIP and without even looking back at the ms I am sure I have overused "shrug." Something to look out for. Oh, well. I'll keep my eyes open on the next pass. All kidding aside, thanks again.

I'm glad the post is helpful, James! I think we all have our pet words. Thank goodness for word search, however ghastly cheerful.

Thank you for the examples of showing the emotions through body language. We convey emotion and thoughts subconsciously in real life and it makes sense for our readers to experience this in our writing. It makes me want to people watch for research!

People watching is ALWAYS fun.

I'm sure I do, I can't think of one off hand. I try to search for overuse words.

I did notice a friend using "shimmied her shoulders" in a book several times recently. It didn't fit the character. I don't think she was using the right word for the action she wanted. denise

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body writing in english

Cheat Sheets For Writing Body Language

What is body language and how do you use it when you write? Use these cheat sheets to help you with your body language descriptions.

What Is Body Language?

People react to situations with micro-expressions, hand gestures, and posture. Most of us are not even aware of them. However, what we do with our body language has a huge impact on other people and how they interpret and perceive us.

‘Even when they don’t express their thoughts verbally, most people constantly throw off clues to what they’re thinking and feeling. Non-verbal messages communicated through the sender’s body movements, facial expressions, vocal tone and volume, and other clues are collectively known as body language.’ ( Psychology Today )

Body language happens when we are doing something. We could be sitting, standing, or walking. We could be talking or thinking . Body language is often an involuntary reaction to something perceived by one of the five senses .

How To Use It In Writing

Using body language is one of the best ways to show and not tell when we write.

This is why we are always told to use body language in our writing. Sometimes, it’s easier said than written. So, I created these cheat sheets to help you show a character’s state of mind through their body language.

When you are completing your character biographies , be sure to include how your main characters move and talk. This is especially important for your protagonist , antagonist , confidant , and love interest . They are the characters that hold the story together and they should be as well-rounded and believable as possible.

The Top Five Tips For Using Body Language

  • Use body language to add depth to dialogue .
  • Use it because more than 50% of human communication is non-verbal.
  • Use it to show how your character’s emotions affect their actions.
  • Use it to help you show rather than tell your reader everything.
  • Use it in moderation. If overused, it can slow your story down.

TIP: Use our Character Creation Kit  to create great characters for your stories.

Use this list to help you with your body language descriptions. It will help you to translate emotions and thoughts into written body language.

Obviously, a character may exhibit a number of these behaviours. For example, they may be shocked and angry, or shocked and happy.

Use these combinations as needed.

Cheat Sheets For Body Language

Use our  Character Creation Kit  to create great characters for your stories.

body writing in english

If you enjoyed this, read:

  • The 17 Most Popular Genres In Fiction – And Why They Matter
  • How To Write A One-Page Synopsis
  • 123 Ideas For Character Flaws – A Writer’s Resource
  • The 7 Critical Elements Of A Great Book
  • All About Parts Of Speech
  • Punctuation For Beginners
  • 5 Incredibly Simple Ways to Help Writers Show and Not Tell
  • 5  Instances When You Need To Tell (And Not Show)
  • The 4 Main Characters As Literary Devices
  • 106 Ways To Describe Sounds

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Top Tip : Find out more about our workbooks and online courses in our shop .

  • Body Language , Creating Characters , Show Don't Tell , Writing Tips from Amanda Patterson

53 thoughts on “Cheat Sheets For Writing Body Language”

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Wow….that’s probably one of the most useful lists I’ve ever seen…thanks!

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Very useful…simply superb. Will be handy for me when I sit down to write next time.

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A mullion trillion thanks for this incredibly useful page of “show” instead of telling. Thank you xx

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I would have liked to pin this on pint rest 🙁

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This is the best of the “show” lists I have either made or found. Superb.

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Love, love, love these! Thanks for compiling them. I’m going to share them and put them in a file to resource. Michelle Random Writing Rants

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This is very useful.

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Its really helpful….

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great post really!!! thanks for sharing

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This is one of the most helpful writer’s guide posts I have ever seen. It is so hard not to write “He looked at her in awe”, but think about the specific body language in that situation. It also helps think about the traits a character can have… Every person is different so one can even put individuality into the writing by giving certain characters characteristic emotional expressions.

Thank you so much for sharing this!!

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Thank you, Kimberley.

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I know I’ll be referring back to this list often. Thank you so much for sharing.

Thank you, Melissa.

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Perhaps this is the best way to hone up the writing skills of one’s own and I should be very thankful to you for helping the writers through this .

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This is dangerous if astute advice. Anything that aids progress writing is useful, but anything that aids progress stops you thinking – and it is only by thinking that he universe opens a portal and pours out something original.

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Great information not only for writing but observation of these behaviors in action. As a school counselor I am interested in non-verbal cues from others.

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Great work! high degree of observation! really impressed.

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This is great. There is one word that comes up SO OFTEN that it is distracting to me as a reader and that is “gaze.” People are gazing at things, at each other, they’re gazing all over the place. One time I counted the number of times “gaze” was used in a book and found an instance of 5 times in 4 consecutive pages. But another book used “gaze” 5 times in 4 consecutive PARAGRAPHS. Why the editors don’t catch this is beyond me. My favorite “gaze” quote from a book is, “Her brown gaze settled upon the distant mountains.” That didn’t make me think of her brown eyes. My first thought was that she was seeing smog! Is it strange to say a color with “gaze”? I’ve also seen something like, “His blue gaze swung up.” (the man was driving at the time) It sounds strange to me, but maybe that’s just me. The book with the distant mountains sentence used “gaze” heavily from the second page all the way to the second to the last paragraph! It was painful to read. I got rid of the book.

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Very helpful to have this all in one place! Thanks!!!

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Thank you! This is great! 🙂

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Thank you for this post. It’s very helpful.

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This is a good list. But I believe we can always be a little more creative in mixing them up to denote various degrees and subtleties in an emotion.

Yes, Ayan. As it says in the post: ‘Obviously, a character may exhibit a number of these behaviours. For example, he may be shocked and angry, or shocked and happy. Use these combinations as needed.’

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These cheat sheets are worth their weight in gold! Thank you for taking the time to put them together.

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AWESOME! I was just speaking with a friend who mentioned I needed to do this a little more. Thank you so much.

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such an amazingly helpful post! Thank you!

Thank you. We’re glad you find this useful.

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Melody, Would have ditched that book too. That’s just bad writing.

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Please send me any further articles you put out. This one is very helpful. It makes us aware of the use of each movement as a symbol of inner thought. Thanks

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This is the most helpful article I have read about telling vs. Showing. Thank you.

Thank you, Wendy.

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Thanks for this really usefull I find that I use the same emotions over and over.

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Thank you! This is an excellent reference for a desirable result.

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“Excellent list,” she said, rubbing her hands together and grinning. ; ) Thank you!

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Thank you, Melissa! I love it!!

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Excellent!!

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I read this very useful and generous article on stumbleupon.com Thank you for sharing your knowledge with me!

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Thank you for the positive feedback. I’m pleased that this helps.

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Thank you for this :))

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Thanks for the helpful post! Great resource for the scripts I’m co-writing.

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Simply superb compilation ! No more adjectives.

Thank you! We’re glad that you find these lists helpful.

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Very useful! Thank you so much!

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What a succinct and useful list!

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“Unfortunately,” (pause, lips pursed indicating deliberation and thought) “these are almost” (stress on final word, downward tilt of the head with slight inclination to the left as the speaker maintains gaze on listener indicating mock-serious intent) “entirely” (extra stress on this word, head lifts and turns full-on indicating intent) “cliché” (jaw firms, slight downward shift of the brow, eyes narrow indicating mild annoyance.) “Sorry” (head lifts, jaw pushes out, eyebrows raised indicating belligerence and complete lack of genuine apology).

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quite informative, and precise. thanks.

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i’m highly grateful to you, thanks a lot n million, may god bless you a long and happy life

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This is so useful! Thank you, thank you very much!

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OMG! I impressed to read it. Really, you are doing good job.

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Very informative thanks!

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I need something different for pleading. and it’s not on the list. Why is the emotion I want not almost never on the lists? xP (Arg)

Comments are closed.

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Writing the Body in Literature and Culture

Key information, module code:, credit value:, module description.

Until recently, the physical body has been a much-neglected subject of contemporary women's writing, whether fictional or autobiographical. Theoretical writings that emerged from contemporary feminist debates in the latter part of the twentieth century tended to privilege more psychoanalytic or abstract considerations of the corporeal. Feminist thought's differentiation of sex and gender, and consequent drive to dissociate biology from determinism and to emphasise the power of the rational female mind may further account for the only recent emergence of the body as a subject worthy of critical and literary analysis. How can language capture the physiological changes and states undergone by the body? Is the 'unspeakable' nature of certain physiological experiences compounded by their unspoken nature, their taboo status? This module seeks to redress that imbalance by focusing more on the materiality of bodies (principally female or non-binary) as they evolve through a series of life events or experiences: abortion; motherhood; transition and ageing. It locates the body in different epochs and national contexts in order to examine the relationship between subjectivity, corporeality and identity more broadly. The content of this module will also be supplemented with audiovisual and filmic representations of the body as part of its secondary corpus. All texts on this module are available in translation.

Assessment details

one 4000-word essay (100%)

Educational aims & objectives

  • To introduce students to the literary, historicaland cultural contexts of twentieth-century and twenty-first century women's writing
  • To deepen students' knowledge of different genres dealing withrepresentations of the body: theory, fiction(including the short story), autobiography, and the essay
  • To introduce students to (or to consolidate their prior knowledge of) theories of corporeality and the body in relation to women's writing in particular

Learning outcomes

By the end of this module, students will:

  • demonstrate sound knowledge of the various contexts of the twentieth- and twenty-first century writing dealing with representations of the body
  • be able to analyse a generically diverse selection of texts dealing with corporeality by placing them in their context and by adopting different theoretical approaches
  • have developed a series of transferable skills (essay writing, textual analysis, individual or group presentations)
  • have gained an insight into the specificities of writing the body from a female and feminist

Teaching pattern

two hour seminar, weekly

Suggested reading list

Marie Darrieussecq, Truismes (Paris: POL, 1996) Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales , trans. by Linda Coverdale (London: Faber and Faber, 1997)

Diamela Eltit, Jamás el fuego nunca (Cáceres: Editorial Periférica, 2013) Diamela Eltit, Never Did the Fire , trans. by Daniel Hahn (Edinburgh: Charco Press, 2022)

Annie Ernaux, Les Armoires Vides (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Annie Ernaux, Cleaned Out , trans. by Carol Sanders (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996).

Annie Ernaux, L'évenement (Paris: Gallimard, 2001) (French original). Annie Ernaux, Happening , trans. by Tanya Leslie (New York: Seven Stories, 2019).

Jenny Erpenbeck, Die Geschichte vom alten Kind (Frankfurt am Main: btb, 2001). Jenny Erpenbeck, 'The Old Child', in The Old Child and the Book of Words , trans. by Susan Bernofsky (London: Portobello, 2008).

Ariana Harwicz, Mátate, amor (San José, Costa Rica: Ediciones Lanzallamas, 2012) Ariana Harwicz, Die, My Love, trans. by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff (Edinburgh: Charco Press, 2017)

Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Ausser sich (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017). Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Beside Myself , trans. by Imogen Taylor (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2019).

Subject areas

  • Arts & Humanities
  • Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Module description disclaimer

King’s College London reviews the modules offered on a regular basis to provide up-to-date, innovative and relevant programmes of study. Therefore, modules offered may change. We suggest you keep an eye on the course finder on our website for updates.

Please note that modules with a practical component will be capped due to educational requirements, which may mean that we cannot guarantee a place to all students who elect to study this module.

Please note that the module descriptions above are related to the current academic year and are subject to change.

  • A1-A2 vocabulary

Body parts 1

Do these exercises to learn words for parts of the body.

Have you ever broken your arm or leg? What happened?

Language level

Hello, no that never happened to me.

  • Log in or register to post comments

Yes,I broken my leg on school basketball competition.

I don't like my nose because it's low

I haven't broken my legs or arms yet . thanks god.

Yes, I have broken my leg in high school. Because I fell when I was playing soccer.

I have never broken my leg or arm.

I have broken my leg when I was Playing Football with my friendes, was in CUP final.

I've broken my ankle at 12.It had happened bacause of a dog.I'm riding my bicycle just as usual.A dog near my house not knowing why he was acting like I'm a stranger.And then started chasing me.I was so afraid at that time and didn't know what to do and spilted my bicycle. When I start to stand up I can't ,my ankle was so painful then I realized it is broke. I can't walk for about 2 months.

I've broken my right leg at the last year. I've fell down when riding the motocross

In fact, I've broken my finger one day when was a child. Honestly, I can't remember well what happened to me on that day, but what is in my memory is that I had an accident with my friend when we were playing outdoors.

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body writing in english

Writing the Body: Trauma, Illness, Sexuality, and Beyond

Eileen myles, ruth ozeki, porochista khakpour, anna march & alexandra kleeman.

In September, Michele Filgate’s quarterly Red Ink Series—focused on women writers, past and present—brought together Eileen Myles, Ruth Ozeki, Porochista Khakpour, Anna March, and Alexandra Kleeman for a wide-ranging discussion about writing the body, from health to gender, sexuality, and beyond. The next Red Ink event, “ Writing About Depression ,” will take place at BookCourt this Thursday, 12/8.

Michele Filgate:  I wanted to start out by reading a quote from Rene Gladman’s new book Calamity that Leads Books just published. I really recommend it. She says, “I began the day trying to say the word ‘body’ as many times as I could, for myself and for everyone in the room. I wanted to exchange the word with all my correspondents. I wanted to say ‘body’ to them: How is your body, or Write through the body, or How does the body activate objects in the room. I hoped to say ‘body’ and see a change come over your face: inside your body, the edge of the body, your body split. (I split you.) I hoped to reach a point in speaking where when it was time to say ‘body’ I could go silent instead. I’d pause and everyone in the room would sound the word within themselves. I’d go, ‘Every time you put a hole in the _____,’ and demur. Lower my head like a 40-watt bulb, look solemn. Or say, ‘We all carry something in our _____,’ and the collective internal silent hum would overwhelm my senses. This would be real communication: something you started in your _____ would finish in mine.”

So I put together this panel because I think it’s so important to talk about bodies, about women and bodies. Some of these questions may be directed to individual authors but I encourage anyone to answer or chime in whenever they want.

Ruth, in The Face: A Time Code , you sat in front of the mirror for three hours and wrote about your face. How did this mirror change the way you think about your body and your writing, and can you also tell us what your Zen is?

Ruth Ozeki:  Sure, well mirror Zen, it turns out, is actually a practice, though I didn’t realize that at the time I came up with this idea to sit in front of a mirror for three hours and observe my face. The reason I did this was really kind of practical. I needed to write this commission for Restless Books—an essay about my face—and when I actually thought about sitting down to do this, it was just so appalling to me that I needed some kind of device that would get me through. Being a Zen practitioner, and certainly being a Zen writer, the way I approach these things is to sit with whatever it is that I’m writing. So in this case I thought, “Well I’ll just put a mirror up, and I’ll sit with my face for three hours”—which seemed like a suitably painful length of time—”and something will happen, right? Something will happen.”

It was interesting because after I did this, and in fact after I wrote the essay, I discovered that there is really a practice called mirror Zen. It started in Kamakura, at a temple called Tōkei-ji. It was a nunnery, and it was the only place in Japan during, you know the, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th    centuries—around that time—where a woman could get a divorce. Women who were trying to escape abusive marriages, or who wanted to be divorced, would come to the nunnery, and they would throw their shoes over the nunnery gate, and that would gain them admittance. Then they would sit for three years and study their reflections in a mirror—they would sit zazen in front of a mirror—and the idea is that, by doing so, you start to understand your attachments and your aversions to your face. It’s a way of reclaiming your image.

So, I think that’s kind of what happened during those three years—three hours. It felt like three years. By sitting there, what I started to realize was that these were all stories that I had—that the face is just filled with stories, and the body is filled with stories. That was an interesting realization, and I think that the most sort of profound part of that was really at the end of three hours, when I walked out of the apartment, and I looked around, and it was astonishing because everyone had faces. Everyone has this complex relationship with—and sort of embedded stories in—their faces, and of course we can’t really see that in each other’s faces. But just the practice of sitting there for three hours opened up this world. So that was really wonderful.

MF:  That sounds terrifying and amazing at the same time. Have any of you ever spent that much time looking at the mirror?

Eileen Myles:  I just want to chime in that the phrase “the Zen writer” is amazing, an amazing pair of words I’ve never heard together like that. It’s really exciting.

MF:  Eileen, I read an interview with you in Rookie mag where you said, “In some way I want my writing to take care of me. I want to live in my worlds. I want to carry my world with me like a shell. I want a home.” Do you think of your body as a home? And do you feel more comfortable with your body on or off the page?

EM:  I sort of feel like writing creates the body, in a way. When I really think about how I felt when I was a kid—I mean, when I was a kid I guess I wrote somewhat, but I drew more, you know. That somehow delivered me into dreams and into some awkward state; it was some way to bear the present, or school, or whatever. But when I stop to think about it, when I really began to have a pretty frequent practice of setting words down, I started to exist. I started to exist on the page. It was almost like until I was out there, I couldn’t be in here, you know? I absolutely don’t say—I could never say—that I feel at home in my body, but I think that my writing created a safe place for it. Putting it out there created an account, or relay, which is kind of the world and my position in it. It’s really literal because so many of us have gotten to our identities through our writing, like it or not. Then you can feel kind of weighed down by that identity. But it started there and I still—I mean, the practice of keeping a journal is not constant in my life, but it’s important because then I’m very aware of when I’m not writing stuff in my journal. When I do, I know there’s a sort of presence, and it’s different from poetry and different from a writing project. It’s all very similar to the way you were describing looking at your face in the mirror and dropping those words on the page. The journal is a self-created image that starts to make it be that I’m here.

RO:  It’s a reflection, too.

EM:  Absolutely. Yeah.

Anna March:  The thing that’s interesting to me about Eileen talking about getting your identity from writing—and I got a lot of this as a young women from her writing, actually—is how you get a lot of your identity from the identity marker of being a woman in society. So you don’t escape that, or you don’t live beyond that—a lot of times it determines the way culture looks at you, the way the world looks at you. So as much as I don’t want to go all Heidegger, I’m thinking about the way that you enter the space by dwelling in the space. I entered the space of feminism, and I entered the space of my body, by writing in it, but also the world enters me through that space of my body, for better or worse, and through the writing as well. So I think that’s kind of what were here about—how were at home in it and how we are not at home in it and alienated from it.

EM: So often they’ll say “she’s there,” but that doesn’t mean that I’m there. They start talking to “her,” and that’s not me. There’s a whole way of, you know, you start as an absence and then you have to write yourself into another thing.

AM:  When you start all that caught up identity of “her,” who’s “her”?

Porochista Khakpour: For me, I’ve never felt that my personality matches me physically, so I’ve always felt out of place. I said at some event last year that I felt uncomfortable in every environment I’ve ever been in. I constantly feel uncomfortable. Everybody makes me uncomfortable: my family, my friends, lovers. Everybody I meet I’m not at ease. So I can try to write from a man’s perspective. I’ve written from the perspective of people with no sexuality. I’ve written from magical perspectives. It’s like an endless quest because, for me, the body is not a temple, and nature is not benevolent. I happen to be somebody who is ill with a pretty seriously chronic illness, so what I get really uncomfortable about is when women—I feel like there’s this goddess culture, right? Loving your body. I mean, I was a yoga teacher at one point, and I was the worst yoga teacher. But it was so violent for me because I don’t like super-feminine identity stuff. I’m wearing a dress tonight, and I know what I might look like, but I find it to be really uncomfortable and hypersexualizing. So I’m still trying to escape the body. Writing for me is my escape from it. It’s kind of like what Eileen is saying: it’s a way for me to multiply my identity so that I’m not trapped in this one.

Alexandra Kleeman:  I just wanted to second what you said, about never feeling like you’re clean, or matching your external appearance. I remember going through puberty and having this experience that people were finding messages in my body that I never placed there. I have no way to rewrite them, but taking them to the page is a way to create reality, or specifically, recreate reality, as a way of taking that back.

MF:  Porochista, you mentioned earlier that you’re chronically ill. You have a memoir coming out called Sick about dealing with late-stage Lyme disease, and you experienced a relapse while you were writing about it. I’m curious—Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay on being ill, “Illness is the great confessional . . . Things are said. Truths blurted out which the cautious respectability of health conceals.” Did you find that to be true while working on your book, and now that you’ve finished the book, do you feel differently about your body?

PK:  The book that I sold, I thought I was going to be well—that I’d gotten cured from late-stage Lyme and cured of all my addictions. So I sold the book as really cheerful, like “Yay, I’m a survivor!” Actually, it was going to be a really shitty book, I think because there was all this false promise of, “You too can be strong like me and in the world.” But then I got hit by a car, an 18 wheeler, and I had this horrible Lyme relapse last winter where it threatened me daily. It threatened my writing life daily. So I actually couldn’t write it. To my editor, I was like, “Hey, do you think I can have some extra time because I heard writers always get extra on books.” They were like, “No,” and I was like, “I’m in the hospital, and there’s no reading of my liver, and they think I might be dying.” They said, “We’ll see if we can . . . maybe give it to us by May.” I was like “Okay, this is fucked up.”

I just somehow did it, but it was really dark, and the thing that helped me a lot was actually social media and writing to strangers. Maybe sort of like what Virginia Woolf was saying—I don’t know if she would be on social media a lot—but I was sharing a lot of inappropriate things. People were writing me like, “I kind of feel like you’re crossing some lines; it’s kind of gross. Did they really need to know about all the blood and all of that?” I had a lot of Miss Manners writing to me on Facebook, and I was like, “Go fuck yourself. First of all I’ve never been someone who’s that pristine or good.” But I was desperate, and my own friends and family were the least helpful people. People in the illness community—there’s a whole underworld there, and it appealed to me in a way that punk rock appealed to me. It’s this other world of invisible people who are all desperate and all there, coming up with crazy solutions. So Sick  became a very different book, and I’m still finishing edits now. I resent saying illness is a teacher. I hate that stuff. But in a way it was, I guess.

MF:  I have a question for you, Anna. In a piece you wrote for Literary Orphans called “What’s In a Name,” you say, “To rewrite our own redemption by telling ourselves our own true stories.” And you wrote a really terrific short story on angels this year called “Sometimes the Angel Has Dreadlocks and Talks Dirty to You.” Yes, we’re getting into the sex portion of the writing about bodies. I’m wondering—there are some really vivid and spectacular sex scenes in that story. When you write about sex, are you writing so you can inhabit your own body more, even if the body is fictional? I’m asking this of all of you.

AM:  No, I’m not writing to inhabit my own body more, but I’m want to talk about another thing related to that question. First, though, I want to talk about what Porochista said about the policing. I write monthly for Salon ; I’ve written a lot about my body. I was a part of the Body Parts section of Salon for a while. There’s very little about my body that I haven’t published somewhere. But I live part-time in this town of 500 people . . . 500 people. I just want to say again,  500 people , and if you come up to me after I’ll tell you all of their names and all of their dogs. So I’m 48, I’m a raw feminist, a feminist killjoy, and I’m totally in your face about it, but I won’t buy tampons in my town. Because I’m 48, but I’m 14, right? I don’t want to get Charlie, who hands me my turkey sandwich four days a week to ask me questions about my period. I just don’t.

So I wrote this piece in Salon about how feminists need to not tolerate men. Feminism has a men’s problem. Forty percent of progressive men identify as feminist vs. eighty percent of progressive women. That is some bullshit. So, Eileen Myles comes over on my page and tells people to blow me when they’re giving me a hard time about Salon. Now I’m feeling all empowered, right? So I decide to go buy tampons. I get the tampons, and Charlie says, “Do you need Advil? Are ya’ feeling all right?” And I’m like, “Can I just get my tampons?” But he’s really sweet, and he’d say the same thing if I was buying Orajel. He’d be like, “Do you have a toothache?” So, a month later I go back and buy more tampons from Charlie. And he goes, “Didn’t you just have your period two weeks ago?” And I’m kind of pissed off. I shouldn’t have been, really. But I’m kind of pissed off, so I say that there’s an app—that you can track your period on the app. So Charlie, who is like 73 and the nicest person, who gives me half a pound of turkey on my sandwich, says, “I’d like to have that app so I can slip some chocolates in your bag for when you’re having PMS.” So here I am, this big bitch.

I go home, and do what I do because I live in a town of 500 people —did I mention that?—and I post it on Facebook. Right away a very important feminist—like, if you Google “very important feminist,” her name is the first one—she writes me, and she says, “You know, Annie, you really shouldn’t let people talk about your body that way.” I’m only trying to tell this nice story about how I live in this town, and how I’m 14 even though I’m not, and how I’m trying to do this thing, and here’s this guy who’s just totally not weird about it. What does feminist mean? It means living in your body out loud. But then I get policed, and people start sharing it, and there’s this full discussion going on about how it’s not okay. So I’m the one that has to deal with this story about inhabiting my body.

I don’t know if I write fiction that way, but it’s certainly true of my nonfiction that I write to inhabit my body more and also to hold myself to what I’m calling for or trying to call for in the world, which is to be more integrated, and to stop being ashamed of your body. I go out and have these talks around the country about shame in your body and all this stuff, and then I won’t buy tampons? No. So I’m trying to integrate that more. In terms of my fiction, though, I write what I like, and what I want to like, and I try to stay true to my characters.

MF:  Back to sex. Why is it so difficult to write about sex? There are awards for bad sex writing, but there aren’t really awards, as far as I know, for bad food writing or bad nature writing, even those can be tough to write about too. So I’m wondering, why sex? What’s difficult about it?

AM:  I think there’s a lot of policing. I participated in a talk for PEN this year called “Beyond Lolita”—which Michele curated or moderated, one of them. It was about writers writing. We had Steve Almond over there saying you should never do these nine things. Then we had Cheryl Strayed saying you should always do these nine things in your writing. I think there are two things: One, a lot of sex writing ignores that women have bodies, and have periods, and buy tampons, and have breasts, and have orgasms, and have them in different ways than men. We have this whole canon of literature where none of that is brought forth. So then when women start writing about that, or men write that about women, it’s like, “Ew, what’s going on?” Lidia Yuknavitch talked about this. Cheryl talked about how she had to fight for the four sex scenes that are in her memoir. I think there’s this sort of notion of “we don’t do that.” Scott Spencer, who wrote Endless Love , which is a horrible movie but a beautiful book, has some of the best—Jonathan Yardley, who hated everything said, “For a few hours of my life it broke my heart. It had some of the most magical, dazzling sex scenes.” He has this 13 page sex scene where Jade has her period, and they’re having sex, and there’s blood everywhere.

I think a lot of this is gendered, and I think also a lot of it is about comfort. There’s also this perception that less is more, and I don’t understand less is more. Why is less more? Why is that? Because Toni Morrison said that once in a Paris Review interview? Alyssa and I have had that fight on panels about this topic. She’s like, “Well, I think less is more,” but why? We can have 20 pages about people sitting at the dining room table which we’re supposed to keep. But then they fuck for, like, one sentence? I don’t get it. And now I won’t talk anymore.

RO:  I was just going to say that we have to parse out this difference between bad sex and bad writing. So there’s bad sex, there’s bad writing, and then there’s bad writing about bad sex. I think these are distinctions that are worth naming. Probably the reason that there are no awards for bad food writing or bad nature writing is that food and nature aren’t really funny in the way that sex is funny, especially when it’s written about badly. I was hanging out with a group of writer friends of mine when Fifty Shades of Grey first came out, and I did an interpretive reading of the first two chapters. In the first two chapters of Fifty Shades of Grey there is very little sex. There’s just a lot of implying that there will be, but it’s so much fun to read out loud. Anyway, I think that there is something to be said for bad writing about bad sex. There’s a virtue there.

PK:  Wait, where can we hear Ruth Ozeki read Fifty Shades of Grey ? [ Laughter. ]

MF:  That will be the next event.

RO:  It was a wonderful group of women. It was Karen Joy Fowler, Jane Hamilton, Dorothy Allison, and we were all living it up.

EM:  Isn’t all porn bad? I don’t mean like gnarly bad, but what I mean is almost anybody I know who likes porn likes certain kinds of bad—they’re like, “I love bad 70s porn.” It’s sort of like the off register is the register.

AM:  And if it’s true to character, is it bad? If your character is weird about sex and awkward, and can’t talk dirty in bed, and then tries to, then you should write that. You should be true to your characters no matter who they are. If you’re writing fiction, then you should be true to yourself and honest as much as the piece requires just like you would about anything else in nonfiction, right? I don’t think it’s that complicated. I think we make it complicated.

PK:  I think it goes back to that idea about being honest. That’s where the humor comes in; that’s why we like awkward sex because my guess is that most people mostly have awkward sex. I don’t know, maybe I do. I think that we haven’t been honest throughout history; women’s bodies have been overly idealized and porno always presents this type of ideal. So we just haven’t been ourselves as human beings a lot. This is something my gynecologist said to me that’s so tragic. Many women don’t realize until much later in life what ovulation looks like or what it is, and they come and say they have yeast infections or something. Nobody ever told me about ovulation when I was in school. I didn’t even know what that was supposed to feel like. We don’t know these things. We are constantly disassociated from our bodies, our own physical realities, so we either go into the realm of the purple—which is like the overly idealized or that sort of porn thing—or it’s clinical, and there’s no in-between. I think this is a good time to be alive because we’re just approaching a sort of raw honesty.

EM:  Have you guys seen the new drawings of the clit?

RO:  Oh, yeah . . .

EM:  It’s all over the media because they have 3D models now and never drawings. The thing that’s really weird is that they had these drawings several centuries ago, and they got suppressed for one or two hundred years because it was disturbing. It’s like the grotto, the dirty. Because it was too systemic and complicated; there was so much more than there was supposed to be.

AK:  I want to second what Porochista was saying about learning about your body from sources that you should have been learning about these things, like in school or in a more professional way. I learned that the vagina can tear during childbirth from a set of poems by a Japanese poet. Then I immediately was like, “Let me look this up on the internet. Let me read more about it.” This should have been basic knowledge. It’s a bad surprise to spring on someone. [ Laughs ] But one of my personal answers as to why writing about sex is so limited right now is that I feel like we’re taking as our model a lot of film images, or images of sex, and those images are flattened in some way. They don’t have viscera; there is no mass to those bodies. I think that good sex writing would be writing that mass back in, and writing in all the parts of the body that have been sort of excluded from the sex act in descriptions. The digestive tract, the skin, the imperfections in the skin, what they mean, how it feels. I think what gives sex so much gravity is that you’re negotiating your body with another person. It’s not that you’re one, and that’s so wonderful, it’s that you’re actually doing this with another person and they don’t always do what you want them to do. And there’s friction, and it fails sometimes, and then it starts working later, or it fails for moments. That’s what’s bad for me.

EM:  I just want to add that what was dirty about you reading Fifty Shades of Grey , Ruth, is that you were the wrong body. I think if you take the text and put it over the right body, then it becomes another type of writing, another type of porn, another kind of permission to hear it. It’s almost like the text doesn’t matter.

AM:  I wrote a whole novel about a 16-year-old girl who really wants to have good sex, and women I knew were like, “Oh, man, hot.” I went through so much of that when I was a teenage girl myself, and men sometimes were like, “Teenage girls don’t want that. Teenage girls don’t think that way.” I mean progressive, good guys, were like, “Really?” I think sometimes writing gets called bad writing, untrue writing because it’s not heteronormative, it’s not the male gaze: it’s queer sex, it’s disabled sex, it’s not Philip Roth. Thank god for that.

PK:  A lot of what we’re talking about here, I think, is, from the perspective of this moment, and a lot of that is being dominated by white women too. So there are a lot of cultural factors at play, where I sometimes want to be like, “Okay, rad white feminists. This a great moment for you, and I’m with you mostly.” I’m sorry to even go here in a way because I know there are other people of color here—thank god, for once. But it’s also like, this conversation, when it just goes to white women, it becomes dangerous for a lot of the world. I’m watching people I really like on social media going off about the burkini, right? And it’s so hideous. Eileen, you have a great twitter essay about this, and you were literally the only white person I saw talk about the burkini in a sophisticated way. That to me is a major issue about women and the body right now, that we’re telling women half the time that they’re not wearing enough clothes, or they’re wanting to be covered up and then we tell them, no, you have to take it off—which, like Eileen was saying, it’s violence. So I always want these conversations to include other cultures as well because it’s different.

MF:  Me too, and this actually leads me to my next question about that. I want to talk about bodies that ignorant people try to silence. I’m thinking of many different categories of women: transgender people, disabled women, aging women, women of color, women who have been raped or sexually assaulted or abused, women of all body sizes, women with eating disorders, women who have strong opinions, women who are too scared to share their opinions, women who run for the presidency of the United States, mothers, child-free or childless women. How can we amplify all of the bodies this society tries to make invisible?

AM: Well, we can write them. Is it a trick question? We can write them, right? We can write them. We can read them. That’s the other thing; we can’t just write them. We have to buy and support independent booksellers, and the fiction and nonfiction that we want to read. It’s great to say we want literary fiction, but we have to go to our independent bookseller to buy those books. So we can write them, we can buy them, we can read them, and we can promote them. I think that’s how we amplify them. And we call out; we say, I don’t care that anyone loves this book by so and so, I think that the sex is heteronormative and white and not all that. I think we should do that as critics sometimes.

EM:  I’m having a hard time summing up what I’m trying to say. But I feel like part of the problem with—I don’t mean the question exactly—but when we talk about all these different bodies, the problem is the stillness of the question, or the stillness of the subject of identity, as if this is about a transgender person, and this is about an Asian person. We’re always kind of writing about books or thinking about books or text as if subject matter is this static frontal thing that’s squared in the center. I think the problem with the way so many bodies are written about is that they’re always not in passing. They’re being dissected and held still. Is this the real world in which people come onstage and offstage? I mean like, why isn’t there a minor despicable transgender character—just because that person exists rather—than those questions of is this a correct novel about a transgender person by a correct transgender author, you know what I mean? I think that we just live in this much more moving way which isn’t reflected in our text at all. I’m only starting to scrape the surface of it, but it’s framing; it’s like our conceptual frames are fucked up. That goes directly into the writing and the books are sold that way, are written about that way. And then the inadequacies of the writer are shown up in a particular way rather than the fact that the whole world is not true.

MF:  I think that’s so right, and I think we’re putting people into boxes too much, which is basically what you’re saying. We’re trying to say, this is the box they go in, and that’s bullshit.

EM:  The subject matter is a fiction.

AM:  For three and a half years I’ve had a partner who is a complete paraplegic, and I cannot tell you how writers—how editors, rather—wanted me to write about the complications of our sex life. And I was like, “Well, really there aren’t any.” And editors were like “No, no, no. We want to pay you a lot of money. We don’t want to pay you for these other things. We want to pay you a lot of money to write about this because we want to hear this story, because we thought here’s this frame, here’s this story of the disabled sex . . . ”

EM:  That’s exactly the other disabled sex story I know of from another writer who was telling me that she had written this book all about her incredible sex life, and they were like, “This is not possible.”

AM:  They wanted me to write that. That’s what they wanted me to write.

EM:  Hers was “too much.” It gets back to the clothes issue. It’s sort of like policing sex. It’s always this “too much.” It’s the wrong person having sex.

AM:  And the grappling. They wanted to do all this grappling. I told them, “Dude, that was 20 minutes over beer. We haven’t talked about it since.” What you’re saying, though, about the wrong person: it’s like we want women to be virginal and not have these desires, teenage girls don’t do this, and then all of a sudden we expect them to be these sex maidens when they’re 30. I don’t know how we expect them to get there. But we’ve sort of have been writing: teenage girls do this, women in their early 20s do this, and then in their 30s they do this, and then at 40 they stop having sex. [ Laughs ]

PK:  I think this stuff comes into a fever pitch, though, at times. I’m looking at this from a slightly different angle. It happens when we’re in times of extreme misogyny, or homophobia, or transphobia, or racism. Writing becomes this model minority trap where before I can write about, say, a Muslim woman who’s wearing a veil, she’s got to be presented as—I’m not saying she has to be—but my instinct would be, in this climate that we’re in today, to make that person a really good person instead of a bad person. Every fucking day I feel like I’m assaulted by this other message. It becomes very challenging to write completely freely when you’re in this environment that we’re in today. This election has just been, like: everything’s out there. It’s not like any of this got created by the election, but it’s really laid it bare, and it’s worse than I thought it was. It’s kind of hard to think of how to create within that.

MF:  Yeah, absolutely. Alexandra, you talked about the strangeness of the body, of writing about all of the body when you’re writing about sex. You said in an interview for Electric Lit, “Eating is something we do almost without thinking about it, but within that act is the crushing-up of another thing’s life structures with your own teeth, the pre-digestion inside the mouth, the genuine digestion in the stomach, the continual death on a large scale of bacteria living within us.” Aren’t you guys hungry right now? [ Laughs ] “We need it in order to get nutrients from food-material. It’s violent and amazing, and looking microscopically at this quotidian activity shows us something about how messy our lives are, whether we perceive it or not.” I feel like a lot of writers shy away from writing about bodily functions. Bodies are strangers, you remind us. And I wonder whether writing about this strangeness has made you feel it more acutely. Is that acknowledgement of our body’s strangeness liberating in itself, since recognizing it forces us to maybe suspend our ideals of cleanliness, perfection, or a narrow definition of health?

AK:  That’s a lot of questions. [ Laughs ] I came to writing about the body when I already had a writing practice going on, but I realized that I was treating my body like an impediment to writing. I was trying to sort of tamp it down when I got hungry, or when I got tried, or when I ate, or needed sleep. I was moving further away from my body and also being very unhealthy. And so part of what I wanted to do was take my body out of this obscure zone, or out of this sort of transparency zone where it seemed ignored or like someone had sent out an alarm. But then I don’t think that writing about my body at all was what brought me closer to it because I think there’s one way of focusing on the body that makes it almost dysmorphic to me. When you search up pathologies it becomes a constant source of pathology, and you can’t accept the perception of the fairly normal process in your body for a fairly normal process. Not every signal is an alarm, right? I started thinking about auscultation, an obsolete medical practice of listening to the body to try to assess what’s wrong with it, and working sort of on spending time—I don’t want to call it meditation because I’m not a professional—but listening to my body, and trying to pay more attention to it, and appreciate the signals it sends for what they are, I guess.

For me, the way back into my body was more thinking about these unseen processes, processes that I have to believe are going on but I can’t see traces of. And also thinking how they connect me to the world because the number one thing about my body, for me, is that it is my interface with the world. Without it there’s nothing for my mind to do. Although sometimes when your mind is really active you can almost believe it will go on by itself. But it doesn’t. It relies on the outside world. I feel like thinking about these processes, thinking about the bacteria, thinking about myself as an ecosystem actually makes me feel much more alive and much more in touch with what’s out there.

RO:  I think that really is a definition of meditation. It’s being a body. I mean, you’re sitting, you’re being a body, you’re paying attention to the signals. It is exactly that. It’s becoming aware of the body as an interface with the world, that there’s this interdependency that’s happening. It’s interesting because I think that when I’m teaching writing I always have my students sit first. They sit in silence first, and we do a body scan and just sort of settle and spend five minutes just being bodies, and then move from there into writing. It seems to me that literature works because we are all bodies, because we have bodies with which we respond to the world. Our readers do too. So when that experience is translated and evoked on the page, readers respond to it precisely because they do have bodies. If readers did not have bodies, we would not have literature. So the tie there between body and words is a really important one.

AK:  I used to work in cognitive science. We were testing body cognition in the language labs, so what we were exploring was this effect that when you hear the word hammer, you can actually see activation in the motor center; you can see a change in the muscles that use the hammer. It’s this sort of knowledge of the world that would be really hard to represent logically, or as a proposition, or to define. Like what is a hammer? It is an object. How do you use it? You can write pages on that. But words connect to the body in this really deep way and immediately.

MF:  I want to talk about gender and vulnerability. Eileen, you said in an interview with Slutever that when a man writes about his own experiences, he’s seen as vulnerable, but when a woman does it, she is criticized. And the word confessional is often used in a condescending tone to talk about women’s writing. So how do we get around that? How do we use our bodies on the page to fight that notion?

EM:  I think it’s more that it’s the same old thing. I think there are ideas of how women are and how men are. When men do certain things they’re supposedly being incredibly different and fresh. Like if a man writes in a personal way, or writes in an abject way, or writes about what a loser he is, or writes about how vulnerable . . . I mean it’s such a rage in the new kind of loser-guy film. It’s like, “Oh my god he’s so funny. He’s naked and he’s dancing. His girlfriend comes in and breaks up with him. That’s amazing.” But what female would be framed that way? That’s just what some sad, slutty girl would be doing and just getting dumped because girls always get dumped. So It’s sort of like we go through these ages of . . . I remember the first time I read in some magazine that different eras had a certain nose; all movie stars were supposed to have the 1930s nose and so on. I think that just in literature—in the 80s you were supposed to be a kind of postfeminist; every female narrator or even writer was the utter top. We really wanted the top female writer because there was no position, no area for masochism. I just feel I don’t identify as a body, but I definitely identify as a masochist, and masochistic storytelling being not so much, you know, constructing a story out of what’s there and dominating the material so much as not having an agenda before I go into it and start and what I find and then rearranging it accordingly. I know that as a female, I’m supposed to write this story and writing the story that I have instead is like gender action in a way.

MF:  I interviewed the incredible writer, who I think a lot of us on this panel really admire, Lidia Yuknavitch who writes about the body all the time and in fact has a class she teaches called Corporeal Writing. She said in the interview, “To my knowledge, no one’s corporeal experience is limited to the novelistic plot points I see supersaturating the market. We are more contradictory than that sexually. Our sexuality is far in excess of those puny stories. Our sexualities deserve better representation than traditional narrative has allowed. But I’m not doing anything new . Walt Whitman. Or Sappho. Or Duras. Or Acker. I mean, Jesus. Let the body go. Let it rise inside language and shatter the story.” How can you let the body go like Lidia suggests?

EM:  By not dying. [ Laughs ]

RO:  By not dying? I would say by dying. [ Laughs ]

AM:  I mean one thing I heard—and, Michele, you probably heard this too, I think you heard this that night when we did “Beyond Lolita”—one thing I heard from all the women who did the panel who write fiction is that there’s always this thing where people think you’re writing about yourself. I mean, I’ll tell you it’s a real thing. I can’t tell you how many men this year have said to me, “So, I read about Daisy in that story.” And it’s like, “Really?” They assume that it’s you and that’s what you want to do in bed. I’m going to write what’s true to the character. I’m going to write the character I want to write. I’m going to give the character the sex I want to give the character and not worry about that. But I heard from all of the women fiction writers, “Oh, where are all the people going to fit?” I heard from none of the men who were writing fiction but from all of the women fiction writers like Cheryl said when she wrote Torch, “I thought, oh, I want to have kids. What are the kids’ teachers going to think about these sex scenes I wrote?”

EM:  I sort of disagree in a way. I feel like everything you write is you. I just think it’s my choices. It’s not like, this is an illustration of the philosophy of Eileen, or my literal existence, but it’s my pornography. It’s the color I want to be with for chapters and chapters, it’s the period of history. The thing that’s weird, I think is, when somebody is overly excited and appropriative about your choice. I mean, every time a man does something to me that I feel like that’s fucked up. It’s like I’m passing through a hallway and somebody just touches my hip a little bit, because isn’t that appropriate? To make a little room around a gal? Like what the fuck! Don’t be an asshole. I think around that same remark . . . it sort of presupposes that you’re sexually available to this person, and that these are appropriate gestures—like you’re there in their field of vision, and this may be done.

AM:  Absolutely and, you know, there’s Judy Bloom. We don’t always think about Judy Bloom, but Judy Bloom talks about this really eloquently because she wrote Wifey,  where she has all this really hot sex going on, in the 70s, at the same time she was publishing Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and all that. She talks about giving your characters that stuff and not letting people appropriate you. Also, if you haven’t read Wifey yet, I suggest you all go do read it. That’s some good sex writing

RO:  I was just thinking of Virginia Woolf’s idea about killing the angel in the house. It was a lecture, actually, that she gave, but there’s this idea that in order to let the body go that the necessary step is to kill the angel in the house. And there are many ways of doing that, I think. But personally, it was very much about letting my father’s surname go. Ozeki is a pen name. I only started using it when my first novel was about to be published. It was fascinating. My father was dying at the time, and he’d been raised as a Christian fundamentalist. He had family who was still alive, and he was very proud of the fact that I was publishing a book. He knew that I always wanted to. But I could tell that there was something really disturbing him about it. And finally I just said, “I mean, yeah, there’s sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll in the book. Is this going to bother you that I’m publishing it under your name?” And he burst into tears and said, yes, he was afraid that his sister would find it because she was still a fundamentalist Christian, and that she would be ashamed. So it was like ,  ugh.  It was a blow. But I decided at that point to publish under a pseudonym, and it was the most amazing thing because I did the edit of that book knowing that I was going to be publishing under Ozeki. It was literally a feeling of letting the body go. All the crampedness, the restriction, it just disappeared. So I was able to edit it with the kind of freedom that I had never had in my writing before. It was really wonderful. The problem is now, of course, Ozeki is my name. So now I need another pseudonym if I’m going to start publishing Fifty Shades of Grey.

PK:  I think that’s really interesting because I think personally, as creators, it’s really important for us to let go. The thing of being a writer is you’re also a reader; you’re a consumer of art as well. What I like about this period, what I like about my students or the people that I’m around, is that they’re thinking more about the body, and how to approach different bodies, and how they should address bodies. So maybe that’s like what these politicians talk about as being politically correct. I see so much disdain around the word “consent,” a concept I think is really radical and really helpful and has saved lives. I think that I don’t really want to let go because I don’t think were there yet societally. We haven’t faced certain bodies. We haven’t thought of certain possibilities. How is it that we’re just now having discussions around trans people? How is it that a whole group has been invisible for so long? For the first time in my life, just in the last two years, we’re talking about what pronoun we want to use. I hear that being made fun of on late night TV or something, and it’s like, what’s so funny? Trans people were committing suicide. It’s too much work for you to use the right gender pronoun? It’s just really shocking to me, so I actually think that one of the right things about the internet—which has been in my head a lot in this panel—is that it does create a safe space for us to sit back and think a little bit, get information, and be exposed to different people without just projecting our selfhood onto different types of people. I think that thinking and moving slowly and holding on are also important.

MF:  I like that. Is the body related to empathy? The root of the word path, which means feeling or disease, would lead us to believe so. Empathy is such a buzz word these days, but what does it have to do with writing about bodies?

RF:  I think literature works because we have the ability to empathize. We have the ability to imagine, to inhabit other bodies, and so a writer who is doing her work well is creating an empathetic site, a site of empathy where you can lead your way into it somehow. You can write your way into it. You can read your way into it.

EM:  I think reading is empathetic. My decision about whether to keep reading a book or not is utterly an empathetic thing. I don’t just mean I feel for these characters, but it’s a question of the pace and the rhythm: Can I take this into my body and not resist? If I have to read that paragraph over and over again, am I enjoying this process? And then of course there is the fact of the things literally in this book. Are these things I want to have in my head and be in the room that I’m sitting in? I think empathetic is a word I’m really excited by.

AK:  I think that the body empathizes first. I think when you see someone, you can’t help but empathize with them. That’s part of why people react so strongly against people they don’t want to empathize with. They feel the feeling, and they reject it. I think it’s not that they see that person and see they have nothing in common with them; I think they don’t like being made to feel in common with them. The dumb example is if someone is biting their fingernails in the subway or something, it’s not that the sound annoys you or pushes you away, it’s that you’re thinking “I wouldn’t do that.” You’re imposing yourself on them. You’re pushing them away.

AM:  I think that’s also true with the confessional thing. I think that a lot of what we hear about confessional writing, and a lot of the reason that standard is considered to be different is because women have a lot of experiences commonly that a lot of men don’t have. Dramatically more women are sexually assaulted than men, so it’s like this whole other thing from what men are experiencing. It becomes this othered thing because of how it’s defined by men in a patriarchal culture. I think that the whole failure of empathy is the failure to reject the patriarchy. I think that when we don’t do that we fail to have empathy in what we’re approaching as both writers and readers, not to steal your line.

EM:  Confessional is such a weird word, as is the rise of it. It didn’t occur to me to look at who coined it when and in what fucking review and for what purpose. Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath in poetry. Or if you think about en plein air painting, it was a big weird thing when people suddenly decided not to write about the gods, or to sit out in the world and paint and use real things, use more peasant subject matter, and so on. It’s sort of like in poetry when people suddenly used life like yours. Whether you’re Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath or whoever is doing it, it’s sort of disturbing the order of poetry and allowing the wrong thing in. Suddenly it’s almost like photography. I think with confessional . . . it’s so funny to think of such a private term erected, very phallically, to negate a whole practice that is actually the absolute opposite. It’s all about allowing. You make it be about denying.

PK: When I think back to confessional breakthroughs, I was just telling my students this, the two things that for me were confessional breakthroughs in my life were, one, telling a room full of strangers that I’d been sexually assaulted. That was a big one. I think a lot of people share that. The other one was telling people that I had a mustache growing up. That was somehow harder than talking about being raped. I just remember the first time I decided to blurt it, I think it was when my first novel came out, I just sort of said it, and I looked everybody in the eye in the audience like, “Okay, what do you want to say? Look at me now.” I didn’t even know what I was doing. I was trying to be like, “But I look good, right?” I don’t even know what I was trying to say. I was just like, “Why don’t we talk about the fact that some women have mustaches. It’s totally normal. Who cares?” [ Laughs ] But it’s sad to me that I went home feeling like I got a trophy for that because it was this confessional breakthrough for me. It felt like I released something, that I could go on. But it feels like we have these things which we’re not allowed to say.

EM:  I remember a million years ago with a poem I suddenly just put in, “I’m not a bad looking woman, I suppose,” and it was so fucking radical to say that because I knew in that moment I would be reading out loud, that people were looking at me. They would be thinking about what I was thinking about myself, and how I look, and I am a little vain. I mean, I was like 30, and I just thought, I’m fucking saying that I think I’m kind of hot . And then of course it was wrong on so many levels, even for me personally, who I thought of myself as. But that is art and poetry: just make the wrong move and feel all the light kind of shift.

RO:  And you’re still using the double negative. “I’m not a bad looking woman.”

MF:  I want to ask a question about body and trauma, and I’m going to ask the question by quoting the wonderful Claudia Rankine from Citizen . “How to care for the injured body, the kind of body that can’t hold the content it is living? And where is the safest place when that place must be someplace other than in the body?”

EM:  That’s a complicated one.

PK:  That’s hard to disassociate from the context of Citizen , especially given even just this week’s news, that you can have a black man just reading a book or leaving a music appreciation class and get shot. To me, it’s almost impossible to divorce that quote specifically from race. Of course you can apply it to different types of identity. But then I think, that’s the dilemma of a lot of what we’re talking about in this panel, too, because the problem is that we’re so visual as people, right? I think that’s our dominant sense. I take that for granted because I learned everything from hearing mostly, and I’m not that visual. But we are as a culture, and so with that comes all sorts of wrongseeing and then hopefully not wrongdoing, but it’s sort of the basis of all sorts of sickening prejudices.

EM:  I think you have to disable the text in some way to deal with difference and disability. I always think of Jonathan Franzen. I read The Corrections by accident. I lost something at the airport, and I kept going back to the lost and found, and they finally just let me all the way in the back room to the big gray chest and said, “Well, take whatever you want. There are a lot of notebooks and books here.” I saw The Corrections , and I thought, “Why not?” I thought it wasn’t bad. It was a good read, but what was really weird is when you got to the part where the father was having hallucinations, he couldn’t write that. I thought that’s so weird he can’t . . . he’s such a straight dude that he can’t imagine an altered state. I thought, any poet could write this scene. Anybody could do seeing shit, hallucinating. He couldn’t do that. I thought there was so much about ability of this. I don’t mean to take him out. He’s not a bad guy. But just as an example of something that was an alteration that couldn’t be written and that was somebody else’s cup of tea.

AM:  I think the way you care for the traumatized body and the traumatized experience of so many of us is to tell it truthfully. I know that sounds obvious but truthfully, with a capital T. I think you don’t call it violence. You spell out what it is step by step. I have this piece called “The Church of Dead Girls” where I just walk through what happened to a girl who was killed. I got the transcript from her mother of the police report of what had happened to her body; what had happened to her before she was raped and then murdered. I think if we stop and think, this is what happens, this is what trauma looks like, and we talk about trauma in real ways . . . I’m not saying that people should write their trauma if they’re not comfortable writing their trauma or if it’s going to be re-traumatizing for them. I’m not saying that. But I think the more we look at trauma, the more we spell it out in a truthful way, both what it is and the repercussions of it, I think that’s how we capture this society and also force it in and care for ourselves.

RO:  I think the question also relates back to the question about empathy. We’re blessed with these imaginations and empathy is not something passive. It’s active. It’s something that we can do both as writers and as readers. But especially as writers. We have the duty to go beyond and unpack the convenient phrases.

Feature photo by Sean Fitzroy.

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IMAGES

  1. Body Writing 101 (Ultimate Guide for Beginners)

    body writing in english

  2. body writing in english

    body writing in english

  3. Whole Body Writing Poster This poster shows children how we use

    body writing in english

  4. body writing in english

    body writing in english

  5. Pin on Bodywriting, the art of non-verbal communication on skin

    body writing in english

  6. Parts of the Body With Pictures & Spellings

    body writing in english

VIDEO

  1. Fun facts about human body with English Calligraphy writing

  2. 15. Body Writing by Jaya and V. Karuppaiah

  3. 5 Body language signs he is in love with you... #shorts

  4. Body Language, Writing skills & Role of environment and language #ytshorts #shorts #youtubeshorts

  5. A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body Essay, Speech, Paragraph or short note writing in English 200 words

  6. Body parts vocabulary

COMMENTS

  1. Body Paragraphs: How to Write Perfect Ones

    A body paragraph is any paragraph in the middle of an essay, paper, or article that comes after the introduction but before the conclusion. Generally, body paragraphs support the work's thesis and shed new light on the main topic, whether through empirical data, logical deduction, deliberate persuasion, or anecdotal evidence.

  2. How to Write the Body of an Essay

    How to Write the Body of an Essay | Drafting & Redrafting Published on November 5, 2014 by Shane Bryson . Revised on July 23, 2023 by Shona McCombes. The body is the longest part of an essay. This is where you lead the reader through your ideas, elaborating arguments and evidence for your thesis. The body is always divided into paragraphs.

  3. Body Paragraphs

    Writing Body Paragraphs. Follow these steps below to write good body paragraphs. Step 1: Develop a Topic Sentence. Step 2: Provide Evidence to Support your Topic Sentence and Overall Argument. Step 3: Add your Own Analysis and Interpretation. Step 4: Conclude. Step 5: Revise and Proofread. A P.I.E. Paragraph. For Example.

  4. How to Write a Strong Body Paragraph for an Essay

    How to Write a Strong Body Paragraph for an Essay Written by MasterClass Last updated: Jun 7, 2021 • 2 min read From magazines to academic essays, you can find body paragraphs across many forms of writing. Learn more about how to write engaging body paragraphs that support the central idea of your writing project. Learn From the Best

  5. Body Paragraphs

    The four elements of a good paragraph (TTEB) A good paragraph should contain at least the following four elements: Transition, Topic sentence, specific Evidence and analysis, and a Brief wrap-up sentence (also known as a warrant) -TTEB! A Transition sentence leading in from a previous paragraph to assure smooth reading.This acts as a hand-off from one idea to the next.

  6. Anatomy of a Body Paragraph

    Anatomy of a Body Paragraph When you write strong, clear paragraphs, you are guiding your readers through your argument by showing them how your points fit together to support your thesis. The number of paragraphs in your essay should be determined by the number of steps you need to take to build your argument.

  7. Body Paragraph

    Quiz Course 75K views How to Write a Body Paragraph Every writer needs to know how to write a body paragraph. The three basic steps are: Write a topic sentence. Provide evidence. Write a...

  8. Simple Ways to Write a Body Paragraph: 13 Steps (with Pictures)

    Writing the Paragraph. 1. Build a transition from the previous paragraph. In most body paragraphs, the first sentence serves two roles. While most of it is dedicated to establishing the main idea, it also should provide a quick but logical transition from the previous paragraph.

  9. How to Write Body Paragraphs

    How to Write Body Paragraphs Writing in English Int - Adv Grades 9-12 In this lesson, students learn tips for writing body paragraphs. They review the main components of body paragraphs and practice writing their own. They also learn about transitional phrases and topic sentences. Teacher Discretion Launch Tasks Open PDF Focus academic writing

  10. How to Write a Body Paragraph

    6 Steps for Writing an Effective Body Paragraph. There are six main steps to crafting a compelling body paragraph. Some steps are essential in every paragraph and must appear in a fixed location, e.g., as the first sentence. Writers have more flexibility with other steps, which can be delayed or reordered (more on this later).

  11. How to Structure an Essay

    The body of a good argumentative essay often begins with simple and widely accepted claims, and then moves towards more complex and contentious ones. For example, you might begin by describing a generally accepted philosophical concept, and then apply it to a new topic.

  12. Body Writing 101 (Ultimate Guide for Beginners)

    Body writing is the act of writing or drawing on someone's body with a pen, pencil, or another instrument. It can be used as a form of communication, to show affection, or for personal empowerment and gratification. Body writing is also a common fetish in BDSM. (This post may have afilliate links. Please see my full disclosure)

  13. Essay Structure: The 3 Main Parts of an Essay

    Basic essay structure: the 3 main parts of an essay. Almost every single essay that's ever been written follows the same basic structure: Introduction. Body paragraphs. Conclusion. This structure has stood the test of time for one simple reason: It works. It clearly presents the writer's position, supports that position with relevant ...

  14. The Beginner's Guide to Writing an Essay

    The essay writing process consists of three main stages: Preparation: Decide on your topic, do your research, and create an essay outline. Writing: Set out your argument in the introduction, develop it with evidence in the main body, and wrap it up with a conclusion. Revision: Check your essay on the content, organization, grammar, spelling ...

  15. 5 Ways to Use Body Paragraph Examples

    Embedding Quotations. Use body paragraph examples to show students how to embed quotations. The more practice students get, the better they will become at this skill. One way I've found successful is to give them a paragraph that is already written along with sources that would support the arguments in the paragraph. However, I omit the research.

  16. Body Parts in English

    Arches. The arches of your feet are the parts that don't actually touch the ground. An arch is also a type of shape — like a bridge. The arch of the foot lifts away from the ground and kind of looks like a bridge. There we have it — common body parts for human bodies in English! You can now talk about the human body with more confidence ...

  17. Parts of the Body for English Learners

    All Parts of the Body. blood - The hospital needs more blood. bone - Our skeleton is made of bone. hair - It's amazing how much hair is on the floor after a haircut. muscle - You should always stretch your muscles before you go running. skin - Make sure to put on sunscreen to protect your skin.

  18. How to Describe Body Language in Writing

    How to Use Body Language in Your Writing 1. Facial expressions

  19. Effective Body Language in Writing

    A Look at Body Language in Writing. More than half of human communication consists of body language, which we use to communicate feelings, thought, and ideas without speech. Body language impacts other people's perception and conveys our emotions far more than we think it does. Physical descriptions of what our characters are doing allows us ...

  20. Cheat Sheets For Writing Body Language

    Cheat Sheets For Writing Body Language. Use this list to help you with your body language descriptions. It will help you to translate emotions and thoughts into written body language. Obviously, a character may exhibit a number of these behaviours. For example, they may be shocked and angry, or shocked and happy. Use these combinations as needed.

  21. Writing the Body in Literature and Culture

    15 Entry requirements: A BA with a 2:1 or equivalent with a major in a Humanities subject. Module description Until recently, the physical body has been a much-neglected subject of contemporary women's writing, whether fictional or autobiographical.

  22. Body parts 1

    Join thousands of learners from around the world who are making great progress with their English vocabulary with our online courses. Find out more Submitted by Imane Al herchi on Thu, 11/01/2024 - 12:56

  23. Writing the Body: Trauma, Illness, Sexuality, and Beyond

    By Literary Hub. December 6, 2016. In September, Michele Filgate's quarterly Red Ink Series—focused on women writers, past and present—brought together Eileen Myles, Ruth Ozeki, Porochista Khakpour, Anna March, and Alexandra Kleeman for a wide-ranging discussion about writing the body, from health to gender, sexuality, and beyond.