This document provides guidance on how to write an effective exemplification essay. It explains that exemplification uses examples to illustrate and clarify an abstract idea or point. Examples can come in various forms, including facts, stories, quotes, and observations. When choosing examples, writers should consider their purpose, audience, and how examples relate to their thesis. Examples should be organized logically and support the overall argument. The conclusion should reinforce the main point without introducing new information.

1. Understanding
Exemplification
Adapted from The Rhetorical Patterns Website at Lincoln University

2. What is Exemplification?
• Exemplification provides readers with examples that illustrate a larger point.
• Examples are especially useful when you need to explain complicated, abstract, or new
ideas.
• Examples can be quotations, facts, narratives, statistics, details, analogies, opinions,
and observations, and examples provide your writing with a firm foundation.
• Examples can help you avoid generalizations about your subject, and they tend to
remove the ambiguity from your writing.

3. Considering Your Purpose and Audience in
Exemplification
• Consider your audience and your purpose before you generate and organize examples.
• Since some of the most effective examples can originate in your own experience or in the experiences
of people you know, you must decide if your audience will accept examples presented in the first
person.
• However, some readers expect an academic exemplification essay to be written primarily, if not almost
entirely, in the third person.
• Readers will also expect that the examples you present will not distract them from your main point, so
make certain that there is a clear relationship between your main point and your examples.
• Effective topic and transition sentences in your body paragraphs can help you keep this relationship
intact for your readers.

4. Strategies for Developing Your Examples
• In order to come up with effective examples, consider your rhetorical situation. Ask
yourself several questions designed to help you understand the needs of your
audience and your purpose:
• Do these examples support my thesis? Are they relevant, adequate, and fair examples?
• Are they the most convincing examples I could use? Are there any others I should use
• Are these examples going to intrigue my readers? How can I keep the interest of my
readers?
• Will these examples clarify the subject and also focus my main point?

5. Remember to Use Effective Examples
• Maybe you have noticed that writers and speakers can persuade, interest, and
entertain others the most effectively by using well-chosen examples.
• Specific examples help readers understand larger theories and generalizations.

6. How do I write my exemplification thesis?
• Consider the point of your essay. What is your main point, or your thesis?
• As you draft your introduction, remember your purpose for using examples. Put
your thesis at the end of the introduction. This is where many readers expect it.

7. Organizing an Exemplification Essay
• Normally, writers use at least a few examples to support their main point, unless they are using
one extended example, which might function similar to an analogy.
• Examples are usually presented in body paragraphs according to their chronology, their spatial
relationship, or their emphatic order (which means that you will use your most powerful
examples at the end of your essay, after your reader has already accepted other, less-intense
examples.
• Your conclusion should reinforce your main idea, since your reader has just finished reading
examples, and your examples, rather than your main idea, might not be the first thing in your
reader’s mind.
• Finally, your conclusion might provide implications and solutions and summarize your essay's
main point.

8. How Do I Organize My Examples?
• There are several ways of organizing your examples. Consider the following:
• Chronologically. Maybe the incidents you are using for examples all happened in one especially
lousy day. Maybe they all happened during one week or month or season. Maybe it was
snowing for some and raining for others. Consider how time relates to your placement of the
examples in the paper.
• Logically. Were there any connections between the examples? Let’s say you are writing about a
summer job at a fast food restaurant. Did, for instance, some of the examples involve, let’s say,
relationships between coworkers, between workers and supervisors, between customers and
workers, or between customers waiting for food or waiting to order? How could you categorize
your examples?

9. How Do I Organize My Examples? Con’t
• There are several ways of organizing your examples. Consider the following:
• Spatially. Let’s continue with the fast food scenario from above. Did some of the examples
happen at the drive through window? Did they happen at the counter or in the parking lot? Can
you organize your examples according to where they happened?
• For Effect. Are some of the examples really shocking (like loud voices, yelling, and anger) while
others are simply a mundane kind of bad behavior (like not washing hands after using the
bathroom)? Can you organize your examples so that they “lead” to your conclusion? Can you
put one of the more common kinds of bad behavior in the introduction, so that you can use it as
a template for the rest of the examples of bad behavior in the paper?

10. How Do I Draft My Conclusion?
• What is important to remember as you draft your conclusion is your purpose for
writing. Ask yourself questions about what you hoped to accomplish by using
examples? Were you trying to get your readers to reconsider an opinion or belief?
Were you trying to get your readers to change their actions?
• Return to your primary purpose and find a way to restate it in an interesting manner
so that your readers will understand, when they finish reading the last of your
examples, exactly what is expected of them.
• However, do not bring up any new examples or information in the conclusion because
it causes your audience to wonder if it really is the conclusion or if you should have
reorganized your paper in light of the new ideas/examples.

11. Exemplification Revision Checklist
• What connects the examples together? What is the main point found in using
these examples? What are you trying to say with the examples?
• Is this message developed into a simple thesis sentence? What is it?
• Do the topic sentences reinforce the thesis statement by saying something about
the main point? Do the topic sentences also summarize each paragraph?

12. Exemplification Revision Checklist Con’t
• Does each body paragraph:
• Provide one clear example? If not, correct on paper.
• Contain generalizations or clichés?
• Give sufficient information about the example?
• Have a transition sentence that sums up the paragraph? If not, write one for each
paragraph on the paper.

13. Exemplification Revision Checklist Con’t
• Does the introduction:
• Have an interesting and engaging first sentence? If not, write one on the paper?
• Is the introduction developed sufficiently? Does it jump too quickly into the paper?
• Does the conclusion:
• Explain the implications of the presentation of the examples? Does it sum up the paper’s
main idea? (Make sure that the conclusion does not bring up any new ideas that might
confuse the reader.)
• Is the conclusion developed sufficiently? Is it too brief?

14. Exemplification Revision Checklist Con’t
• Surface features:
• Check on the use of punctuation: comma, period, semicolon, colon, other.
• Are there any problems with subject verb agreement, pronoun reference, parallelism,
serious syntax/sentence construction, awkward sentence construction, choppy sentences,
diction/word choice, spelling, spelling/homonyms?
• Content:
• Are there any places in the paper that seem superficial?
• Are there any generalizations, clichés, or factual errors? Is the paper off topic, not an
exemplification essay, hurried/lacking anything?

15. Work Consulted
• Rhetorical Patterns – Exemplification. Lincoln University, 2022.
https://www.lincoln.edu/academics/academic-departments/languages-and-
literature-department/rhetorical-patterns/rhetorical-patterns.html