friendships Essay Examples

How to Write a Good Essay about Friendship

Writing an essay about friendship is one of the most common assignments in both high school and college. The reason is that this topic is so broad and can be approached from so many angles that one can write practically any kind of essay about friendship. For instance, you can write a personal essay about friendship and talk about your best friend or about a more particular instance where you experienced what friendship means. When writing an essay about friendship for your psychology class, you can discuss all the variety of topics related to friendship. If you write for your philosophy class, you can dwell upon friendship as an abstract notion. To help you write an excellent essay about friendship, we have put together some tips and guidelines along with a list of the most popular friendship essay topics.

Friendship Essay Writing Tips

As we have mentioned, friendship is an extremely broad topic – too broad to cover in just one essay. So, you will have to pick a narrower subject. For instance, you can write about how similar or different friendship can be between men and women; you can compare friendship to other feelings, like love; you can go more sophisticated and discuss the role of friendly relations in society, etc. Friendship is something that every one of us has experienced in his or her life. Therefore, anyone will have something personal to say about it. This raises something of a challenge since an essay is an academic paper where the writer should not rely solely on personal opinions and impressions, but should rather stay as objective as possible. Here are some do’s and dont’s:

• DO tell about some of your personal experiences, but DON'T expand too much upon them. Make them brief, and DON'T be tempted to make them even more personal by abusing emotional or colloquial vocabulary.
• DO inform the reader of your standpoint on particular issues, but DON’T go too emotional about insisting on your opinion.
• DO substantiate your opinion with examples, but DON’T make your essay into a list of happenings. Remember that examples are merely illustrations of the point that you want to make.

PERSONAL VS OBJECTIVE

On the one hand, an essay is a piece of academic writing. But on the other hand, friendship is always a personal topic. This is why, when you illustrate your opinion with examples from your personal experience, always make sure that they fit well into the context, i.e., that the connection between the fact that you mention and the point that you want to make is evident. Where possible, be strongly recommended to refer not only to your personal life experiences, but also external sources – such as examples from literature or movies, statistical data, etc. Also, we cannot remind you enough that even when you write about something as personal as friendship, your essay still needs to adhere to the general writing guidelines regarding its structure. Putting it briefly, always keep your reader in mind and make sure that the point(s) that you want to make will come through and be understood by your reader. For this purpose, the essay needs to be both well-structured and captivating.

TOPIC EXAMPLES FOR ESSAYS ABOUT FRIENDSHIP

• How different friendship can be between men and women?
• How can friendship turn into rivalry?
• How friendship can make you vulnerable?
• How I met my best friend
• What makes one a good friend?
• How to preserve your friendship?
• What constitutes a firm friendship?
• Can friendship be based solely on common interests in life?
• Where is it best to make friends?
• What can destroy a friendship – externally or internally?
• Is it healthy to envy our friends?
• Can friendship last an entire life?
• How to behave when a friend reveals an unhealthy obsession with you?
• Why friends sometimes stop respecting each other?
• How not to quarrel with your friends?
• How I spent a perfect day with my best friend(s)
• What makes me and my friend the best friends
• What do we seek in a friendly advice?
• How friends offend each other and how they fix it?
• How different is online friendship from a real-life one?
• Can religion be an obstacle to friendship?

Naturally, this is by no means a full list of possible essays about friendship. If you find that the topics above are too typical and want something more individual and exciting, you are welcome to contact our specialists, and together we are sure to come up with something never seen before!

UNDERSTANDING THE CLASSIFICATION OF ESSAYS ABOUT FRIENDSHIP

The topic of friendship is so broad and multi-layered that it may be a challenge to pick a specific essay topic from such a multitude of exciting variants. To facilitate your choice, you can just look at the assignment more attentively. The very formulation of the assignment usually has a prompt for picking just the right topic. Namely, you should pay attention to what kind of essay you are to write. It is common knowledge that there are different kinds of essays. They differ in their overall purpose, the methods, and approaches that the author employs, their tone and style, etc. So, knowing what kind of essay you are to write will narrow down your choice of topics a great deal. This may sound vague; so, we will take a look at an example. Suppose your task is to write an argumentative essay about friendship. This means that you present your standpoint on a friendship-related issue and substantiate it with arguments. With this in mind, you can have a picture of what you would like to discuss, what arguments you will use, and how you will structure your essay. If your instructor has not specified the type of essay for you to write and left this choice to you, you should know that the principle that we have discussed above works vice versa just as well. Once you know what exactly you want to write about and formulate your essay topic, you also know what exactly you want to bring across to your reader. This way, you know which essay type is best for this purpose. For you to get a clearer idea about the classification of friendship essays, let us take a look at examples within some of the most common friendship essay types:

• narrative essays. You can narrate about something that your best friend has done for you that made you realize how deep your friendship goes or influenced you in any other way. Alternatively, you can narrate about a perfect day that you have spent or would like to spend with your best friend. As in any other narrative essay, pay special attention to minor circumstances and other details and use them to let your reader know how much you cherish these memories and why.
• descriptive essays. As you know, a descriptive essay is about describing. So, the first most obvious choice here is just to describe your best friend. Here, you can highlight his or her nicest traits, as well as some of the more peculiar ones that only a true friend like you can appreciate. Here, it may get quite tempting just to enumerate a person's qualities, but a simple list does not make up an essay. You should dwell on your friend's traits and explain why you value them in him or her.
• definition essays. Here, you define friendship as a whole or any friendship-related concept. Naturally, you don’t need to try and include all the possible viewpoints on such a multi-angled topic. If your reader wanted that, they could simply read a Wikipedia article. Instead, you should remember that it is still your essay, and focus on the aspects that you find particularly interesting and about which you have something to say.

The Writing Process

Students and instructors alike tend to see friendship as arguably the easiest topic to write an essay about, because everyone has had plenty of experience to talk about in this regard. For this reason, there are few materials to aid writing about friendship – both online and offline. This seems unfair, because the topic of friendship is also arguably the broadest one possible, and there are many pitfalls and tempting mistakes. First of all, a student may often think that writing about friendship one can simply tell a story from one’s life. Friendship is a positive thing in our life, so we enjoy talking about how great our friends are and how we value them. An essay, however, is still an academic paper and never equals to a simple life-story. Of course, you are welcome to use real-life examples to illustrate your point, but they alone cannot constitute a solid essay. If you fail to realize this, your writing will be a simple stream of consciousness with little to no academic value. So, you need to remember that you are writing an academic paper and not an exercise in freewriting. The reason why friendship is such a popular topic for various kinds of essays is because it is so broad and gives the opportunity to train the student in academic writing skills without limiting him or her to a specific topic. So basically, you just take the guidelines for a particular kind of essays and "fill" them with what you have to say about your topic. Like any other essay, an essay about friendship will be built according to a three-part structure: introduction, main body, and conclusion. The main body, as one may guess, should be the biggest and the most meaningful part of your essay. This is where you put everything you have to say on the topic. The introduction and the conclusion of your essay are equally important, but you are not to give your reader any new information here. So, they are to be kept as brief as possible; together, they should not exceed 30% of your whole paper. The function of an introduction is to get the reader prepared for what you are about to discuss in the main body, and the conclusion is where you summarize and finalize it. Mind that you don’t need to keep all these guidelines in your head all the time throughout your writing process. You can facilitate it a great deal by penning an outline in advance. Basically, you just make a list of your paragraphs and the main ideas that you will discuss in each paragraph, and you write a few keywords next to each point in your list. This way, you will not overlook them when you move on to actually drafting your essay. These guidelines are not specific for essays about friendship. Quite the contrary, they are used in all kinds of papers, regardless of the topic. However, friendship is the kind of subject where it is easiest to overlook them. So, it is necessary to stress that the three-part structure is a crucial element in writing an essay about friendship.

FORMULATING A FRIENDSHIP ESSAY TITLE

Some students fail to understand the value of an essay title and the difference that it can make. Meanwhile, whenever you are about to read something, you first look at the title, and it is arguably the most important factor that contributes to your opinion on what you are about to read before you even start reading. Failing to understand this, many students see the title as a mere formality and just use the general topic of their essays as the title. You should avoid this by making your friendship essay title accurately reflect its content. Obviously, to achieve this, you should first write your essay, and then move on to composing the title. Only when the essay itself is ready can you pick the title to reflect its main idea, because before that, there is nothing to reflect. So, you put off the title for the last.

BEGINNING TO WRITE

We have already stressed the importance of adhering to the classical essay structure when writing about friendship. One should not see it as a set of restrictions and limitations to one's creative thought. Quite the contrary, following the structure gives you as a writer the sense of direction and saves you from being stranded without knowing what to do and where even to begin. Speaking about essays about friendship, in particular, there are two main approaches – the general and the specific one. In other words, you can either begin with discussing the concept of friendship in general and then substantiate your opinion with more specific evidence, or you can start off with a real-life instance and then deduct your main point from this example. We realize that this may sound vague, so here is a concrete example of how you can start off your essay about friendship: “Friendship” is a very important word for all of us. The concept of friendship roots so deep in our minds that we use this word without even thinking. But how can we be sure that we mean the same thing? What do we mean we pronounce this word?” This would be the more general kind of an introduction to an essay about friendship. It could be used for any type of essay. One can argue that it is generic, but nevertheless, it constitutes an excellent starting point from which you can go further in any direction you like. If you want to start off more specifically, here is another example: "The understanding of friendship is as old as humanity itself. Same as every other aspect of human lives, friendship and its understanding have been evolving throughout the ages. This is the reason why, when one tries to come up with a unique definition, one finds that this challenge is next to impossible. It is, however, easy to see that all understandings of friendship agree that it all comes down to the spiritual side. So, it only makes sense to turn to psychology for answers.” This is an excellent example of an introduction to an essay about friendship. What makes it so excellent is that it immediately informs the reader about what the main body of the essay will discuss. It clearly states that the author will not focus on his or her own experiences with his or her own friends. Instead, a wider topic will be under discussion – the very concept of friendship and the psychological approach to it. Moreover, this introduction ends with a smooth transition to the main body of your essay that will present more information on the topic. This way, you do not need to think too hard about what you will write next and how you will start off the main body of your essay. In general, it is a splendid idea to look through other authors’ essays about friendships to see how they choose to start their essays and how well their introductions work in the context of their essays as a whole. However, if you choose to do so, don’t get carried away. It may be tempting to go investigating other authors’ writings instead of working on your own. To avoid this, you should already have a clear idea of what you are to write about. This way, you will be able to see immediately, whether or not the example that you are looking at is relevant to your work. If it is irrelevant, then you can and should just drop it and move on with your work without wasting any of your precious time and effort.

MOVING ON TO THE MAIN BODY

Once you have put together a brief introducing paragraph that perfectly prepares your reader to your main point(s) and ends with a smooth transition sentence, you should go on to the main body of your essay. The simplest kind of an essay about friendship will have the main body consisting of three paragraphs. Each of these paragraphs will include a statement and a piece of evidence to solidify it. Here is an example of how this principle works: "One can hardly live a full life without having any friends. Of course, nobody lives in isolation, and everybody has some people to socialize with. A friend, however, offers much more – a supportive hand to lean on when necessary." Once again, this is an example for a general-themed essay on friendship. If we continue with the more psychological introduction example, it can transition into the main body paragraph like this: "What does psychology have to say about friendship? In fact, there are several specific definitions of different non-exclusive kinds of friendship. They all use metaphors to explain the side of friendship more precisely. For example, we have “comrade friendship” that puts common interests and activities in the center. There is also “mirror friendship” that implies comparing ourselves to our friend, using them as a tool to self-reflect and know ourselves better. "Compassionate friendship" focuses on empathy and emotional intimacy. Arguably the most popular understanding is the "interlocutor friendship" that revolves around communicating with someone who understands you best. Finally, there is "alter ego friendship" that looks at how people change in the course of their friendship, gaining more likeness to one another."

CONCLUDING YOUR FRIENDSHIP ESSAY

As we have mentioned, the conclusion to your essay should be about as small as your introduction. As a matter of fact, you can easily just paraphrase your introduction, turn it upside down, and make that into your conclusion. However, if you have the time, it is a better idea to write an original conclusion that will finalize the topic in the mind of your reader and leave no further question Here is an example: "Having friends is the key element in our lives. Close friends are the only people with whom we can be ourselves, and thus they are an invaluable help in actually being ourselves. This is made possible through their unconditional love and acceptance.”