Writing essays is a craft, and, as with any craft, the skills of good essay writing are to be honed over time.
In this article, we will look at the top 5 fundamentals required to produce well-written essays. For students to become adept in these areas will require teachers to offer lots of reinforcement and opportunities to practice the suggestions below.
The fundamentals listed below are general enough to apply to a wide variety of essay types.
Before beginning to write, students must clearly identify the purpose of their writing. So, let’s start by looking at the different types of essays students may be asked to write, along with some advice for students to follow while writing them.
1. IDENTIFY THE TYPE OF ESSAY
Before a student begins to respond to an essay prompt, they must understand the broad features that characterize the various types of essay they may be asked to write.
Most essays fall into one of four genres. Let’s take a look at some of the main features of each of these:
● NARRATIVE ESSAYS
Essentially, a narrative essay is a storytelling from a specific point of view, most often from the writers. Usually, the events will be based on real-life experiences. To effectively convey the inner and outer action of the narrative, students must create as vivid a telling as possible through packing their story with sensory detail.
As narrative essays normally focus on real-life events told from the writer’s own POV, they are usually written in the first person. The use of many first-person pronouns (I, me, my, etc.) helps draw the reader into the experience recounted.
Though real-life does not always lend itself to perfectly crafted plotlines, narrative essays should still work toward a well-crafted conclusion, often in the form of a personal statement.
Other characteristic features of a narrative essay may include conflict and dialogue to drive the narrative.
● DESCRIPTIVE ESSAYS
True to its name, a descriptive essay focuses on describing something, whether an experience, an event, a sensation, an emotion, a person, a place, an object, etc.
While it has many things in common with a narrative essay, such as its focus on personal and sensory detail, there are some fundamental differences. While narrative essays are largely concerned with telling a story, descriptive essays are more akin to painting a picture in words.
Despite this preoccupation with description, essays of this type shouldn’t be clinical deconstructions of things into the adjectives that describe them. A good descriptive essay will be evocative and have an emotional appeal to the reader.
While narrative essays are focused on action and tend to organize themselves around a ‘plot’ of sorts naturally, the descriptive essay demands a different means of organization than chronology.
Please encourage students to think of a means of organization for their descriptive essays. Anything reasonable will do, such as organizing it from various perspectives or using the different senses.
● EXPOSITORY
The expository essay comes in many forms, such as the ‘How To’ essay, the Compare & Contrast’, and the ‘Cause and Effect’ essay. Though there are clear differences between these types, all expository essays endeavor to provide the reader with a balanced analysis of a given subject.
Unlike the narrative and the descriptive essay, personal feelings don’t apply here. Expository essays are not generally written in the first person, and the writer doesn’t reveal their own feelings on the topic.
This form of essay explains a topic and often uses facts, statistics, and examples to achieve this.
● PERSUASIVE
Also known as an argumentative essay, this type of essay aims to convince the reader of the validity of the writer’s point of view on a topic.
As with expository essays, the persuasive essay is also concerned with facts and logic, but usually as supporting evidence for the writer's opinions.
When writing a persuasive essay, be sure to encourage students to present their arguments supported by evidence. Though they will be expressing an opinion in these essays, this does not mean they will ignore the other side of the argument.
These should be touched on too, but there should be no doubt left in the reader’s mind on the writer’s opinion and why they think that way.
You must be logged in to post a comment.