article in essay

The Correct Way to Write an Article Title in a Paper

It is a cardinal rule to cite scholarly sources when writing a paper. Most professors will specify the approximate number of sources for a paper, essay, or assignment. A well-written academic paper is objective and has references or works cited page where you list the references used. However, how do you write the title of an article when writing a paper?

When you mention an online or magazine article in your essay, do not just do it as you please. There is a formula you need to follow depending on the referencing style. This post looks at how to title an article in an essay following the APA, Harvard, MLA, and Chicago.

Let’s commence.

How to Title an Article in APA

APA stands for American Psychological Association. The association published the first APA stylebook in the late 1920s. Over the years, the stylebook has been widely adopted beyond psychology. It has also been updated many times. The stylebook meticulously describes how to format every aspect of your essay.

Whenever you mention the name of a source in an APA essay, there are rules you need to follow. This is true for all sources, including articles, books, webpages, reports, chapters, etc.

The rules you need to follow depend on the type of source (standalone source or part of a greater thing). For some sources, you simply capitalize and italicize the main words; for others, you have to capitalize the main words and put them in double quotation marks.

You need to italicize and capitalize their names when you mention standalone sources. Standalone sources include a podcast, a TV series, a dissertation, a movie, and an e-book.

Examples showing how to write larger works in APA

• Morbid: A True Crime Podcast (podcast title)
• The Last of Us (TV series title)
• Canadian Legal System Versus US Legal System: A Comparative Study (dissertation title)
• The Pirates of the Caribbean (movie title)
• For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America (e-book title)

On the other hand, when you mention sources that are part of a greater work, you need to capitalize them and put them in double quotation marks. Examples of these sources include a magazine article, a newspaper article, a blog post, and a journal article. This means mentioning any article must capitalize its title and put it in double quotations.

Examples showing how to write article titles in APA

• “Study of Correlation between Criminality and Population” (journal article title)
• “Effective Active Ingredients Obtained through Biotechnology” (journal article title)
• “Doping in Cycling: Everything You Need to Know” (magazine article title)
• “Do you know what is in Your Cosmetics?” (newspaper article title)
• “35 Best Ways to Make Money Online in 2023” (blog post title)

Titling an article in a Harvard Style Format Paper or Essay

The Harvard referencing system was invented late in the nineteenth century by a Harvard University professor. The system has been widely adopted beyond the lecture halls of Harvard. It is popularly used to reference various works in the following fields: philosophy, behavioral sciences, and humanities.

When you name or mention an article in a Harvard essay, there are rules you must follow. There are rules you need to follow when you mention any work in a Harvard essay.

The rules you need to follow depend mainly on the size of the work. The titles of large works are formatted differently compared to the titles of small works.

Large works include books and journals. When you mention a book or journal in a Harvard essay, you must italicize the entire title and capitalize the major words.

Examples showing how to write large works in Harvard

• The Lucifer Effect (book title)
• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (book title)
• Games People Play (book title)
• Comparative Studies in Society and History (journal title)
• Journal of American History (journal title)

The titles of smaller works are written differently in contrast to the title of large works. They are written by putting them inside single quotation marks.

Smaller works include journal articles, blog posts, web pages, web articles, etc. Whenever you mention these things in your essay, you must put them inside quotes.

Examples showing how to write smaller works in Harvard

• ‘Sex, Military Brothels, and Gender Violence during the Italian Campaign in the USSR, 1941-3’ (journal article title)
• ‘Hitler’s Worldview and the Interwar Kulturkamf’ (journal article title)
• ’10 POC-Owned Advisory Businesses With Insanely Great Marketing’ (blog post title)
• ‘How to Use Instagram for Your Financial Planning Business’ (blog post title)
• ‘These 9 Decorative Accessory Trends Are About to Pop Off in Your Group Text’ (web page title)

How to Title an Article in MLA

MLA is an acronym for Modern Language Association. The association started in 1883 to promote the study of modern languages and literature. It published the first stylebook in 1953 and has made major updates to it a number of times. The MLA style is widely used in the following fields: cultural studies, comparative literature, literary criticism, foreign languages, and English studies. It is also used in humanities disciplines.

When you mention an article or any other source in MLA, there are rules you need to follow. The rules largely depend on the type of source you mention.

When you mention a large standalone work (a book, a film, a journal, a website, a magazine, or a movie), you must italicize it and then capitalize all major words. (You should capitalize articles in the middle of the title, prepositions, and coordinating conjunctions.

Examples showing how to write large works in MLA

• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (book title)
• Literary Theory: An Introduction (book title)
• Fast Company (magazine title)
• Library Philosophy and Practice (journal title)
• Teens Dealing with Death; When Someone Dies: Understanding Grief (movie title)

When you mention a singular article (journal or otherwise) or any other smaller work, you must put it in double quotation marks. No italicizing as in the case of larger works. Examples of smaller works that need to be put in quotes include journal articles, web articles, news articles, book chapters, songs, short stories, TV episodes, magazine articles, and poems.

Examples showing how to write smaller works in MLA

• “Collaborative writing among young EFL learners in a school context: product and process” (journal article title)
• “Investigating cohort effects of early foreign language learning” (journal article title)
• “Studying French is easy: 10 tips to learn French fast” (web article title)
• “ChatGPT Gets Dartmouth Talking” (news article title)
• “Do not go gentle into that good night” (poem title)

How to Title an Article in a Chicago Format Essay/Paper

Chicago format is an American English formatting style invented by the University of Chicago in 1906. It is widely used in many academic disciplines (fine arts, history, and business) and book publishing.

When writing an essay according to the Chicago stylebook, you must follow everything recommended in it. How you are supposed to write the title of a journal or a book is not the same way you are supposed to write the title of a journal article or a book chapter.

The Chicago Manual of Style requires you to italicize the title of all standalone works you mention in your essay. Standalone works that you must italicize include journals, books, plays, and so on.

Examples showing how to write the titles of standalone works in Chicago

• Internal Journal of Art & Design Education (journal-title title)
• Studies in Art Education (journal title)
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (book title)
• Rich Dad Poor Dad (book title)
• Long Day’s Journey Into Night (play title)

The Chicago Manual requires you to enclose the title of short works in double quotation marks. Examples of short works that need to be enclosed include journal articles, magazine articles, news articles, book chapters, etc.

• “Frank Gehry’s non-trivial drawings as gestures” drawdlings and kinaesthetic approach to architecture” (journal article title)
• “The Saka ‘Animal Style’ in Context: Material, Technology, Form and Use” (journal article title)
• “An Abandoned, Industrial Ruin Bursts With New Life in Delaware” (magazine article title)
• “The Unfinished Business of International Business Tax Reform” (news article title)
• “The Technologies Behind Bitcoin” (book chapter title)

On a Final Note!

You now know how to format standalone and shorter works in APA, MLA, Harvard, and Chicago. Therefore, when asked to write an essay following any of these formatting styles, you should be able to correctly mention or talk about any article or larger work in your essay.

Try our paper editing service if you need help editing your essay to conform to APA, MLA, Harvard, or Chicago standards. We offer essay editing services at affordable rates. We can edit any work to meet any academic requirements. Check out our other writing and homework help services .

Contact us today for fast and professional assistance.

Gradecrest is a professional writing service that provides original model papers. We offer personalized services along with research materials for assistance purposes only. All the materials from our website should be used with proper references. See our Terms of Use Page for proper details.

• PRO Courses Guides New Tech Help Pro Expert Videos About wikiHow Pro Upgrade Sign In
• EDIT Edit this Article
• EXPLORE Tech Help Pro About Us Random Article Quizzes Request a New Article Community Dashboard This Or That Game Popular Categories Arts and Entertainment Artwork Books Movies Computers and Electronics Computers Phone Skills Technology Hacks Health Men's Health Mental Health Women's Health Relationships Dating Love Relationship Issues Hobbies and Crafts Crafts Drawing Games Education & Communication Communication Skills Personal Development Studying Personal Care and Style Fashion Hair Care Personal Hygiene Youth Personal Care School Stuff Dating All Categories Arts and Entertainment Finance and Business Home and Garden Relationship Quizzes Cars & Other Vehicles Food and Entertaining Personal Care and Style Sports and Fitness Computers and Electronics Health Pets and Animals Travel Education & Communication Hobbies and Crafts Philosophy and Religion Work World Family Life Holidays and Traditions Relationships Youth
• Browse Articles
• Learn Something New
• Quizzes Hot
• This Or That Game New
• Train Your Brain
• Explore More
• Support wikiHow
• About wikiHow
• Log in / Sign up
• Education and Communications
• College University and Postgraduate
• Academic Writing

How to Introduce a Journal Article in an Essay

Last Updated: February 9, 2024

This article was co-authored by Noah Taxis and by wikiHow staff writer, Jennifer Mueller, JD . Noah Taxis is an English Teacher based in San Francisco, California. He has taught as a credentialed teacher for over four years: first at Mountain View High School as a 9th- and 11th-grade English Teacher, then at UISA (Ukiah Independent Study Academy) as a Middle School Independent Study Teacher. He is now a high school English teacher at St. Ignatius College Preparatory School in San Francisco. He received an MA in Secondary Education and Teaching from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. He also received an MA in Comparative and World Literature from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a BA in International Literary & Visual Studies and English from Tufts University. This article has been viewed 33,281 times.

Using a journal article in your essay can add to your credibility and make your points more persuasive. When you introduce an article to your readers, you help them understand why you're using it as a source. We've gathered a number of different ways you can introduce the journal article and transition between your thoughts and those of the other author. Pick the one that works best for you and your personal writing style.

List the title and the author.

• For example, you might write: "Albus Dumbledore describes the origin of the four Hogwarts houses in his article 'Separating Hogwarts Fact and Fiction.'"
• Put the title of the article in double-quotation marks in your text. [1] X Research source
• If you're quoting directly from the source, include the author's full name the first time you quote them. [2] X Research source

Summarize the article.

• For example, you might write: "The history of Hogwarts makes clear that the houses were never intended to be seen as 'good' or 'evil.' Rather, each house emphasizes and nurtures specific traits students have—how they use those traits is up to them."
• Paraphrasing from the article is similar to summarizing. However, when you summarize, you're covering the entire article in a sentence or two. A paraphrase typically only covers a small portion of the article.

Provide any necessary background.

• For example, you might write: "Professor Slughorn was one of the longest-serving teachers at Hogwarts, schooling generations of students in potions until his retirement."
• You might also include some background if the author of the article is controversial or the article's conclusions have been seriously questioned. If you're doing this, go on to explain why you're using the article in your essay.

Explain the purpose of the source in your essay.

• For example, you might write: "Although this essay doesn't discuss defenses against the dark arts, Gilderoy Lockhart's article provides an example of how you can't learn anything by plagiarizing the work of others."

Frame the source in the context of your own essay.

• For example, you might write: "This article demonstrates broad support for the idea that Hogwarts should continue to sort students into four houses."

Add a signal phrase to distinguish ideas from the source.

• For example, you might write: "McGonagall argues that Slytherin House should be disbanded after the Battle of Hogwarts."

Discuss the source's limitations.

• For example, you might write: "While McGonagall makes a compelling argument that Slytherin House should be disbanded, she was biased by her experiences. In this essay, I will show that the personality traits emphasized by Slytherin are positive traits that can be used for good."

Expert Q&A

• Remember to include an in-text citation for the source if required by your citation guide. You'll also need an entry for the source in your reference list at the end of your paper. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• In an academic essay, you typically introduce a journal article in the first sentence of a paragraph. Then, use the sentences that follow to show how the material from the article relates to the rest of your essay. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

Expert Interview

Thanks for reading our article! If you’d like to learn more about academic writing, check out our in-depth interview with Noah Taxis .

• ↑ https://rasmussen.libanswers.com/faq/32501
• ↑ https://www.ursinus.edu/live/files/1160-integrating-quotespdf
• ↑ https://www.una.edu/writingcenter/docs/Writing-Resources/Source%20Integration.pdf
• ↑ https://www.stetson.edu/other/writing-center/media/Handout%20-%20Incorporating%20Sources%20Effectively.pdf

About This Article

• Send fan mail to authors

Did this article help you?

Featured Articles

Trending Articles

Watch Articles

• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Do Not Sell or Share My Info
• Not Selling Info

Don’t miss out! Sign up for

wikiHow’s newsletter

• Bipolar Disorder
• Therapy Center
• When To See a Therapist
• Types of Therapy
• Best Online Therapy
• Best Couples Therapy
• Best Family Therapy
• Managing Stress
• Sleep and Dreaming
• Understanding Emotions
• Self-Improvement
• Healthy Relationships
• Student Resources
• Personality Types
• Verywell Mind Insights
• 2023 Verywell Mind 25
• Mental Health in the Classroom
• Editorial Process
• Meet Our Review Board
• Crisis Support

How to Reference Articles in APA Format

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.

If you write a psychology paper, you will need to reference several sources in APA format. Journal articles are often used and cited to summarize the results of studies and experiments conducted by researchers. In most cases, you will need to create references for at least five or more journal articles for every APA format paper you write.

APA format details a set of strict rules for referencing articles that appear in academic journals and other periodicals. These vary somewhat based on where the article appears and who the authors are. While most articles you will use in your paper appear in academic and professional journals, you may also find articles in magazines, newspapers, and online publications.

Keep reading for a breakdown of the rules for creating references in APA format.

Basic Structure for Journal Article References

Begin the reference with the author's last name and first initials, followed by the date of publication in parentheses. Provide the title of the article, but only capitalize the first letter of the title. Next, include the journal or periodical and volume number in italics, followed by the issue number in parentheses. Finally, provide the page numbers where the article can be found.

Author, I. N. (Year). Title of the article. Title of the Journal or Periodical, volume number (issue number), page numbers.

Smith, L. V. (2000). Referencing articles in APA format. APA Format Weekly, 34 (1), 4-10.

If possible, include the DOI (digital object identifier) number at the end of your reference. If a DOI number is not available and you accessed the article online, give the URL of the journal's home page.

Formatting Rules

• The title , subtitle and all proper nouns should be capitalized.
• Your reference page should be double-spaced.
• The first line of each reference should be flush left and remaining lines should be indented

Be sure to check your references using the official Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. See an example of different types of references and learn more about APA format .

Magazine Articles

The structure of a reference for an article appearing in a magazine is similar to that of a journal article. However, be sure to add the month and day of publication to the publication date.

James, S. A. (2001, June 7). Magazine articles in APA format. Newsweek, 20, 48-52.

Newspaper Articles

References for newspaper articles follow the basic structure as magazines, but you should list each individual page the article appears on rather than a page range.

Tensky, J. A. (2004, January 5). How to cite newspaper articles. The New York Times, 4D, 5D.

Articles With Two Authors

If an article has two authors, follow the basic format for a journal reference. Place a comma after the first initial of the first author followed by an ampersand (&). Then, include the last name and first initial of the second author.

Mischel, W., & Baker, N. (1975). Cognitive transformations of reward objects through instructions.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31 , 254-261.

Articles With Three to Twenty Authors

 For journal articles with three to 20 authors, you will follow a similar format as with two authors but each author and their initials will be separated with a comma. The final author should be preceded by an ampersand. Follow this same format for each additional author up to 20 authors.

Hart, D., Keller, M., Edelstein, W., & Hofmann, V. (1998). Childhood personality influences on social-cognitive development: A longitudinal study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1288-1289. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1278

Keller, J. L., Smithfield, K. B., Ellis, M., Michelina, R., & Bels, S. (1987). The limitations of anchoring bias. J ournal of Market Research, 17 , 115-119.

Articles With More Than Twenty Authors

The rules for referencing both single and multiple authors apply to all sources, whether the material came from books, magazine articles, newspaper articles, journal articles, or online sources. Include the last name and first initials of each author, with individuals' names separated by a comma. The last author should be preceded with an ampersand.

If the article includes 20 or fewer authors, list each author separately. If there are more than 20, include the first 19 and then include an ellipse (. . . ) in place of the authors' names before listing the final author.

Arlo, A., Black, B., Clark, C., Davidson, D., Emerson, E., Fischer, F., Grahmann, G., Habib, H., Ianelli, I., Juarez, J., Kobayashi, K., Lee, L., Martin, M., Naim, N., Odelsson, O., Pierce, P., Qiang, Q., Reed, R., Scofield, S., . . . Thatcher, T. (2011). Even more references. APA Format Today, 11 (4), 30-38.

Articles With No Author

If an article does not cite any authors, start the reference with the title of the article. Follow this with the publication date, source, and URL if the article was accessed electronically.

Scientists seek source of creativity. (2012, March, 6). Dayton County News. http://www.daytoncountynews.com/news/39756_39275.html

The reference section is one of the easiest places to lose points due to incorrect APA format, so be sure to check your references before you hand in your psychology papers . While it may be tedioous, learning to reference articles in proper APA style will help you throughout your study of psychology.

American Psychological Association. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association  (7th ed.). The American Psychological Association, 2019.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Reading Lists
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

A (Very) Simple Way to Improve Your Writing

• Mark Rennella

It’s called the “one-idea rule” — and any level of writer can use it.

The “one idea” rule is a simple concept that can help you sharpen your writing, persuade others by presenting your argument in a clear, concise, and engaging way. What exactly does the rule say?

• Every component of a successful piece of writing should express only one idea.
• In persuasive writing, your “one idea” is often the argument or belief you are presenting to the reader. Once you identify what that argument is, the “one-idea rule” can help you develop, revise, and connect the various components of your writing.
• For instance, let’s say you’re writing an essay. There are three components you will be working with throughout your piece: the title, the paragraphs, and the sentences.
• Each of these parts should be dedicated to just one idea. The ideas are not identical, of course, but they’re all related. If done correctly, the smaller ideas (in sentences) all build (in paragraphs) to support the main point (suggested in the title).

Where your work meets your life. See more from Ascend here .

Most advice about writing looks like a long laundry list of “do’s and don’ts.” These lists can be helpful from time to time, but they’re hard to remember … and, therefore, hard to depend on when you’re having trouble putting your thoughts to paper. During my time in academia, teaching composition at the undergraduate and graduate levels, I saw many people struggle with this.

• MR Mark Rennella is Associate Editor at HBP and has published two books, Entrepreneurs, Managers, and Leaders and The Boston Cosmopolitans .  

Partner Center

How do I actually write the names of the article and the journal/magazine in my paper?

To write the name of a journal/magazine title in the body of your paper:

• The title of the journal should be in italics - Example:  Journal of the American Medical Association
• Capitalize all of the major words.

To write the the name of an article title in the body of your paper:

• The title of the article should be in quotation marks - E xample: "Tiger Woman on Wall Street"

For more information, please see the following pages on the APA Style Blog :

• Title Case Capitalization
• Use of Italics
• Use of Quotation Marks

Thank you for using ASK US.  For more information, please contact your Baker librarians .

• Last Updated May 05, 2023
• Views 531399
• Answered By Baker Librarians

FAQ Actions

• Share on Facebook

Comments (8)

• Do articles contain address? by Danny on Mar 20, 2017
• On the APA References page add Retrieved from and the website address at the end of the citation. See the APA Help page for examples-https://guides.baker.edu/apahelp by ASK US on Mar 20, 2017
• Is this information the same for scientific research journals and articles (still within APA)? by Haley on Apr 03, 2017
• Yes, it is. See the APA Help guide for examples. guides.baker.edu/apahelp by ASK US on Apr 03, 2017
• Do I have to put the name of the author of the article or website the article was from? by Hailee on May 01, 2017
• The answer given was for the body of your paper. Here's how to cite an article both on the References page and in-text: Author Last Name, First & Middle Initials. (Date). Title of article: Subtitle of article. Title of Source, Volume(Issue), Page numbers. Retrieved from... In-text: Paraphrase: (Author Last Name, Year). Quotation: (Author Last Name, Year, p. Page Number). by ASK US on May 02, 2017
• Do I put the title of essay in single quotation marks if I write in UK English (APA)? by joseph on Mar 25, 2019
• See the APA Style Blog's post on How to Capitalize and Format Reference Titles in APA Style: https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/03/how-to-capitalize-and-format-reference-titles-in-apa-style.html by Patrick Mullane on Mar 25, 2019

We'll answer you within 3 hours M - F 8:00 am - 4:00 pm.

Home / Guides / Citation Guides / Harvard Referencing / Harvard Referencing Style Examples / How to reference an article in Harvard referencing style

How to reference an article in Harvard referencing style

What is an article.

Almost all writers and academics reference other people’s writing in their works. Referencing demonstrates that you have researched your topic, are well versed in its arguments and theories, and it also helps avoid charges of plagiarism.  

The Harvard citation system is just one of many referencing styles – and which style you choose is normally guided by the institution or publication you are writing for.

In this article, you will learn how to use the Harvard citation system to reference the following types of articles:

• journal article
• newspaper article
• magazine article

Properly citing article details in the reference list will help the readers to locate your source material if they wish to read more about a particular area or topic.

Information you need:

• Author name
• (Year published)  
• ‘Article title’  
• Journal/newspaper/magazine name  
• Day and month published, if available
• Volume number, if available
• (Issue) number, if available
• Page number(s), if available

If accessed online:

• Available at: URL or DOI  
• (Accessed: date).

Journal articles

Academic or scholarly journals are periodical publications about a specific discipline. No matter what your field is, if you are writing an academic paper, you will inevitably have to cite a journal article in your research. Journal articles often have multiple authors, so make sure you know when to use et al. in Harvard style . The method for referencing a journal article in the reference list is as follows:

Reference list (print) structure:

Last name, F. (Year published) ‘Article title’, Journal name , Volume(Issue), Page(s).

Shepherd, V. (2020) ‘An exploration around peer support for secondary pupils in Scotland with experience of self-harm’, Educational Psychology in Practice, 36(3), pp. 297-312.

Note that the article title uses sentence case. However, the title of the journal uses title case. Additionally, the volume number comes immediately after the journal title followed by the issue number in round brackets.

If the original material you are referencing was accessed online, then the method for citing it in the reference list will be the same as that in print, but with an additional line at the end.  

Reference list (online) structure:

Last name, F. (Year published) ‘Article title’, Journal Name , Volume(Issue), Page(s). Available at: URL or DOI (Accessed: date).  

Shepherd, V. (2020) ‘An exploration around peer support for secondary pupils in Scotland with experience of self-harm’, Educational Psychology in Practice, 36(3), pp. 297-312. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02667363.2020.1772726 (Accessed: 08 October 2020).

In-text citation (print or online) structure:

In-text citations are written within round brackets and start with the last name of the author followed by the year published, both separated by a comma.

You can also mention the author within the text and only include the publication year in round brackets.

Examples:  

In this article (Shepherd, 2020) deals with…  

According to Shepherd (2020), when peer support is available…  

Talking about the secondary education system, Shepherd (2020, p.299) suggests that…

Newspaper articles

Even if you are referring to an incident which is public knowledge, you still need to cite the source.  

The name of the author in a newspaper article is referred to as a byline. Below are examples for citing an article both with and without a byline.  

Reference list (print) structure:  

Last name, F. (Year published). ‘Article title’, Newspaper name , Day Month, Page(s).

Hamilton, J. (2018). ‘Massive fire at local department store’, The Daily Local, 10 August, p. 1.

Last name, F. (Year published). ‘Article title’, Newspaper name , Day Month, Page(s). Available at: URL (Accessed: Day Month Year).

Gambino, L. (2020) ‘Kamala Harris and Mike Pence clash over coronavirus response in vice-presidential debate,’ The Guardian, 8 October. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/07/debate-kamala-harris-mike-pence-latest-news (Accessed: 8 October 2020).

Reference list structure, no byline:

The basic reference list structure for the reference is the same for both print and online articles. If information isn’t available, simply omit it from the reference.

Newspaper name (Year published) ‘Article Title’, Day Month, Page(s). Available at: URL (Accessed: Day Month Year).

The Chronicler (2016) ‘Local man wins lottery jackpot twice in one year’, 30 May, p. 14. Available at: https://thechroniclerpaper.com/local-man-wins-lottery-twice (Accessed: 1 October 2020).

In-text citation structure (print or online):

The last name of the author and date are written in round brackets, separated by a comma. The method is similar to referencing journal articles in in-text citations.

(Hamilton, 2018)

In his paper, Gambino (2020) mentioned that…

For articles accessed online which do not have an author, the name of the publication is mentioned in place of the author’s name and is italicized.

( The Chronicler , 2016)

Magazine articles  

The structure of magazine articles is similar to that of a journal article.

Last name, F. (Year published) ‘Article title’, Magazine Name , Volume(Issue), Page(s).

Ornes, S. (2020). “To save Appalachia’s endangered mussels, scientists hatched a bold plan”, ScienceNews, (198), p.2.

Last name, F. (Year published) ‘Article title’, Magazine name , Volume(Issue), Page(s). Available at: URL (Accessed: Date).

Ornes, S. (2020) ‘To save Appalachia’s endangered mussels, scientists hatched a bold plan’, ScienceNews, (198), p.2. Available at: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/endangered-mussels-appalachia-rivers-biologists-conservation-plan (Accessed: 3 October 2020).

  In-text citation (print or online) structure:

(Author last name, Year published)

(Ornes, 2020)

Published October 29, 2020.

Harvard Formatting Guide

Harvard Formatting

• et al Usage
• Direct Quotes
• In-text Citations
• Multiple Authors
• Page Numbers
• Writing an Outline
• View Harvard Guide

Reference Examples

• View all Harvard Examples

How useful was this post?

Click on a star to rate it!

We are sorry that this post was not useful for you!

Let us improve this post!

Tell us how we can improve this post?

Harvard Referencing Examples

Writing Tools

Citation Generators

Other Citation Styles

Plagiarism Checker

Upload a paper to check for plagiarism against billions of sources and get advanced writing suggestions for clarity and style.

Get Started

The Difference Between an Article and an Essay

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

In composition studies , an article is a short work of nonfiction that typically appears in a magazine or newspaper or on a website. Unlike essays , which often highlight the subjective impressions of the author (or narrator ), articles are commonly written from an objective point of view . Articles include news items, feature stories, reports , profiles , instructions, product descriptions, and other informative pieces of writing.

What Sets Articles Apart From Essays

Though both articles and essays are types of nonfiction writing, they differ in many ways. Here are some features and qualities of articles that differentiate them from essays.

Subject and Theme in Articles

"A useful exercise is to look at some good articles and name the broader subject and the particular aspect each treats. You will find that the subject always deals with a partial aspect examined from some viewpoint; it is never a crammed condensation of the whole.

"...Observe that there are two essential elements of an article: subject and theme . The subject is what the article is about: the issue, event, or person it deals with. (Again, an article must cover only an aspect of a whole.) The theme is what the author wants to say about the subject—what he brings to the subject." (Ayn Rand, The Art of Nonfiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers , ed. by Robert Mayhew. Plume, 2001)

"An article is not everything that's true. It's every important thing that's true." (Gary Provost, Beyond Style: Mastering the Finer Points of Writing . Writer's Digest Books, 1988)

Article Structure

"There are five ways to structure your article . They are:

- The inverted pyramid - The double helix - The chronological double-helix - The chronological report - The storytelling model

Think about how you read a newspaper: you scan the captions and then read the first paragraph or two to get the gist of the article and then read further if you want to know more of the details. That's the inverted pyramid style of writing used by journalists, in which what's important comes first. The double-helix also presents facts in order of importance but it alternates between two separate sets of information. For example, suppose you are writing an article about the two national political conventions. You'll first present Fact 1 about the Democratic convention, then Fact 2 about the Republicans, then Fact 2 about the Democrats, Fact 2 about the Republicans, and so on. The chronological double-helix begins like the double helix but once the important facts from each set of information have been presented, it then goes off to relay the events in chronological order...

"The chronological report is the most straightforward structure to follow since it is written in the order in which the events occurred. The final structure is the storytelling model, which utilizes some of the techniques of fiction writing, so you would want to bring the reader into the story right away even if it means beginning in the middle or even near the end and then filling in the facts as the story unfolds." (Richard D. Bank, The Everything Guide to Writing Nonfiction . Adams Media, 2010)

Opening Sentence of an Article

"The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn't induce him to continue to the third sentence, it's equally dead. Of such a progression of sentences, each tugging the reader forward until he is hooked, a writer constructs that fateful unit, the ' lead .'" (William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction , 7th ed. HarperCollins, 2006)

Articles and Media

"More and more, article content written for printed media is also appearing on digital devices (often as an edited version of a longer article) for readers who have short attention spans due to time constraints or their device's small screen. As a result, digital publishers are seeking audio versions of content that is significantly condensed and written in conversational style. Often, content writers must now submit their articles with the understanding they will appear in several media formats." (Roger W. Nielsen, Writing Content: Mastering Magazine and Online Writing . R.W. Nielsen, 2009)

Writer's Voice in Articles and Essays

"Given the confusion of genre minglings and overlaps, what finally distinguishes an essay from an article may just be the author's gumption, the extent to which personal voice , vision, and style are the prime movers and shapers, even though the authorial 'I' may be only a remote energy, nowhere visible but everywhere present. ('We commonly do not remember,' Thoreau wrote in the opening paragraphs of Walden , 'that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.')" (Justin Kaplan, quoted by Robert Atwan in The Best American Essays, College Edition , 2nd ed. Houghton Mifflin, 1998)

• How to Write a News Article That's Effective
• What Are the Different Types and Characteristics of Essays?
• What Is Expository Writing?
• Definition and Examples of Paragraphing in Essays
• What Is a Synopsis and How Do You Write One?
• How To Write an Essay
• Paragraph Length in Compositions and Reports
• Learn to Write News Stories
• Unity in Composition
• Writing a Lead or Lede to an Article
• How to Structure an Essay
• How to Write Your Graduate School Admissions Essay
• Creative Nonfiction
• How to Write a Great Book Report
• Writers on Writing: The Art of Paragraphing
• AP English Exam: 101 Key Terms

Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

MLA Works Cited: Electronic Sources (Web Publications)

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

MLA (Modern Language Association) style is most commonly used to write papers and cite sources within the liberal arts and humanities. This resource, updated to reflect the MLA Handbook (9 th ed.), offers examples for the general format of MLA research papers, in-text citations, endnotes/footnotes, and the Works Cited page.

The MLA Handbook highlights principles over prescriptive practices. Essentially, a writer will need to take note of primary elements in every source, such as author, title, etc. and then assort them in a general format. Thus, by using this methodology, a writer will be able to cite any source regardless of whether it’s included in this list.

However, this guide will highlight a few concerns when citing digital sources in MLA style.

Best Practices for Managing Online Sources

Because online information can change or disappear, it is always a good idea to keep personal copies of important electronic information whenever possible. Downloading or even printing key documents ensures you have a stable backup. You can also use the Bookmark function in your web browser in order to build an easy-to-access reference for all of your project's sources (though this will not help you if the information is changed or deleted).

It is also wise to keep a record of when you first consult with each online source. MLA uses the phrase, “Accessed” to denote which date you accessed the web page when available or necessary. It is not required to do so, but it is encouraged (especially when there is no copyright date listed on a website).

Important Note on the Use of URLs in MLA

Include a URL or web address to help readers locate your sources. Because web addresses are not static (i.e., they change often) and because documents sometimes appear in multiple places on the web (e.g., on multiple databases), MLA encourages the use of citing containers such as Youtube, JSTOR, Spotify, or Netflix in order to easily access and verify sources. However, MLA only requires the www. address, so eliminate all https:// when citing URLs.

Many scholarly journal articles found in databases include a DOI (digital object identifier). If a DOI is available, cite the DOI number instead of the URL.

Online newspapers and magazines sometimes include a “permalink,” which is a shortened, stable version of a URL. Look for a “share” or “cite this” button to see if a source includes a permalink. If you can find a permalink, use that instead of a URL.

Abbreviations Commonly Used with Electronic Sources

If page numbers are not available, use par. or pars. to denote paragraph numbers. Use these in place of the p. or pp. abbreviation. Par. would be used for a single paragraph, while pars. would be used for a span of two or more paragraphs.

Basic Style for Citations of Electronic Sources (Including Online Databases)

Here are some common features you should try to find before citing electronic sources in MLA style. Not every web page will provide all of the following information. However, collect as much of the following information as possible:

• Author and/or editor names (if available); last names first.
• "Article name in quotation marks."
• Title of the website, project, or book in italics.
• Any version numbers available, including editions (ed.), revisions, posting dates, volumes (vol.), or issue numbers (no.).
• Publisher information, including the publisher name and publishing date.
• Take note of any page numbers (p. or pp.) or paragraph numbers (par. or pars.).
• DOI (if available, precede it with "https://doi.org/"), otherwise a URL (without the https://) or permalink.
• Date you accessed the material (Date Accessed). While not required, saving this information it is highly recommended, especially when dealing with pages that change frequently or do not have a visible copyright date.

Use the following format:

Author. "Title." Title of container (self contained if book) , Other contributors (translators or editors), Version (edition), Number (vol. and/or no.), Publisher, Publication Date, Location (pages, paragraphs and/or URL, DOI or permalink). 2 nd container’s title , Other contributors, Version, Number, Publisher, Publication date, Location, Date of Access (if applicable).

Citing an Entire Web Site

When citing an entire website, follow the same format as listed above, but include a compiler name if no single author is available.

Author, or compiler name (if available). Name of Site. Version number (if available), Name of institution/organization affiliated with the site (sponsor or publisher), date of resource creation (if available), DOI (preferred), otherwise include a URL or permalink. Date of access (if applicable).

Editor, author, or compiler name (if available). Name of Site . Version number, Name of institution/organization affiliated with the site (sponsor or publisher), date of resource creation (if available), URL, DOI or permalink. Date of access (if applicable).

The Purdue OWL Family of Sites . The Writing Lab and OWL at Purdue and Purdue U, 2008, owl.english.purdue.edu/owl. Accessed 23 Apr. 2008.

Felluga, Dino. Guide to Literary and Critical Theory . Purdue U, 28 Nov. 2003, www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/. Accessed 10 May 2006.

Course or Department Websites

Give the instructor name. Then list the title of the course (or the school catalog designation for the course) in italics. Give appropriate department and school names as well, following the course title.

Felluga, Dino. Survey of the Literature of England . Purdue U, Aug. 2006, web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/241/241/Home.html. Accessed 31 May 2007.

English Department . Purdue U, 20 Apr. 2009, www.cla.purdue.edu/english/. Accessed 31 May 2015.

A Page on a Web Site

For an individual page on a Web site, list the author or alias if known, followed by an indication of the specific page or article being referenced. Usually, the title of the page or article appears in a header at the top of the page. Follow this with the information covered above for entire Web sites. If the publisher is the same as the website name, only list it once.

Lundman, Susan. “How to Make Vegetarian Chili.”  eHow , www.ehow.com/how_10727_make-vegetarian-chili.html. Accessed 6 July 2015.

“ Athlete's Foot - Topic Overview. ”   WebMD , 25 Sept. 2014, www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/tc/athletes-foot-topic-overview.

Citations for e-books closely resemble those for physical books. Simply indicate that the book in question is an e-book by putting the term "e-book" in the "version" slot of the MLA template (i.e., after the author, the title of the source, the title of the container, and the names of any other contributors).

Silva, Paul J.  How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing. E-book, American Psychological Association, 2007.

If the e-book is formatted for a specific reader device or service, you can indicate this by treating this information the same way you would treat a physical book's edition number. Often, this will mean replacing "e-book" with "[App/Service] ed."

Machiavelli, Niccolo.  The Prince , translated by W. K. Marriott, Kindle ed., Library of Alexandria, 2018.

Note:  The MLA considers the term "e-book" to refer to publications formatted specifically for reading with an e-book reader device (e.g., a Kindle) or a corresponding web application. These e-books will not have URLs or DOIs. If you are citing book content from an ordinary webpage with a URL, use the "A Page on a Web Site" format above.

An Image (Including a Painting, Sculpture, or Photograph)

Provide the artist's name, the work of art italicized, the date of creation, the institution and city where the work is housed. Follow this initial entry with the name of the Website in italics, and the date of access.

Goya, Francisco. The Family of Charles IV . 1800. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Museo Nacional del Prado , www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-family-of-carlos-iv/f47898fc-aa1c-48f6-a779-71759e417e74. Accessed 22 May 2006.

Klee, Paul. Twittering Machine . 1922. Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Artchive , www.artchive.com/artchive/K/klee/twittering_machine.jpg.html. Accessed May 2006.

If the work cited is available on the web only, then provide the name of the artist, the title of the work, and then follow the citation format for a website. If the work is posted via a username, use that username for the author.

Adams, Clifton R. “People Relax Beside a Swimming Pool at a Country Estate Near Phoenix, Arizona, 1928.” Found, National Geographic Creative, 2 June 2016, natgeofound.tumblr.com/.

An Article in a Web Magazine

Provide the author name, article name in quotation marks, title of the web magazine in italics, publisher name, publication date, URL, and the date of access.

Bernstein, Mark. “ 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web. ”   A List Apart: For People Who Make Websites , 16 Aug. 2002, alistapart.com/article/writeliving. Accessed 4 May 2009.

An Article in an Online Scholarly Journal

For all online scholarly journals, provide the author(s) name(s), the name of the article in quotation marks, the title of the publication in italics, all volume and issue numbers, and the year of publication. Include a DOI if available, otherwise provide a URL or permalink to help readers locate the source.

Article in an Online-only Scholarly Journal

MLA requires a page range for articles that appear in Scholarly Journals. If the journal you are citing appears exclusively in an online format (i.e. there is no corresponding print publication) that does not make use of page numbers, indicate the URL or other location information.

Dolby, Nadine. “Research in Youth Culture and Policy: Current Conditions and Future Directions.” Social Work and Society: The International Online-Only Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, 2008, www.socwork.net/sws/article/view/60/362. Accessed 20 May 2009.

Article in an Online Scholarly Journal That Also Appears in Print

Cite articles in online scholarly journals that also appear in print as you would a scholarly journal in print, including the page range of the article . Provide the URL and the date of access.

Wheelis, Mark. “ Investigating Disease Outbreaks Under a Protocol to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. ”   Emerging Infectious Diseases , vol. 6, no. 6, 2000, pp. 595-600, wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/6/6/00-0607_article. Accessed 8 Feb. 2009.

An Article from an Online Database (or Other Electronic Subscription Service)

Cite online databases (e.g. LexisNexis, ProQuest, JSTOR, ScienceDirect) and other subscription services as containers. Thus, provide the title of the database italicized before the DOI or URL. If a DOI is not provided, use the URL instead. Provide the date of access if you wish.

Alonso, Alvaro, and Julio A. Camargo. “ Toxicity of Nitrite to Three Species of Freshwater Invertebrates. ”   Environmental Toxicology, vol. 21, no. 1, 3 Feb. 2006, pp. 90-94. Wiley Online Library , https://doi.org/10.1002/tox.20155. Accessed 26 May 2009.

Langhamer, Claire. “Love and Courtship in Mid-Twentieth-Century England.” Historical Journal, vol. 50, no. 1, 2007, pp. 173-96. ProQuest , https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X06005966. Accessed 27 May 2009.

E-mail (including E-mail Interviews)

Give the author of the message, followed by the subject line in quotation marks. State to whom the message was sent with the phrase, “Received by” and the recipient’s name. Include the date the message was sent. Use standard capitalization.

Kunka, Andrew. “ Re: Modernist Literature. ”  Received by John Watts, 15 Nov. 2000.

Neyhart, David. “ Re: Online Tutoring. ” Received by Joe Barbato, 1 Dec. 2016.

A Listserv, Discussion Group, or Blog Posting

Cite web postings as you would a standard web entry. Provide the author of the work, the title of the posting in quotation marks, the web site name in italics, the publisher, and the posting date. Follow with the date of access. Include screen names as author names when author name is not known. If both names are known, place the author’s name in brackets.

Author or compiler name (if available). “Posting Title.” Name of Site , Version number (if available), Name of institution/organization affiliated with the site (sponsor or publisher), URL. Date of access.

Salmar1515 [Sal Hernandez]. “Re: Best Strategy: Fenced Pastures vs. Max Number of Rooms?” BoardGameGeek , 29 Sept. 2008, boardgamegeek.com/thread/343929/best-strategy-fenced-pastures-vs-max-number-rooms. Accessed 5 Apr. 2009.

Begin with the user's Twitter handle in place of the author’s name. Next, place the tweet in its entirety in quotations, inserting a period after the tweet within the quotations. Include the date and time of posting, using the reader's time zone; separate the date and time with a comma and end with a period. Include the date accessed if you deem necessary.

@tombrokaw. “ SC demonstrated why all the debates are the engines of this campaign. ”   Twitter, 22 Jan. 2012, 3:06 a.m., twitter.com/tombrokaw/status/160996868971704320.

@PurdueWLab. “ Spring break is around the corner, and all our locations will be open next week. ”   Twitter , 5 Mar. 2012, 12:58 p.m., twitter.com/PurdueWLab/status/176728308736737282.

A YouTube Video

Video and audio sources need to be documented using the same basic guidelines for citing print sources in MLA style. Include as much descriptive information as necessary to help readers understand the type and nature of the source you are citing. If the author’s name is the same as the uploader, only cite the author once. If the author is different from the uploader, cite the author’s name before the title.

McGonigal, Jane. “Gaming and Productivity.” YouTube , uploaded by Big Think, 3 July 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkdzy9bWW3E.

“8 Hot Dog Gadgets put to the Test.” YouTube, uploaded by Crazy Russian Hacker, 6 June 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBlpjSEtELs.

A Comment on a Website or Article

List the username as the author. Use the phrase, Comment on, before the title. Use quotation marks around the article title. Name the publisher, date, time (listed on near the comment), and the URL.

Not Omniscient Enough. Comment on “ Flight Attendant Tells Passenger to ‘Shut Up’ After Argument Over Pasta. ”  ABC News, 9 Jun 2016, 4:00 p.m., abcnews.go.com/US/flight-attendant-tells-passenger-shut-argument-pasta/story?id=39704050.

• Key Differences

Know the Differences & Comparisons

Difference Between Article and Essay

An article is nothing but a piece of writing commonly found in newspapers or websites which contain fact-based information on a specific topic. It is published with the aim of making the reader aware of something and keeping them up to date.

An essay is a literary work, which often discusses ideas, experiences and concepts in a clear and coherent way. It reflects the author’s personal view, knowledge and research on a specific topic.

Content: Article Vs Essay

Comparison chart, definition of article.

An ‘article’ can be described as any form of written information which is produced either in a printed or electronic form, in newspaper, magazine, journal or website. It aims at spreading news, results of surveys, academic analysis or debates.

An article targets a large group of people, in order to fascinate the readers and engage them. Hence, it should be such that to retain the interest of the readers.

It discusses stories, reports and describes news, present balanced argument, express opinion, provides facts, offers advice, compares and contrast etc. in a formal or informal manner, depending upon the type of audience.

For writing an article one needs to perform a thorough research on the matter, so as to provide original and authentic information to the readers.

Components of Article

• Title : An article contains a noticeable title which should be intriguing and should not be very long and descriptive. However, it should be such that which suggests the theme or issue of the information provided.
• Introduction : The introduction part must clearly define the topic, by giving a brief overview of the situation or event.
• Body : An introduction is followed by the main body which presents the complete information or news, in an elaborative way, to let the reader know about the exact situation.
• Conclusion : The article ends with a conclusion, which sums up the entire topic with a recommendation or comment.

Definition of Essay

An essay is just a formal and comprehensive piece of literature, in which a particular topic is discussed thoroughly. It usually highlights the writer’s outlook, knowledge and experiences on that particular topic. It is a short literary work, which elucidates, argues and analyzes a specific topic.

The word essay is originated from the Latin term ‘exagium’ which means ‘presentation of a case’. Hence, writing an essay means to state the reasons or causes of something, or why something should be done or should be the case, which validates a particular viewpoint, analysis, experience, stories, facts or interpretation.

An essay is written with the intent to convince or inform the reader about something. Further, for writing an essay one needs to have good knowledge of the subject to explain the concept, thoroughly. If not so, the writer will end up repeating the same points again and again.

Components of the Essay

• Title : It should be a succinct statement of the proposition.
• Introduction : The introduction section of the essay, should be so interesting which instantly grabs the attention of the reader and makes them read the essay further. Hence, one can start with a quote to make it more thought-provoking.
• Body : In the main body of the essay, evidence or reasons in support of the writer’s ideas or arguments are provided. One should make sure that there is a sync in the paragraphs of the main body, as well as they,  should maintain a logical flow.
• Conclusion : In this part, the writer wraps up all the points in a summarized and simplified manner.

Key Differences Between Article and Essay

Upcoming points will discuss the difference between article and essay:

• An article refers to a written work, published in newspapers, journals, website, magazines etc, containing news or information, in a specific format. On the other hand, an essay is a continuous piece of writing, written with the aim of convincing the reader with the argument or merely informing the reader about the fact.
• An article is objective in the sense that it is based on facts and evidence, and simply describes the topic or narrate the event. As against, an essay is subjective, because it is based on fact or research-based opinion or outlook of a person on a specific topic. It analyses, argues and criticizes the topic.
• The tone used in an article is conversational, so as to make the article easy to understand and also keeping the interest of the reader intact. On the contrary, an essay uses educational and analytical tone.
• An article may contain headings, which makes it attractive and readable. In contrast, an essay does not have any headings, sections or bullet points, however, it is a coherent and organized form of writing.
• An article is always written with a definite objective, which is to inform or make the readers aware of something. Further, it is written to cater to a specific niche of audience. Conversely, an essay is written in response to a particular assertion or question. Moreover, it is not written with a specific group of readers in mind.
• An article is often supported by photographs, charts, statistics, graphs and tables. As opposed, an essay is not supported by any photographs, charts, or graphs.
• Citations and references are a must in case of an essay, whereas there is no such requirement in case of an article.

By and large, an article is meant to inform the reader about something, through news, featured stories, product descriptions, reports, etc. On the flip side, an essay offers an analysis of a particular topic, while reflecting a detailed account of a person’s view on it.

You Might Also Like:

Anna H. Smith says

November 15, 2020 at 6:21 pm

Great! Thank you for explaining the difference between an article and an academic essay so eloquently. Your information is so detailed and very helpful. it’s very educative, Thanks for sharing.

Sunita Singh says

December 12, 2020 at 7:11 am

Thank you! That’s quite helpful.

Saba Zia says

March 8, 2021 at 12:33 am

Great job!! Thank u for sharing this explanation and detailed difference between essay and article. It is really helpful.

Khushi Chaudhary says

February 7, 2021 at 2:38 pm

Thank you so much! It is really very easy to understand & helpful for my test.

Dury Frizza says

July 25, 2022 at 8:18 pm

Thanks a lot for sharing such a clear and easily understood explanation!!!!.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Five Takeaways From Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Essay on the ‘Colorblindness’ Trap

How a 50-year campaign has undermined the progress of the civil rights movement.

By Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer at the magazine and the creator of The 1619 Project. She also teaches race and journalism at Howard University.

Last June, the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action in college admissions was not constitutional. After the decision, much of the discussion was about its impact on the complexions of college campuses. But in an essay in The Times Magazine, I argue that we were missing the much bigger and more frightening story: that the death of affirmative action marks the culmination of a radical 50-year strategy to subvert the goal of colorblindness put forth by civil rights activists, by transforming it into a means of undermining racial justice efforts in a way that will threaten our multiracial democracy.

What do I mean by this? Here are the basic points of my essay:

The affirmative-action ruling could bring about sweeping changes across American society.

Conservatives are interpreting the court’s ruling broadly, and since last summer, they have used it to attack racial-justice programs outside the field of higher education. Since the decision, conservative groups have filed and threatened lawsuits against a range of programs that consider race, from diversity fellowships at law firms to maternal-health programs. One such group has even challenged the medical school of Howard University, one of the nation’s pre-eminent historically Black universities. Founded to educate people who had been enslaved, Howard’s mission has been to serve Black Americans who had for generations been systematically excluded from American higher education. These challenges to racial-justice programs will have a lasting impact on the nation’s ability to address the vast disparities that Black people experience.

Conservatives have co-opted the civil rights language of ‘colorblindness.’

In my essay, I demonstrate that these challenges to racial-justice programs often deploy the logic of “colorblindness,” the idea that the Constitution prohibits the use of race to distinguish citizens and that the goal of a diverse, democratic nation should be a society in which race does not determine outcomes for anyone. Civil rights leaders used the idea of colorblindness to challenge racial apartheid laws and policies, but over the last 50 years, conservatives have successfully co-opted both the rhetoric and the legal legacy of the civil rights era not to advance racial progress, but to stall it. And, I’d argue, reverse it.

Though the civil rights movement is celebrated and commemorated as a proud period in American history, it faced an immediate backlash. The progressive activists who advanced civil rights for Black Americans argued that in a society that used race against Black Americans for most of our history, colorblindness is a goal. They believed that achieving colorblindness requires race-conscious policies, such as affirmative action, that worked specifically to help Black people overcome their disadvantages in order to get to a point where race no longer hindered them. Conservatives, however, invoke the idea of colorblindness to make the case that race-conscious programs, even to help those whose race had been used against them for generations, are antithetical to the Constitution. In the affirmative-action decision, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, embraced this idea of colorblindness, saying: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

The Supreme Court’s decision undermines attempts to eliminate racial inequality that descendants of slavery suffer.

But mandating colorblindness in this way erases the fact that Black Americans still suffer inequality in every measurable aspect of American life — from poverty to access to quality neighborhoods and schools to health outcomes to wealth — and that this inequality stems from centuries of oppressive race-specific laws and policies. This way of thinking about colorblindness has reached its legal apotheosis on the Roberts court, where through rulings on schools and voting the Supreme Court has helped constitutionalize a colorblindness that leaves racial disparities intact while striking down efforts to ameliorate them.

These past decisions have culminated in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which can be seen as the Supreme Court clearing the way to eliminate the last legal tools to try to level the playing field for people who descend from slavery.

Affirmative action should not simply be a tool for diversity but should alleviate the particular conditions of descendants of slavery.

Part of the issue, I argue, is that the purpose of affirmative action got muddled in the 1970s. It was originally designed to reduce the suffering and improve the material conditions of people whose ancestors had been enslaved in this country. But the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1978 Bakke case changed the legally permissible goals of affirmative action, turning it into a generalized diversity program. That has opened the door for conservatives to attack the program for focusing on superficial traits like skin color, rather than addressing affirmative action's original purpose, which was to provide redress for the disadvantages descendants of slavery experienced after generations of oppression and subordination.

Working toward racial justice is not just the moral thing to do, but it is also crucial to our democracy.

When this country finally abolished slavery, it was left with a fundamental question: How does a white-majority nation, which wielded race-conscious policies and laws to enslave and oppress Black people, create a society in which race no longer matters? After the short-lived period of Reconstruction, lawmakers intent on helping those who had been enslaved become full citizens passed a slate of race-conscious laws. Even then, right at the end of slavery, the idea that this nation owed something special to those who had suffered under the singular institution of slavery faced strident opposition, and efforts at redress were killed just 12 years later with Reconstruction’s end. Instead, during the nearly 100-year period known as Jim Crow, descendants of slavery were violently subjected to a dragnet of racist laws that kept them from most opportunities and also prevented America from becoming a true democracy. During the civil rights era, when Black Americans were finally assured full legal rights of citizenship, this question once again presented itself: In order to address the disadvantage Black Americans faced, do we ignore race to eliminate its power, or do we consciously use race to undo its harms? Affirmative action and other racial-justice programs were born of that era, but now, once again, we are in a period of retrenchment and backlash that threatens the stability of our nation. My essay argues that if we are to preserve our multiracial democracy, we must find a way to address our original sin.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine focusing on racial injustice. Her extensive reporting in both print and radio has earned a Pulitzer Prize, National Magazine Award, Peabody and a Polk Award. More about Nikole Hannah-Jones

The Cowardice of Guernica

The literary magazine Guernica ’s decision to retract an essay about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reveals much about how the war is hardening human sentiment.

Listen to this article

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

In the days after October 7, the writer and translator Joanna Chen spoke with a neighbor in Israel whose children were frightened by the constant sound of warplanes. “I tell them these are good booms,” the neighbor said to Chen with a grimace. “I understood the subtext,” Chen wrote later in an essay published in Guernica magazine on March 4, titled “From the Edges of a Broken World.” The booms were, of course, the Israeli army bombing Gaza, part of a campaign that has left at least 30,000 civilians and combatants dead so far.

The moment is just one observation in a much longer meditative piece of writing in which Chen weighs her principles—she refused service in the Israeli military, for years has volunteered at a charity providing transportation for Palestinian children needing medical care, and works on Arabic and Hebrew translations to bridge cultural divides—against the more turbulent feelings of fear, inadequacy, and split allegiances that have cropped up for her after October 7, when 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage in Hamas’s assault on Israel. But the conversation with the neighbor is a sharp, novelistic, and telling moment. The mother, aware of the perversity of recasting bombs killing children mere miles away as “good booms,” does so anyway because she is a mother, and her children are frightened. The act, at once callous and caring, will stay with me.

Not with the readers of Guernica , though. The magazine , once a prominent publication for fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction, with a focus on global art and politics, quickly found itself imploding as its all-volunteer staff revolted over the essay. One of the magazine’s nonfiction editors posted on social media that she was leaving over Chen’s publication. “Parts of the essay felt particularly harmful and disorienting to read, such as the line where a person is quoted saying ‘I tell them these are good booms.’” Soon a poetry editor resigned as well, calling Chen’s essay a “horrific settler normalization essay”— settler here seeming to refer to all Israelis, because Chen does not live in the occupied territories. More staff members followed, including the senior nonfiction editor and one of the co-publishers (who criticized the essay as “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism”). Amid this flurry of cascading outrage, on March 10 Guernica pulled the essay from its website, with the note: “ Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it. A more fulsome explanation will follow.” As of today, this explanation is still pending, and my request for comment from the editor in chief, Jina Moore Ngarambe, has gone unanswered.

Read: Beware the language that erases reality

Blowups at literary journals are not the most pressing news of the day, but the incident at Guernica reveals the extent to which elite American literary outlets may now be beholden to the narrowest polemical and moralistic approaches to literature. After the publication of Chen’s essay, a parade of mutual incomprehension occurred across social media, with pro-Palestine writers announcing what they declared to be the self-evident awfulness of the essay (publishing the essay made Guernica “a pillar of eugenicist white colonialism masquerading as goodness,” wrote one of the now-former editors), while reader after reader who came to it because of the controversy—an archived version can still be accessed—commented that they didn’t understand what was objectionable. One reader seemed to have mistakenly assumed that Guernica had pulled the essay in response to pressure from pro-Israel critics. “Oh buddy you can’t have your civilian population empathizing with the people you’re ethnically cleansing,” he wrote, with obvious sarcasm. When another reader pointed out that he had it backwards, he responded, “This chain of events is bizarre.”

Some people saw anti-Semitism in the decision. James Palmer, a deputy editor of Foreign Policy , noted how absurd it was to suggest that the author approved of the “good bombs” sentiment, and wrote that the outcry was “one step toward trying to exclude Jews from discourse altogether.” And it is hard not to see some anti-Semitism at play. One of the resigning editors claimed that the essay “includes random untrue fantasies about Hamas and centers the suffering of oppressors” (Chen briefly mentions the well-documented atrocities of October 7; caring for an Israeli family that lost a daughter, son-in-law, and nephew; and her worries about the fate of Palestinians she knows who have links to Israel).

Madhuri Sastry, one of the co-publishers, notes in her resignation post that she’d earlier successfully insisted on barring a previous essay of Chen’s from the magazine’s Voices on Palestine compilation. In that same compilation, Guernica chose to include an interview with Alice Walker, the author of a poem that asks “Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews,” and who once recommended to readers of The New York Times a book that claims that “a small Jewish clique” helped plan the Russian Revolution, World Wars I and II, and “coldly calculated” the Holocaust. No one at Guernica publicly resigned over the magazine’s association with Walker.

However, to merely dismiss all of the critics out of hand as insane or intolerant or anti-Semitic would ironically run counter to the spirit of Chen’s essay itself. She writes of her desire to reach out to those on the other side of the conflict, people she’s worked with or known and who would be angered or horrified by some of the other experiences she relates in the essay, such as the conversation about the “good booms.” Given the realities of the conflict, she knows this attempt to connect is just a first step, and an often-frustrating one. Writing to a Palestinian she’d once worked with as a reporter, she laments her failure to come up with something meaningful to say: “I also felt stupid—this was war, and whether I liked it or not, Nuha and I were standing at opposite ends of the very bridge I hoped to cross. I had been naive … I was inadequate.” In another scene, she notes how even before October 7, when groups of Palestinians and Israelis joined together to share their stories, their goodwill failed “to straddle the chasm that divided us.”

Read: Why activism leads to so much bad writing

After the publication of Chen’s essay, one writer after another pulled their work from the magazine. One wrote, “I will not allow my work to be curated alongside settler angst,” while another, the Texas-based Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah, wrote that Chen’s essay “is humiliating to Palestinians in any time let alone during a genocide. An essay as if a dispatch from a colonial century ago. Oh how good you are to the natives.” I find it hard to read the essay that way, but it would be a mistake, as Chen herself suggests, to ignore such sentiments. For those who more naturally sympathize with the Israeli mother than the Gazan hiding from the bombs, these responses exist across that chasm Chen describes, one that empathy alone is incapable of bridging.

That doesn’t mean empathy isn’t a start, though. Which is why the retraction of the article is more than an act of cowardice and a betrayal of a writer whose work the magazine shepherded to publication. It’s a betrayal of the task of literature, which cannot end wars but can help us see why people wage them, oppose them, or become complicit in them.

Empathy here does not justify or condemn. Empathy is just a tool. The writer needs it to accurately depict their subject; the peacemaker needs it to be able to trace the possibilities for negotiation; even the soldier needs it to understand his adversary. Before we act, we must see war’s human terrain in all its complexity, no matter how disorienting and painful that might be. Which means seeing Israelis as well as Palestinians—and not simply the mother comforting her children as the bombs fall and the essayist reaching out across the divide, but far harsher and more unsettling perspectives. Peace is not made between angels and demons but between human beings, and the real hell of life, as Jean Renoir once noted, is that everybody has their reasons. If your journal can’t publish work that deals with such messy realities, then your editors might as well resign, because you’ve turned your back on literature.

After a writer expressed sympathy for Israelis in an essay, all hell broke loose at a literary journal

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

What are the limits of empathy in war?

That’s the question that Joanna Chen, a liberal writer and translator who is Jewish and lives in Israel, probed in an essay about her struggles since Oct. 7 to connect with Palestinians.

“It is not easy to tread the line of empathy, to feel passion for both sides,” she wrote in the literary journal Guernica , explaining that she briefly stopped her volunteer work driving Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals for lifesaving medical care.

“How could I continue after Hamas had massacred and kidnapped so many civilians,” she asked, noting that the dead included a fellow volunteer, a longtime peace activist named Vivian Silver. “And I admit, I was afraid for my own life.”

The essay, titled “From the Edges of a Broken World,” provoked an uproar in the activist literary world. Over the weekend, more than a dozen of the publication’s staff resigned in protest — and Guernica removed the essay from its website.

“Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it,” the magazine said in a statement . “A more fulsome explanation will follow.”

Among those who quit was the co-publisher, Madhuri Sastry, who wrote on X that the essay was “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”

Sastry also called for the resignation of the editor in chief, Jina Moore Ngarambe, a veteran foreign correspondent. Ngarambe did not respond to requests for comment.

In a statement to The Times on Tuesday, Chen said: “Removing any stories and silencing any voices is the opposite of progress and the opposite of literature.”

“Today, people are afraid to listen to voices that do not perfectly mirror their own,” she said. “But ignorance begets hatred. My essay is an opening to a dialogue that I hope will emerge when the shouting dies down.”

The retraction of the essay comes as a new generation of activists in the literary world frames the conflict in the Middle East as a black-and-white battle between two sides — oppressor and oppressed — and pressures institutions to boycott Israeli or Zionist writers.

World & Nation

U.S. college campuses have embraced the Palestinian cause like never before. The story began decades ago

The Palestinian cause — and hostility toward Israel — has shifted from the sidelines of student activism to a robust political movement at U.S. colleges.

Dec. 7, 2023

In January, protesters from Writers Against the War on Gaza disrupted a PEN America event in Los Angeles featuring actor Mayim Bialik, who supports Israel and opposes a cease-fire. Last month, the Jewish Book Council, a nonprofit that promotes Jewish writers and stories, launched an initiative for authors, publishers, agents and others to report antisemitic incidents in the world of publishing — from “getting review-bombed because their book includes Jewish content” to “threats of intimidation and violence.”

For many activists, giving voice to opposing points of view or conveying empathy for Israeli victims of Hamas amounts to both-sidesism that glosses over power imbalances. Israel says that Hamas killed about 1,200 people on Oct. 7, prompting an invasion that authorities in Gaza say has killed more than 31,000 people.

On X, Guernica’s former fiction editor, Ishita Marwah, slammed Chen’s essay as a “rank piece of genocide apologia” and condemned Guernica as “a pillar of eugenicist white colonialism masquerading as goodness.”

Grace Loh Prasad, a Taiwanese-born writer based in the Bay Area who published an excerpt of her new memoir in Guernica last week, wrote : “I am alarmed & upset that my writing has appeared alongside an essay that attempts to convey empathy for a colonizing, genocidal power.”

Hua Xi, Guernica’s former interviews editor, singled out a passage in which Chen describes a neighbor telling her she tried to calm her children who were frightened by the sound of military planes flying over their house: I tell them these are good booms.

Chen writes: “ She grimaced, and I understood the subtext, that the Israeli army was bombing Gaza.”

For Xi, quoting an Israeli calling bombs “good booms” undermines Guernica’s “premise that they are holding space for Palestinian writers.”

Rather than just disagree, these activists are calling for the silencing of voices they view as harmful.

On social media, an activist accused Chen of “both-sidesing genocide.” Another condemned Chen, who was born in Britain and moved to Israel with her parents when she was 16, as “a settler who has settler genocidal friends and raised settler genocidal children.”

‘This is not a pro-Hamas protest’: Palestinian Americans fight charges of antisemitism

The Palestinian cause has never had so much support. But some Palestinian Americans say the movement has a messaging problem.

Dec. 21, 2023

Established in 2004 amid the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Guernica was founded as an unabashedly antiwar, anti-imperialist publication, according to one of its founders, Josh Jones.

The journal took its name from a Lower East Side bar where two of the founders participated in a reading series, and Picasso’s iconic painting depicting the horror of the 1937 bombing of the Basque town in northern Spain.

Guernica’s leaders did not always agree on what it meant to be antiwar — particularly as a growing wave of pro-Palestinian activists called for not platforming pro-Israeli voices.

Sastry wrote on X that over the last few months she urged Guernica’s leaders to “commit to cultural boycotts” organized by pro-Palestinian activists. They disagreed, she wrote, telling staff in an email that “Guernica’s political projects can be found in what we publish.”

For the record:

8:23 a.m. March 13, 2024 An earlier version of this article said Madhuri Sastry flagged concerns about a Joanna Chen story published in Guernica’s “Voices on Palestine” compilation. The story was published but not included in the collection.

But Sastry did not always like what the magazine published. Even before this week, she said, she raised concerns about a previous story by Chen that was being considered for the magazine’s “Voices on Palestine” compilation. It was ultimately excluded.

At the same time, Guernica’s editors received complaints that their magazine lacked a complexity of voices and was too pro-Palestinian.

Emily Fox Kaplan, an essayist and journalist who is Jewish and has written for Guernica since 2020, wrote on X that “the only mistake Guernica made was not publishing a wide variety of voices” on the Israel-Palestinian issue “from day one.”

“The problem, when it really comes down to it, is that it presents an Israeli as human,” Kaplan wrote of Chen’s essay. “The people who are losing their minds about this want to believe that there are no civilians in Israel. They want a simple good guys/bad guys binary, and this creates cognitive dissonance.”

Other writers accused activists who attacked Chen’s essay of “bareknuckled antisemitism” and Guernica of “ taking its cue from Joe McCarthy and MAGA book burners .”

“God forbid someone might think Israelis are complex human beings, and not just demons,” said Lahav Harkov, a senior political correspondent at Jewish Insider.

The antisemitic cartoon roiling Harvard? It’s not the first time it caused a firestorm

Activists set out to highlight the links between Black and Palestinian liberation. They dredged up a historic dispute over an antisemitic cartoon.

Feb. 23, 2024

Chen said in her statement to The Times that she did not realize the essay was sparking more than usual criticism until Saturday evening when a friend texted to alert her that one of the Guernica editors had resigned. She reached out to the editor in chief that evening and they spoke briefly Sunday morning.

“Since then, nothing,” she said.

“Guernica claims to be ‘a home for singular voices, incisive ideas, and critical questions’ but apparently there is no longer space in this home for a real conversation,” Chen said. “But I do not regard this as a missed opportunity: my words are being read and the door is still, in fact, open.”

Her essay, which is available on the Internet archive , Wayback Machine, offers a personal account of living in Israel before and after Oct. 7.

She wrote that she struggled to assimilate when she moved to Israel. Two years later, at 18, she chose not to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. Besides her volunteer work with Road to Recovery, which provides transportation for Palestinian children to hospitals, she describes donating blood to the people of Gaza. She also translated and edited the poems of Palestinian poets, believing their voices were “just as important” as the voices she translated from Hebrew.

After Oct. 7, Chen wrote, “I listened to interviews with survivors; I watched videos of atrocities committed by Hamas in southern Israel and reports about the rising number of innocent civilians killed in a devastated Gaza.”

She described holding a space in her mind for the victims in both Israel and Gaza: “At night, I lay in bed on my back in the dark, listening to rain against the window. I wondered if the Israeli hostages underground, the children and women, had any way of knowing the weather had turned cold, and I thought of the people of Gaza, the children and women, huddled inside tents supplied by the UN or looking for shelter.”

When a fellow volunteer expressed anger that Palestinians she had helped did not reach out after Oct. 7, Chen did not take sides.

“The Palestinians in the West Bank were struggling with their own problems: closure, the inability to work, the threat of widescale arrests being made by the Israeli army, and harassment by settlers,” she wrote. “No one was safe.”

Two weeks after Oct. 7, Chen writes, she resumed volunteering for Road to Recovery, ignoring her family’s fears for her safety, and drove a Palestinian boy and his father to an Israeli hospital. When they exited her car and the child’s father thanked her, she wrote, she wanted to tell him: “ No, thank you for trusting me with your child. Thank you for reminding me that we can still find empathy and love in this broken world.”

For activists who object to the very existence of Israel, Chen’s liberal framing — and refusal to take a stance — is inherently problematic: They say that the focus on finding empathy and love in a broken world ultimately justifies the status quo.

In her critique of the essay, April Zhu, former senior editor for interviews, wrote the essay starts “from a place that ostensibly acknowledges the ‘shared humanity’ of Palestinians and Israelis, yet fails or refuses to trace the shape of power — in this case, a violent, imperialist, colonial power — that makes the systematic and historic dehumanization of Palestinians ... a non-issue.”

Some argued that Chen’s liberal perspective was more problematic than any conservative voice.

“I find open warmongering less nauseating than this sort of self-pitying faux-bleeding heart claptrap,” wrote an independent filmmaker from L.A. “The fascist propagandist is at least honest. The liberal propagandist never shuts up about how tormented they are by the terrible *complexity* of it all. Get over yourself.”

More to Read

Letters to the Editor: ‘War is hell’ is an awful excuse to keep killing Palestinians

Feb. 29, 2024

Opinion: How the fight against antisemitism is now used to promote an ‘anti-woke’ agenda

Jan. 24, 2024

Israel’s media mostly keep Gaza’s human toll out of sight

Start your day right

Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Jenny Jarvie is a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times based in Atlanta.

More From the Los Angeles Times

What is Ramadan and how do Muslims observe the Islamic holy month?

March 15, 2024

The first ship to use a new sea route delivers aid to Gaza, Israeli military says

Proposed U.S. resolution would back global efforts for an immediate and sustained cease-fire in Gaza

Biden backs Schumer after senator calls for new elections in Israel

Why the ‘colorblindness’ movement is peaking now

It is very much worth reading Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay for the New York Times Magazine exploring the emergence of what she calls the “colorblindness” trap. It’s a reference to an increasingly common — and effective — rejoinder to programs meant to combat racial discrimination: Why aren’t we, instead, enforcing a colorblind society? Often, this argument has as its central component the Martin Luther King Jr. quote about people being judged by the content of their character — a quote that, as Hannah-Jones notes, plucks one particularly palatable cherry from King’s orchard of advocacy for addressing discrimination and discriminatory systems.

Hannah-Jones tracks the half-century during which this counterargument’s potency has grown, from the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke to the political rhetoric of the moment. Or, really, how the argument is a continuation of an eternal tension in the United States.

At times, often following “violent upheavals,” she writes, “enough white people in power embraced the idea that racial subordination is antidemocratic and so the United States must counter its legacy of racial caste not with a mandated racial neutrality or colorblindness but with sweeping race-specific laws and policies to help bring about Black equality. Yet any attempt to manufacture equality by the same means that this society manufactured inequality has faced fierce and powerful resistance.”

So it’s worth asking: Why, besides the fact that there’s been a concerted effort over decades to unwind programs meant to address historic discrimination, has the trap Hannah-Jones identifies been sprung now?

Sign up for the How to Read This Chart newsletter

Hannah-Jones’s presentation depends on the reader accepting the existence of ingrained patterns that for centuries have disadvantaged Black Americans — more specifically, those whose ancestors were enslaved. That is: the existence of systemic racism. She describes how racism survived direct efforts to combat it during the civil rights era.

“Systems constructed and enforced over centuries to subjugate enslaved people and their descendants based on race no longer needed race-based laws to sustain them,” Hannah-Jones writes. “Racial caste was so entrenched, so intertwined with American institutions, that without race-based counteraction, it would inevitably self-replicate.”

Here we see one of the reasons that the question of addressing historic discrimination is so aggressively contested in the moment: Acceptance of this idea is now polarized on partisan lines.

The General Social Survey (GSS) has asked Americans since the 1970s whether they believed that the differences in economic status between Black and White Americans were mostly due to discrimination. Before 2000, at which point the GSS adopted a more expansive way to record race, White Democrats were slightly more likely to attribute the differences to discrimination than were White Republicans. (Both groups were less likely to believe it than Black Americans.) Then, after 2014, belief that social differences were due to discrimination soared — particularly among White Democrats.

Why? Almost certainly because of the Black Lives Matter movement, which brought enormous attention to the issue of systemic racism. But that movement — which itself quickly became polarized on partisan lines — did not have the same observable effect on White Republicans. In fact, they are less likely to say they think Black Americans are primarily disadvantaged by discrimination than they were in the 1980s.

This is a central issue for the question of affirmative action programs, of course. Hannah-Jones notes that the intent of such programs was to address long-standing discriminatory practices. Her essay includes the famous Lyndon B. Johnson quote: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” But those efforts have been reframed as being centrally about race, not historic disadvantages, because race was for so long a useful proxy for those disadvantages.

It no longer is.

I looked at historic Census Bureau data on race as I was writing my 2023 book and summarized the shift in the non-White population of the United States like so:

“In 1960, before immigration laws were loosened, more than 94 percent of non-White U.S. residents were Black — though this was also before Hispanic ethnicity was separated from the overall White category. In 1970, 2 in 3 non-Whites (a group now including Hispanics) were Black (including Black Hispanics). By 2010, though, when Obama was president, only about a third of non-White residents were Black. By 2020, that density had fallen under 3 in 10.”

This is a reason the GSS changed how it records race: Its old process for categorizing race as White/Black/Other was no longer sufficient.

This evolution in America’s demographic composition is a central aspect of the movement Hannah-Jones describes. In part, that’s because, as she puts it, “institutions have treated affirmative-action programs as a means of achieving visual diversity,” emphasis added. The programs often drifted from being centered on addressing discrimination and injustice to more broadly focusing on representation. The disadvantages that are downstream from enslavement were submerged. Experiences with discrimination lost some differentiation.

The demographic evolution is also central, though, because it overlaps with a strong sense among White Americans that the country is changing away from them. The country is growing more diverse, and more quickly among younger generations. Older White Americans — who are more likely to be Republican than other populations — see the country changing literally as they read about it changing demographically. “Make America great again” is, in part, an unsubtle response to that change.

So we see that Republicans (the vast majority of whom are White) generally agree that racism against Black Americans used to be a problem — but that more of them now think racism against White Americans is a problem.

More Republicans think racism against White people is a problem than think that racism against Black, Latino or Asian Americans is.

This is a manifestation of the success of the movement Hannah-Jones is talking about. White Republicans think that systems are arrayed against them more than against historically disadvantaged groups. The effort by Black Lives Matter to elevate systemic racism heightened this sense of aggrievement rather than easing it, thanks largely to the utility for Republican leaders of casting BLM as a political foil.

A decade ago, the Republican Party arrived at a crossroads. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 and, more so, his reelection four years later seemed to augur the arrival of a new, diverse, Democratic coalition. In considering how the GOP failed to regain the White House in 2012, the party compiled a report of recommendations. Among them: better outreach to Black, Hispanic and Asian voters. When the party fared unexpectedly poorly in the 2022 midterms, RNC cChair Ronna McDaniel assembled an advisory council tasked, among other things, with the same desired outcome.

But that was just one path. Donald Trump chose the other path, elevating White grievance and concerns about “reverse racism,” a more rhetorically pointed version of the “colorblindness” argument. A sense that Whites were being left behind was a better predictor of primary support for Trump in 2016 than economic insecurity. And that approach from Trump continues. After he recently triggered the ouster of McDaniel, the party spiked its minority outreach program . In recent years, the argument seems to be, the GOP is faring better with Black and Hispanic voters regardless.

Hannah-Jones quotes University of California at Berkeley professor Ian Haney López.

“This rhetoric is a massive fraud, because it claims colorblindness toward race but is actually designed to stimulate hyper-race-consciousness among white people,” Haney López said. “That strategy has worked.”

Trump’s ascent seems like obvious evidence of that effect. His rise, in fact, is inextricable from the patterns to which Hannah-Jones points, including the backlash against programs meant to address historic injustice and changing demography. The trend existed before 2016, as she writes. But it’s not a coincidence that both he and the backlash are seeing success at the same time.

The Philippines economy in 2024: Stronger for longer?

The Philippines ended 2023 on a high note, being the fastest growing economy across Southeast Asia with a growth rate of 5.6 percent—just shy of the government's target of 6.0 to 7.0 percent. 1 “National accounts,” Philippine Statistics Authority, January 31, 2024; "Philippine economic updates,” Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, November 16, 2023. Should projections hold, the Philippines is expected to, once again, show significant growth in 2024, demonstrating its resilience despite various global economic pressures (Exhibit 1). 2 “Economic forecast 2024,” International Monetary Fund, November 1, 2023; McKinsey analysis.

The growth in the Philippine economy in 2023 was driven by a resumption in commercial activities, public infrastructure spending, and growth in digital financial services. Most sectors grew, with transportation and storage (13 percent), construction (9 percent), and financial services (9 percent), performing the best (Exhibit 2). 3 “National accounts,” Philippine Statistics Authority, January 31, 2024. While the country's trade deficit narrowed in 2023, it remains elevated at $52 billion due to slowing global demand and geopolitical uncertainties. 4 “Highlights of the Philippine export and import statistics,” Philippine Statistics Authority, January 28, 2024. Looking ahead to 2024, the current economic forecast for the Philippines projects a GDP growth of between 5 and 6 percent.

Inflation rates are expected to temper between 3.2 and 3.6 percent in 2024 after ending 2023 at 6.0 percent, above the 2.0 to 4.0 percent target range set by the government. 5 “Nomura downgrades Philippine 2024 growth forecast,” Nomura, September 11, 2023; “IMF raises Philippine growth rate forecast,” International Monetary Fund, July 16, 2023.

For the purposes of this article, most of the statistics used for our analysis have come from a common thread of sources. These include the Central Bank of the Philippines (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas); the Department of Energy Philippines; the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP); and the Philippines Statistics Authority.

The state of the Philippine economy across seven major sectors and themes

In the article, we explore the 2024 outlook for seven key sectors and themes, what may affect each of them in the coming year, and what could potentially unlock continued growth.

Financial services

The recovery of the financial services sector appears on track as year-on-year growth rates stabilize. 6 Philippines Statistics Authority, November 2023; McKinsey in partnership with Oxford Economics, November 2023. In 2024, this sector will likely continue to grow, though at a slower pace of about 5 percent.

Financial inclusion and digitalization are contributing to growth in this sector in 2024, even if new challenges emerge. Various factors are expected to impact this sector:

• Inclusive finance: Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas continues to invest in financial inclusion initiatives. For example, basic deposit accounts (BDAs) reached $22 million in 2023 and banking penetration improved, with the proportion of adults with formal bank accounts increasing from 29 percent in 2019 to 56 percent in 2021. 7 “Financial inclusion dashboard: First quarter 2023,” Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, February 6, 2024.
• Digital adoption: Digital channels are expected to continue to grow, with data showing that 60 percent of adults who have a mobile phone and internet access have done a digital financial transaction. 8 “Financial inclusion dashboard: First quarter 2023,” Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, February 6, 2024. Businesses in this sector, however, will need to remain vigilant in navigating cybersecurity and fraud risks.
• Unsecured lending growth: Growth in unsecured lending is expected to continue, but at a slower pace than the past two to three years. For example, unsecured retail lending for the banking system alone grew by 27 percent annually from 2020 to 2022. 9 “Loan accounts: As of first quarter 2023,” Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, February 6, 2024; "Global banking pools,” McKinsey, November 2023. Businesses in this field are, however, expected to recalibrate their risk profiling models as segments with high nonperforming loans emerge.
• High interest rates: Key interest rates are expected to decline in the second half of 2024, creating more accommodating borrowing conditions that could boost wholesale and corporate loans.

Supportive frameworks have a pivotal role to play in unlocking growth in this sector to meet the ever-increasing demand from the financially underserved. For example, financial literacy programs and easier-to-access accounts—such as BDAs—are some measures that can help widen market access to financial services. Continued efforts are being made to build an open finance framework that could serve the needs of the unbanked population, as well as a unified credit scoring mechanism to increase the ability of historically under-financed segments, such as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), to access formal credit. 10 “BSP launches credit scoring model,” Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, April 26, 2023.

Energy and Power

The outlook for the energy sector seems positive, with the potential to grow by 7 percent in 2024 as the country focuses on renewable energy generation. 11 McKinsey analysis based on input from industry experts. Currently, stakeholders are focused on increasing energy security, particularly on importing liquefied natural gas (LNG) to meet power plants’ requirements as production in one of the country’s main sources of natural gas, the Malampaya gas field, declines. 12 Myrna M. Velasco, “Malampaya gas field prod’n declines steeply in 2021,” Manila Bulletin , July 9, 2022. High global inflation and the fact that the Philippines is a net fuel importer are impacting electricity prices and the build-out of planned renewable energy projects. Recent regulatory moves to remove foreign ownership limits on exploration, development, and utilization of renewable energy resources could possibly accelerate growth in the country’s energy and power sector. 13 “RA 11659,” Department of Energy Philippines, June 8, 2023.

Gas, renewables, and transmission are potential growth drivers for the sector. Upgrading power grids so that they become more flexible and better able to cope with the intermittent electricity supply that comes with renewables will be critical as the sector pivots toward renewable energy. A recent coal moratorium may position natural gas as a transition fuel—this could stimulate exploration and production investments for new, indigenous natural gas fields, gas pipeline infrastructure, and LNG import terminal projects. 14 Philippine energy plan 2020–2040, Department of Energy Philippines, June 10, 2022; Power development plan 2020–2040 , Department of Energy Philippines, 2021. The increasing momentum of green energy auctions could facilitate the development of renewables at scale, as the country targets 35 percent share of renewables by 2030. 15 Power development plan 2020–2040 , 2022.

Growth in the healthcare industry may slow to 2.8 percent in 2024, while pharmaceuticals manufacturing is expected to rebound with 5.2 percent growth in 2024. 16 McKinsey analysis in partnership with Oxford Economics.

Healthcare demand could grow, although the quality of care may be strained as the health worker shortage is projected to increase over the next five years. 17 McKinsey analysis. The supply-and-demand gap in nursing alone is forecast to reach a shortage of approximately 90,000 nurses by 2028. 18 McKinsey analysis. Another compounding factor straining healthcare is the higher than anticipated benefit utilization and rising healthcare costs, which, while helping to meet people's healthcare budgets, may continue to drive down profitability for health insurers.

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies are feeling varying effects of people becoming increasingly health conscious. Consumers are using more over the counter (OTC) medication and placing more beneficial value on organic health products, such as vitamins and supplements made from natural ingredients, which could impact demand for prescription drugs. 19 “Consumer health in the Philippines 2023,” Euromonitor, October 2023.

Businesses operating in this field may end up benefiting from universal healthcare policies. If initiatives are implemented that integrate healthcare systems, rationalize copayments, attract and retain talent, and incentivize investments, they could potentially help to strengthen healthcare provision and quality.

Businesses may also need to navigate an increasingly complex landscape of diverse health needs, digitization, and price controls. Digital and data transformations are being seen to facilitate improvements in healthcare delivery and access, with leading digital health apps getting more than one million downloads. 20 Google Play Store, September 27, 2023. Digitization may create an opportunity to develop healthcare ecosystems that unify touchpoints along the patient journey and provide offline-to-online care, as well as potentially realizing cost efficiencies.

Consumer and retail

Growth in the retail and wholesale trade and consumer goods sectors is projected to remain stable in 2024, at 4 percent and 5 percent, respectively.

Inflation, however, continues to put consumers under pressure. While inflation rates may fall—predicted to reach 4 percent in 2024—commodity prices may still remain elevated in the near term, a top concern for Filipinos. 21 “IMF raises Philippine growth forecast,” July 26, 2023; “Nomura downgrades Philippines 2024 growth forecast,” September 11, 2023. In response to challenging economic conditions, 92 percent of consumers have changed their shopping behaviors, and approximately 50 percent indicate that they are switching brands or retail providers in seek of promotions and better prices. 22 “Philippines consumer pulse survey, 2023,” McKinsey, November 2023.

Online shopping has become entrenched in Filipino consumers, as they find that they get access to a wider range of products, can compare prices more easily, and can shop with more convenience. For example, a McKinsey Philippines consumer sentiment survey in 2023 found that 80 percent of respondents, on average, use online and omnichannel to purchase footwear, toys, baby supplies, apparel, and accessories. To capture the opportunity that this shift in Filipino consumer preferences brings and to unlock growth in this sector, retail organizations could turn to omnichannel strategies to seamlessly integrate online and offline channels. Businesses may need to explore investments that increase resilience across the supply chain, alongside researching and developing new products that serve emerging consumer preferences, such as that for natural ingredients and sustainable sources.

Manufacturing

Manufacturing is a key contributor to the Philippine economy, contributing approximately 19 percent of GDP in 2022, employing about 7 percent of the country’s labor force, and growing in line with GDP at approximately 6 percent between 2023 and 2024. 23 McKinsey analysis based on input from industry experts.

Some changes could be seen in 2024 that might affect the sector moving forward. The focus toward building resilient supply chains and increasing self-sufficiency is growing. The Philippines also is likely to benefit from increasing regional trade, as well as the emerging trend of nearshoring or onshoring as countries seek to make their supply chains more resilient. With semiconductors driving approximately 45 percent of Philippine exports, the transfer of knowledge and technology, as well as the development of STEM capabilities, could help attract investments into the sector and increase the relevance of the country as a manufacturing hub. 24 McKinsey analysis based on input from industry experts.

To secure growth, public and private sector support could bolster investments in R&D and upskill the labor force. In addition, strategies to attract investment may be integral to the further development of supply chain infrastructure and manufacturing bases. Government programs to enable digital transformation and R&D, along with a strategic approach to upskilling the labor force, could help boost industry innovation in line with Industry 4.0 demand. 25 Industry 4.0 is also referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Priority products to which manufacturing industries could pivot include more complex, higher value chain electronic components in the semiconductor segment; generic OTC drugs and nature-based pharmaceuticals in the pharmaceutical sector; and, for green industries, products such as EVs, batteries, solar panels, and biomass production.

Information technology business process outsourcing

The information technology business process outsourcing (IT-BPO) sector is on track to reach its long-term targets, with $38 billion in forecast revenues in 2024. 26 Khriscielle Yalao, “WHF flexibility key to achieving growth targets—IBPAP,” Manila Bulletin , January 23, 2024. Emerging innovations in service delivery and work models are being observed, which could drive further growth in the sector.

The industry continues to outperform headcount and revenue targets, shaping its position as a country leader for employment and services. 27 McKinsey analysis based in input from industry experts. Demand from global companies for offshoring is expected to increase, due to cost containment strategies and preference for Philippine IT-BPO providers. New work setups continue to emerge, ranging from remote-first to office-first, which could translate to potential net benefits. These include a 10 to 30 percent increase in employee retention; a three- to four-hour reduction in commute times; an increase in enabled talent of 350,000; and a potential reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 1.4 to 1.5 million tons of CO 2 per year. 28 McKinsey analysis based in input from industry experts. It is becoming increasingly more important that the IT-BPO sector adapts to new technologies as businesses begin to harness automation and generative AI (gen AI) to unlock productivity.

Talent and technology are clear areas where growth in this sector can be unlocked. The growing complexity of offshoring requirements necessitates building a proper talent hub to help bridge employee gaps and better match local talent to employers’ needs. Businesses in the industry could explore developing facilities and digital infrastructure to enable industry expansion outside the metros, especially in future “digital cities” nationwide. Introducing new service areas could capture latent demand from existing clients with evolving needs as well as unserved clients. BPO centers could explore the potential of offering higher-value services by cultivating technology-focused capabilities, such as using gen AI to unlock revenue, deliver sales excellence, and reduce general administrative costs.

Sustainability

The Philippines is considered to be the fourth most vulnerable country to climate change in the world as, due to its geographic location, the country has a higher risk of exposure to natural disasters, such as rising sea levels. 29 “The Philippines has been ranked the fourth most vulnerable country to climate change,” Global Climate Risk Index, January 2021. Approximately $3.2 billion, on average, in economic loss could occur annually because of natural disasters over the next five decades, translating to up to 7 to 8 percent of the country’s nominal GDP. 30 “The Philippines has been ranked the fourth most vulnerable country to climate change,” Global Climate Risk Index, January 2021.

The Philippines could capitalize on five green growth opportunities to operate in global value chains and catalyze growth for the nation:

• Renewable energy: The country could aim to generate 50 percent of its energy from renewables by 2040, building on its high renewable energy potential and the declining cost of producing renewable energy.
• Solar photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing: More than a twofold increase in annual output from 2023 to 2030 could be achieved, enabled by lower production costs.
• Battery production: The Philippines could aim for a $1.5 billion domestic market by 2030, capitalizing on its vast nickel reserves (the second largest globally). 31 “MineSpans,” McKinsey, November 2023.
• Electric mobility: Electric vehicles could account for 15 percent of the country’s vehicle sales by 2030 (from less than 1 percent currently), driven by incentives, local distribution, and charging infrastructure. 32 McKinsey analysis based on input from industry experts.
• Nature-based solutions: The country’s largely untapped total abatement potential could reach up to 200 to 300 metric tons of CO 2 , enabled by its biodiversity and strong demand.

The Philippine economy: Three scenarios for growth

Having grown faster than other economies in Southeast Asia in 2023 to end the year with 5.6 percent growth, the Philippines can expect a similarly healthy growth outlook for 2024. Based on our analysis, there are three potential scenarios for the country’s growth. 33 McKinsey analysis in partnership with Oxford Economics.

Slower growth: The first scenario projects GDP growth of 4.8 percent if there are challenging conditions—such as declining trade and accelerated inflation—which could keep key policy rates high at about 6.5 percent and dampen private consumption, leading to slower long-term growth.

Soft landing: The second scenario projects GDP growth of 5.2 percent if inflation moderates and global conditions turn out to be largely favorable due to a stable investment environment and regional trade demand.

Accelerated growth: In the third scenario, GDP growth is projected to reach 6.1 percent if inflation slows and public policies accommodate aspects such as loosening key policy rates and offering incentive programs to boost productivity.

Focusing on factors that could unlock growth in its seven critical sectors and themes, while adapting to the macro-economic scenario that plays out, would allow the Philippines to materialize its growth potential in 2024 and take steps towards achieving longer-term, sustainable economic growth.

Jon Canto is a partner in McKinsey’s Manila office, where Frauke Renz is an associate partner, and Vicah Villanueva is a consultant.

The authors wish to thank Charlene Chua, Charlie del Rosario, Ryan delos Reyes, Debadrita Dhara, Evelyn C. Fong, Krzysztof Kwiatkowski, Frances Lee, Aaron Ong, and Liane Tan for their contributions to this article.

Explore a career with us

Related articles.

The Philippines Growth Dialogues

What does 2023 hold for the Philippines’ economy?

On the verge of a digital banking revolution in the Philippines

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, generate accurate citations for free.

• Knowledge Base
• The four main types of essay | Quick guide with examples

The Four Main Types of Essay | Quick Guide with Examples

Published on September 4, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

An essay is a focused piece of writing designed to inform or persuade. There are many different types of essay, but they are often defined in four categories: argumentative, expository, narrative, and descriptive essays.

Argumentative and expository essays are focused on conveying information and making clear points, while narrative and descriptive essays are about exercising creativity and writing in an interesting way. At university level, argumentative essays are the most common type. 

In high school and college, you will also often have to write textual analysis essays, which test your skills in close reading and interpretation.

Instantly correct all language mistakes in your text

Upload your document to correct all your mistakes in minutes

Table of contents

Argumentative essays, expository essays, narrative essays, descriptive essays, textual analysis essays, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about types of essays.

An argumentative essay presents an extended, evidence-based argument. It requires a strong thesis statement —a clearly defined stance on your topic. Your aim is to convince the reader of your thesis using evidence (such as quotations ) and analysis.

Argumentative essays test your ability to research and present your own position on a topic. This is the most common type of essay at college level—most papers you write will involve some kind of argumentation.

The essay is divided into an introduction, body, and conclusion:

• The introduction provides your topic and thesis statement
• The body presents your evidence and arguments
• The conclusion summarizes your argument and emphasizes its importance

The example below is a paragraph from the body of an argumentative essay about the effects of the internet on education. Mouse over it to learn more.

A common frustration for teachers is students’ use of Wikipedia as a source in their writing. Its prevalence among students is not exaggerated; a survey found that the vast majority of the students surveyed used Wikipedia (Head & Eisenberg, 2010). An article in The Guardian stresses a common objection to its use: “a reliance on Wikipedia can discourage students from engaging with genuine academic writing” (Coomer, 2013). Teachers are clearly not mistaken in viewing Wikipedia usage as ubiquitous among their students; but the claim that it discourages engagement with academic sources requires further investigation. This point is treated as self-evident by many teachers, but Wikipedia itself explicitly encourages students to look into other sources. Its articles often provide references to academic publications and include warning notes where citations are missing; the site’s own guidelines for research make clear that it should be used as a starting point, emphasizing that users should always “read the references and check whether they really do support what the article says” (“Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia,” 2020). Indeed, for many students, Wikipedia is their first encounter with the concepts of citation and referencing. The use of Wikipedia therefore has a positive side that merits deeper consideration than it often receives.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

An expository essay provides a clear, focused explanation of a topic. It doesn’t require an original argument, just a balanced and well-organized view of the topic.

Expository essays test your familiarity with a topic and your ability to organize and convey information. They are commonly assigned at high school or in exam questions at college level.

The introduction of an expository essay states your topic and provides some general background, the body presents the details, and the conclusion summarizes the information presented.

A typical body paragraph from an expository essay about the invention of the printing press is shown below. Mouse over it to learn more.

The invention of the printing press in 1440 changed this situation dramatically. Johannes Gutenberg, who had worked as a goldsmith, used his knowledge of metals in the design of the press. He made his type from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony, whose durability allowed for the reliable production of high-quality books. This new technology allowed texts to be reproduced and disseminated on a much larger scale than was previously possible. The Gutenberg Bible appeared in the 1450s, and a large number of printing presses sprang up across the continent in the following decades. Gutenberg’s invention rapidly transformed cultural production in Europe; among other things, it would lead to the Protestant Reformation.

A narrative essay is one that tells a story. This is usually a story about a personal experience you had, but it may also be an imaginative exploration of something you have not experienced.

Narrative essays test your ability to build up a narrative in an engaging, well-structured way. They are much more personal and creative than other kinds of academic writing . Writing a personal statement for an application requires the same skills as a narrative essay.

A narrative essay isn’t strictly divided into introduction, body, and conclusion, but it should still begin by setting up the narrative and finish by expressing the point of the story—what you learned from your experience, or why it made an impression on you.

Mouse over the example below, a short narrative essay responding to the prompt “Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself,” to explore its structure.

Since elementary school, I have always favored subjects like science and math over the humanities. My instinct was always to think of these subjects as more solid and serious than classes like English. If there was no right answer, I thought, why bother? But recently I had an experience that taught me my academic interests are more flexible than I had thought: I took my first philosophy class.

Before I entered the classroom, I was skeptical. I waited outside with the other students and wondered what exactly philosophy would involve—I really had no idea. I imagined something pretty abstract: long, stilted conversations pondering the meaning of life. But what I got was something quite different.

A young man in jeans, Mr. Jones—“but you can call me Rob”—was far from the white-haired, buttoned-up old man I had half-expected. And rather than pulling us into pedantic arguments about obscure philosophical points, Rob engaged us on our level. To talk free will, we looked at our own choices. To talk ethics, we looked at dilemmas we had faced ourselves. By the end of class, I’d discovered that questions with no right answer can turn out to be the most interesting ones.

The experience has taught me to look at things a little more “philosophically”—and not just because it was a philosophy class! I learned that if I let go of my preconceptions, I can actually get a lot out of subjects I was previously dismissive of. The class taught me—in more ways than one—to look at things with an open mind.

A descriptive essay provides a detailed sensory description of something. Like narrative essays, they allow you to be more creative than most academic writing, but they are more tightly focused than narrative essays. You might describe a specific place or object, rather than telling a whole story.

Descriptive essays test your ability to use language creatively, making striking word choices to convey a memorable picture of what you’re describing.

A descriptive essay can be quite loosely structured, though it should usually begin by introducing the object of your description and end by drawing an overall picture of it. The important thing is to use careful word choices and figurative language to create an original description of your object.

Mouse over the example below, a response to the prompt “Describe a place you love to spend time in,” to learn more about descriptive essays.

On Sunday afternoons I like to spend my time in the garden behind my house. The garden is narrow but long, a corridor of green extending from the back of the house, and I sit on a lawn chair at the far end to read and relax. I am in my small peaceful paradise: the shade of the tree, the feel of the grass on my feet, the gentle activity of the fish in the pond beside me.

My cat crosses the garden nimbly and leaps onto the fence to survey it from above. From his perch he can watch over his little kingdom and keep an eye on the neighbours. He does this until the barking of next door’s dog scares him from his post and he bolts for the cat flap to govern from the safety of the kitchen.

With that, I am left alone with the fish, whose whole world is the pond by my feet. The fish explore the pond every day as if for the first time, prodding and inspecting every stone. I sometimes feel the same about sitting here in the garden; I know the place better than anyone, but whenever I return I still feel compelled to pay attention to all its details and novelties—a new bird perched in the tree, the growth of the grass, and the movement of the insects it shelters…

Sitting out in the garden, I feel serene. I feel at home. And yet I always feel there is more to discover. The bounds of my garden may be small, but there is a whole world contained within it, and it is one I will never get tired of inhabiting.

Here's why students love Scribbr's proofreading services

Discover proofreading & editing

Though every essay type tests your writing skills, some essays also test your ability to read carefully and critically. In a textual analysis essay, you don’t just present information on a topic, but closely analyze a text to explain how it achieves certain effects.

Rhetorical analysis

A rhetorical analysis looks at a persuasive text (e.g. a speech, an essay, a political cartoon) in terms of the rhetorical devices it uses, and evaluates their effectiveness.

The goal is not to state whether you agree with the author’s argument but to look at how they have constructed it.

The introduction of a rhetorical analysis presents the text, some background information, and your thesis statement; the body comprises the analysis itself; and the conclusion wraps up your analysis of the text, emphasizing its relevance to broader concerns.

The example below is from a rhetorical analysis of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech . Mouse over it to learn more.

King’s speech is infused with prophetic language throughout. Even before the famous “dream” part of the speech, King’s language consistently strikes a prophetic tone. He refers to the Lincoln Memorial as a “hallowed spot” and speaks of rising “from the dark and desolate valley of segregation” to “make justice a reality for all of God’s children.” The assumption of this prophetic voice constitutes the text’s strongest ethical appeal; after linking himself with political figures like Lincoln and the Founding Fathers, King’s ethos adopts a distinctly religious tone, recalling Biblical prophets and preachers of change from across history. This adds significant force to his words; standing before an audience of hundreds of thousands, he states not just what the future should be, but what it will be: “The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.” This warning is almost apocalyptic in tone, though it concludes with the positive image of the “bright day of justice.” The power of King’s rhetoric thus stems not only from the pathos of his vision of a brighter future, but from the ethos of the prophetic voice he adopts in expressing this vision.

Literary analysis

A literary analysis essay presents a close reading of a work of literature—e.g. a poem or novel—to explore the choices made by the author and how they help to convey the text’s theme. It is not simply a book report or a review, but an in-depth interpretation of the text.

Literary analysis looks at things like setting, characters, themes, and figurative language. The goal is to closely analyze what the author conveys and how.

The introduction of a literary analysis essay presents the text and background, and provides your thesis statement; the body consists of close readings of the text with quotations and analysis in support of your argument; and the conclusion emphasizes what your approach tells us about the text.

Mouse over the example below, the introduction to a literary analysis essay on Frankenstein , to learn more.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel. This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as. This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature’s perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume’s narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

College essays

• Choosing Essay Topic
• Write a College Essay
• Write a Diversity Essay
• College Essay Format & Structure
• Comparing and Contrasting in an Essay

 (AI) Tools

• Grammar Checker
• Paraphrasing Tool
• Text Summarizer
• AI Detector
• Plagiarism Checker
• Citation Generator

At high school and in composition classes at university, you’ll often be told to write a specific type of essay , but you might also just be given prompts.

Look for keywords in these prompts that suggest a certain approach: The word “explain” suggests you should write an expository essay , while the word “describe” implies a descriptive essay . An argumentative essay might be prompted with the word “assess” or “argue.”

The vast majority of essays written at university are some sort of argumentative essay . Almost all academic writing involves building up an argument, though other types of essay might be assigned in composition classes.

Essays can present arguments about all kinds of different topics. For example:

• In a literary analysis essay, you might make an argument for a specific interpretation of a text
• In a history essay, you might present an argument for the importance of a particular event
• In a politics essay, you might argue for the validity of a certain political theory

An argumentative essay tends to be a longer essay involving independent research, and aims to make an original argument about a topic. Its thesis statement makes a contentious claim that must be supported in an objective, evidence-based way.

An expository essay also aims to be objective, but it doesn’t have to make an original argument. Rather, it aims to explain something (e.g., a process or idea) in a clear, concise way. Expository essays are often shorter assignments and rely less on research.

The key difference is that a narrative essay is designed to tell a complete story, while a descriptive essay is meant to convey an intense description of a particular place, object, or concept.

Narrative and descriptive essays both allow you to write more personally and creatively than other kinds of essays , and similar writing skills can apply to both.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Caulfield, J. (2023, July 23). The Four Main Types of Essay | Quick Guide with Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved March 15, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/essay-types/

Is this article helpful?

Jack Caulfield

Other students also liked, how to write an argumentative essay | examples & tips, how to write an expository essay, how to write an essay outline | guidelines & examples, what is your plagiarism score.