Narration as the Beginning of Expository Writing If you practice narrating in your homeschool, your child is already practicing expository writing in its earliest forms. How to Teach Expository Writing There is no one single way that is the answer on how to teach expository writing.
Summarizing While writing a summary and writing an expository essay is not the same thing, a summary is definitely a pre-cursor to expository writing.
Make sure your child can write summaries that: Retell significant details Are organized with a topic sentence and supporting details Ignore insignificant details. Finding the Main Idea Sometimes, it is hard for children to find the main idea of a passage. The Writing Process For every essay your child writes, have him follow a defined writing process of pre-writing or outlining, writing a rough draft, editing and then producing a final draft.
Pre-writing Begin by having your child work on some type of visual organizer for his thoughts. Rough Draft and Editing Have your child write a rough draft of his expository essay. Encourage your child to just write and then during the editing process, help your child look for these common mistakes: Does the essay have one overall topic? Is there a topic sentence? Is there good supporting points? Are there an introductory paragraph and a concluding paragraph that introduce and summarize the main points of the essay?
Did the student use his sources but not copy them? The Final Expository Essay A good expository essay should: Be informative and explain a topic in detail as is age-appropriate Use varied sentences and clear language Have a focused topic that is not too broad Have a topic sentence Keep in mind that it is okay to give multiple expository writing assignments.
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By Mary Gormandy White. Writing the activity is thinking, and therefore synthetic. Expository writing the product is analytic. Maybe the culprit, in the end, is the English language. This disguises the fundamental opposition between writing the process and writing the product. One is synthetic, one is analytic. Literary writing, like a poem or discursive essay, is often a synthetically-ordered product.
Details of human experience first, insight or conclusion at the end. I think not! For example, assign your students to rewrite a Petrarchan sonnet as an expository essay.
See if they can figure out that they need to reverse the order of the ideas. If nothing else, share the idea with your students that thinking can go in two directions. Bottom-up, or top-down. For expository writing, draft synthetically, re-write analytically.
But this simple idea has the potential to revolutionize your approach to writing instruction. I come back to the concept again and again in class and in tutoring sessions. Thank you for this offering. I continue to be in awe of your collaborative narrative voice.
The visuals are very helpful. I would like more! I found it very helpful to think more clearly about reader-oriented writing vs. Thank you for the explanation of synthetic and analytic. I do not know how I made it to this decade without those words in my working vocabulary. Expository writing should first be written backwards. Then rewritten forwards. Process vs.
But, as Peter Elbow and many other composition theorists have said, writing is thinking. While these are important elements for readers and writers to understand, they are typically not a part of expository writing.
However, as our students get older, and start taking standardized tests, they are often required to write expository pieces. Expository writing is a skill that must be taught on its own, but you will find there are many areas of crossover from narrative writing skills into expository.
Regardless of the style of writing you are doing, planning is a critical element for success. There are three steps to proper planning for an expository essay. First, one must analyze the prompt. Next, creating a quick graphic organizer is suggested to get your initial thoughts down on paper. And finally, students can use a more detailed essay organizer template, or outline, to plan out their writing. Consider this prompt and think about how the RAFT acronym can help your students prepare for responding to it:.
Write an editorial for the school newsletter with suggestions for how the problem can be addressed. In analyzing this prompt with the RAFT acronym, students would acknowledge that their role R is a concerned student, and their audience A is fellow students and school staff. They would use the descriptive text structure F to describe their suggested solutions. And finally, they would have to choose a problem at school on which they can focus their writing T.
One example problem might be that new students feel overwhelmed and left out. Students should be encouraged to come up with three solid suggestions, or examples, to describe in their essay. For this example, they might come up with ideas such as assigning a buddy to each new student, creating a video tour of the school, and developing a brochure about extra-curricular activities. It is a good idea to have your students analyze numerous writing prompts.
This does not mean they have to take the piece through the entire writing process, but through repeated practice of analyzing prompts, they will build their confidence at how to tackle a prompt, thus feeling more prepared for a writing assessment. Once students have a response in mind for the prompt, they need to put their ideas on a paper, and start visually organizing their plan.
A basic web is a great design for planning a descriptive essay. The main topic would be in the center of the web, with their three ideas or examples branching off from the center. Then from each idea or example, students can add more branches to represent supporting details. See the example below based on the topic described in Step One.
Using their graphic organizer as a stepping stone, students will now flesh out the details of their original thoughts. Our Descriptive Essay Organizer resource is available for you below to share with your students.
You can reproduce the template and have students write directly on it, or you can share an electronic version so they can type their responses. A third option is to simply show them the organizer, and have the students recreate their own on paper. This is probably the best option if you want them to be able to use this tool for future essays.
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