The Key Components to a Perfect Essay or Cake: A Metaphor for my Writing Life

When cooking from scratch, you start with so many ingredients but each one plays a major role in the finished product. For instance, if you were to bake a cake the some key ingredients would include flour, sugar,  eggs, and salt.

Now let’s compare each ingredient’s role to the key components of writing an essay.

Flour:

Flour could be represented as the structure of the paper. All the words combined make it possible for it to be considered a paper.  If there was no flour in the cake, the recipe would be liquid. If there was no structure to the paper, there would be random words on a page that made no sense.

Sugar:

Sugar acts as a sweetener to the cake and also improves the crust color. Sugar compares to research that supports my thesis. It makes the paper sweet, indulging and makes you want to keep reading. Researching information that supports my thesis will improve the overall appearance of my paper and make it appealing to interested readers.

Eggs:

When bringing together the thesis, supporting details, and sources, the overall topic of the paper acts as a binding agent, somewhat comparable to eggs. Without a general concept and topic of the paper, there wold be nothing to write about and nothing to bring it all together. Transition words could also be considered a binding agent because they make the paper fluent and ties each paragraph with the next.

Salt:

Every well written argumentative paper includes a rebuttal, the opposing sides argument. The salt acts as the rebuttal in the paper, adding a little bit of bitterness. It’s hard to accept the opposing argument when you feel strongly about something and it’s common feel a sense of bitterness or get “heated.” That’s why I tie salt to the rebuttal, because it makes you feel “salty.”

To conclude my analogy, your finished product should be perfect with the correct balance of each key component. Every essay needs structure, research, an overall topic that flows together and a rebuttal just like how every cake needs flour, sugar, eggs and salt.