Types of Essay

1. Definition Essay
As the name suggests, a definition type of essay defines different things, ideas, and
perceptions.
2. Narrative Essay
A narrative essay is a narration like a short story. It is, however, different from a short
story in that it is written in an essay format.
3. Descriptive Essay
A descriptive essay describes something to make readers feel, smell, see, taste, or hear
what is described.
4. Expository Essay
An expository essay exposes things in detail to make readers understand without any
complications.
5. Persuasive Essay
A persuasive essay is meant to convince the target audience to do something or not do
something.
6. Argumentative Essay
An argumentative essay is meant to present arguments in the favor of something. It
has an additional fourth body paragraph that is meant to present opposite arguments.
7. Analytical Essay
An analytical essay analyzes something, such as in literature an analytical essay
analyzes a piece of literature from different angles.
8. Comparison and Contrast Essay
A comparison and contrast essay makes either a comparison, a contrast, or both
between two different or similar things.
9. Cause and Effect Essay
A cause and effect essay makes readers understand the cause of things, and their
effects on other things.
10. Critical Essay
A critical essay is written on literary pieces to evaluate them on the basis of their
merits or demerits.
11. Process Essay
A process essay outlines a process of making or breaking or doing something that
readers understand fully and are able to do it after reading it.
12. Synthesis Essay
A synthesis essay means to synthesize different ideas to make a judgement about their
merit and demerits.
13. Explicatory Essay
An explicatory essay is meant to explain a piece of literature. It is often written about
poems, short stories, and novels.
14. Rhetorical Analysis Essay
A rhetorical analysis essay evaluates a speech or a piece of rhetoric on the basis of
rhetorical strategies and devices used in it.
15. Review Essay
A review essay discusses the merits and demerits of a book and evaluates it through a
review.
16. Simple Essay
A simple essay is just a five-paragraph essay that is written on any topic after it is
specified.
17-Research Essay
A research essay revolves around a research question that is meant to answer some specific
question through a research of the relevant literature.

15 Practices Proven Effective for Teaching Writing

Heinemann Publishing

Feb 23, 2017

1. All students can and should write: Just like with reading, the more students write the
better they get…oh, and the more they write, the better they read.

2. Help students find real purposes to write and real audiences to reach: Purpose and
audience are the oxygen and water of blooming engagement.

3. Help students exercise choice, take ownership, and assume responsibility: It’s simple 
— the more choices you make for writers, the less they learn about writing.

4. Provide opportunities for students to experience the complete writing process: Writing
isn’t a black box. When kids learn that writing has stages (topic selection, prewriting,
drafting, revising, and editing) the process is demystified and simplified.

5. Help students get started: Many kids struggle with topic selection, show them prewriting
techniques that unleash their thinking.

6. Guide students as they draft and revise: Play the long game! Telling students what to fix
today may result in a better piece of tomorrow. Modeling how to fix things today helps them
write well forever.

7. Model for kids how you write a text: Kids want to know what adult writers think and do.
You are an important mentor for them, so write in front of them and think aloud as you do.

8. Lead students to learn the craft of writing: Introduce the key moves writers make, then
gradually release responsibility to your writers for using those moves.

9. Confer with individual students on their writing: This is your golden differentiation
opportunity — brief 1:1 moments that are goal-oriented and richly instructional.

10. Teach grammar and mechanics in the context of actual writing: Don’t bother with
isolated skill-and-drill grammar — research shows it doesn’t work. What does work is
teaching grammar and style when kids are revising and editing work written for authentic
audiences and purposes. That’s when they are keenly motivated to work on conventions.
11. Provide a classroom context of shared learning: Peer collaboration, not peer critique!
Students need a safe, not critical, place to take risks and try things that drive their growth as
writers.

12. Support growth in writing for English learners: Few actions grow proficiency in a new
language than using it to express one’s thoughts with care and deliberation.

13. Use writing to support learning throughout the curriculum: For self-contained
classrooms, this doubles up the power of your teaching time. Content-area teachers, you can
use brief, ungraded writing-to-learn activities to deepen comprehension, improve class
discussion, elicit questions, and reflect on what’s been learned.

14. Use evaluation constructively and efficiently: Research shows that red marks
discourage growth in writing. Praise and thoughtful questions generate growth, not just
“correcting.”

15. Expose kids to a wide array of great fiction and nonfiction writing: Kids need to be
introduced to and surrounded by great writing to learn from accomplished mentors.

What is process writing?

The process approach treats all writing as a creative act which requires time and positive
feedback to be done well. In process writing, the teacher moves away from being someone
who sets students a writing topic and receives the finished product for correction without any
intervention in the writing process itself.

Why should teachers be interested in a process approach to writing?

White and Arntd say that focusing on language errors 'improves neither grammatical accuracy
nor writing fluency' and they suggest instead that paying attention to what the students say
will show an improvement in writing.

Research also shows that feedback is more useful between drafts, not when it is done at the
end of the task after the students hand in their composition to be marked. Corrections written
on compositions returned to the student after the process has finished seem to do little to
improve student writing.

The changing roles of teacher and students

The teacher needs to move away from being a marker to a reader, responding to the content of
student writing more than the form. Students should be encouraged to think about audience:
Who is the writing for? What does this reader need to know? Students also need to realise that
what they put down on paper can be changed: Things can be deleted, added, restructured,
reorganised, etc.

What stages are there in a process approach to writing?

Although there are many ways of approaching process writing, it can be broken down into
three stages:

Pre-writing
The teacher needs to stimulate students' creativity, to get them thinking how to approach a
writing topic. In this stage, the most important thing is the flow of ideas, and it is not always
necessary that students actually produce much (if any) written work. If they do, then the
teacher can contribute with advice on how to improve their initial ideas.

Focusing ideas
During this stage, students write without much attention to the accuracy of their work or the
organisation. The most important feature is meaning. Here, the teacher (or other students)
should concentrate on the content
of the writing. Is it coherent? Is there anything missing? Anything extra?

Evaluating, structuring and editing

Now the writing is adapted to a readership. Students should focus more on form and on
producing a finished piece of work. The teacher can help with error correction and give
organisational advice.

Classroom activities
Here are some ideas for classroom activities related to the stages above:

Pre-writing

 Brainstorming
Getting started can be difficult, so students divided into groups quickly produce words
and ideas about the writing.

 Planning
Students make a plan of the writing before they start. These plans can be compared
and discussed in groups before writing takes place.

 Generating ideas
Discovery tasks such as cubing (students write quickly about the subject in six
different ways - they:
o 1. describe it
o 2. compare it
o 3. associate it
o 4. analyze it
o 5. apply it
o 6. argue for or against it.

 Questioning
In groups, the idea is to generate lots of questions about the topic. This helps students
focus upon audience as they consider what the reader needs to know. The answers to
these questions will form the basis to the composition.

 Discussion and debate

The teacher helps students with topics, helping them develop ideas in a positive and
encouraging way.

 
Focusing ideas

 Fast writing
The students write quickly on a topic for five to ten minutes without worrying about
correct language or punctuation. Writing as quickly as possible, if they cannot think of
a word they leave a space or write it in their own language. The important thing is to
keep writing. Later this text is revised.

 Group compositions
Working together in groups, sharing ideas. This collaborative writing is especially
valuable as it involves other skills (speaking in particular.)

 Changing viewpoints
A good writing activity to follow a role-play or storytelling activity. Different students
choose different points of view and think about /discuss what this character would
write in a diary, witness statement, etc.

 Varying form
Similar to the activity above, but instead of different viewpoints, different text types
are selected. How would the text be different if it were written as a letter, or a
newspaper article, etc.

Evaluating, Structuring and Editing

 Ordering
Students take the notes written in one of the pre-writing activities above and organise
them. What would come first? Why? Here it is good to tell them to start with
information known to the reader before moving onto what the reader does not know.

 Self-editing
A good writer must learn how to evaluate their own language - to improve through
checking their own text, looking for errors, structure. This way students will become
better writers.

 Peer editing and proof-reading

Here, the texts are interchanged and the evaluation is done by other students. In the
real world, it is common for writers to ask friends and colleagues to check texts for
spelling, etc. You could also ask the students to reduce the texts, to edit them,
concentrating on the most important information.

The importance of feedback

It takes a lot of time and effort to write, and so it is only fair that student writing is responded
to suitably. Positive comments can help build student confidence and create good feeling for
the next writing class. It also helps if the reader is more than just the teacher. Class
magazines, swapping letters with other classes, etc. can provide an easy solution to providing
a real audience.
Writing as communication
Process writing is a move away from students writing to test their language towards the
communication of ideas, feelings and experiences. It requires that more classroom time is
spent on writing, but as the previously outlined activities show, there is more than just writing
happening during a session dedicated to process writing.

Potential problems
Writing is a complex process and can lead to learner frustration. As with speaking, it is
necessary to provide a supportive environment for the students and be patient. This approach
needs that more time be spent on writing in class, but as you have seen, not all classroom time
is spent actually writing.
Students may also react negatively to reworking the same material, but as long as the
activities are varied and the objectives clear, then they will usually accept doing so. In the
long term, you and your students will start to recognise the value of a process writing
approach as their written work improves.