Eight-legged essay

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The eight-legged essay (Chinese: 八股文 bāgǔwén) was a style of essay writing that had to be mastered to pass the imperial examinations during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. It is named so because it was divided into eight sections.

It was formulated around a rigid, artificial structure, and tested, among other things, the examinees' knowledge of the Four Books and Five Classics and ability to insert classical allusions and idioms at the places deemed appropriate. The structure of much of the essay included heavy parallelism and redundancy, rhetorical features that survive in modern Chinese expository writing. Such parallel expression was (and to some extent still is) considered emphatic and euphonic to the Chinese, rather than wasteful and superfluous as it is in the West.

The eight "legs" or sections were as follows:

Opening (破題): Two sentences of prose whose function is to broach the topic.
Amplification (承題): Five sentences of prose, elaborating upon and clarifying the theme.
Preliminary exposition (起講): Prosaic writing
Initial argument (起股): A specified number (4, 5, 8 or 9) of sentence pairs written in parallel, developing the initial argument. The parallel sentences address the topic and convey similar meanings, with similar structure but different words.
Central argument (中股): Sentences written in parallel, with no limit as to their number, in which the central points of the essay are expounded freely.
Latter argument (後股): Sentences written in parallel, with no limit as to their number. Here, points not addressed in the previous section are discussed; otherwise, the writer may continue padding the ideas in the central argument. It is to be written in a serious tone rooted in realism.
Final argument (束股): Parallel sentence groups, each one consisting of either two to three, or else four to five, lines. Here, the main theme is revisited and loose ends are tied up.
Conclusion (大結): Prosaic writing where free expression and creativity are allowed. The concluding remarks are made here.