Topics for essays are chosen based upon the purpose of the essay itself. The expository essay has a pretty simple purpose – to explain an idea, a thing, a process, situation, event, or concept. The goal is to inform your reader in an objective and factual way. Given this definition, it is obvious that the possibilities for topics for such an essay are almost limitless.

The expository essay – you wrote a bunch of them in high school, although they may not have been called by that name. Every time you wrote an essay that explained, informed, or described something, you produced an expository piece of writing. So that you have a real understanding, expository writing is.

Authors spend a lot of time alone with themselves, their ideas, and their words. They really don’t want others around during these times and usually have a space in their homes that are “closed” to friends and relatives during times of creative production. This banishment never seems to apply to pets, however, and lots of authors claim a spiritual bond with their pets that actually soothes them and allows their creativity to be fueled.

The overall purpose of a classification essay is to categorize people, places, things, or ideas into groups that make sense. Lots of things in life are categorized – types of plants and animals, types of chemical compounds, types of medicine, types of furniture, and so forth. So, when you are assigned a classification essay, you will need to make a decision.

As a kid in elementary school, you probably did sorting activities, usually with buttons. You were given a large bag of buttons and told to decide how you wanted to sort them (by size, shape, two-hole or 4-hole, etc.), and then to sort them. This activity was to give you practice in an important thinking skill – classification.

You are starting college and your parents have just dropped you off. You are excited to be finally on your own with no adult directions, rules, and such. Or, you are a returning students having spent the summer at home with all of your old friends – what fun! Now you are here, and the realities of college life begin to creep in – you are away from family and friends; the work is getting hard; and you are beginning to feel somewhat helpless and alone.

Choosing a topic for a cause and effect essay is not as easy as you might think. The biggest issue with topic selection is manageability, because choosing a topic that has too many causes or too many effects will create an organizational nightmare for you, not to mention a horrible mess as you attempt to write the essay.

Almost anything we do or anything that happens has a cause; and almost anything we do and almost anything that happens has an effect. So, if you are tired today, it has been caused by not enough sleep; and not having enough sleep may cause you to be irritable. That irritability will cause you to argue with a friend, and the effect will be that your friend becomes angry.

In your college career, you will write many different types of essays. You will write essays on many different subjects. Finally, you will write essays for many different purposes. Each time you receive a new essay assignment, you will have something new to learn. It may be a new topic for you to research, or it may be that you are writing a specific type of essay for the first time

An analytical essay is a written work where the author analyzes another written work. This is not to be confused with book report or a review. These focus on what happens (the characters, the plot), and what the writer thinks of the quality of the work. When writing an analysis, the student focuses on various writing elements that are employed, and how they are used in the written work.