Confused by essay types

by Shieh
(Taiwan)

I am teaching English essay writing to college juniors in my country, Taiwan. I am using a textbook Writers at Work: The Essay published by Cambridge. It lists six types of essays. One of them is explanatory essays. I could not find any related articles about it in your website. What type of essay is it? Is there another term for it?

In addition, I am confused by the terms for essay types. For example, you use the term expository essays as an umbrella term for all types of essays. (Am I right?) However, from other sources, expository essay is a specific essay.

This is my understanding from reading your website. Expository pattern has two types: persuasive, which is thesis+support, and narrative, which has no fixed pattern.

I belong to the type you mentioned in your website: "I am having to learn to teach writing while teaching writing." It is such a challenging and worthy job. I like it because I learn.

Linda responds:

I think you have done a pretty good job of summarizing what I said, Shieh. As you note, essays are examples of expository writing. They expose, explain, discuss, describe, and generally try to make clear some point that we call a thesis statement.

Your text's explanatory essay might be another text's informative, expository, descriptive, or process essay, or some combination of those labels.

Essay types are labels for common ways of responding to writing prompts that ask for an essay to be written a certain way. For example, if a writing prompt asks students to write a paper to convince the school to allow students to wear baseball caps in class, it's sensible to label the response a persuasive essay.

The writing prompts we set determine the essays we get; the essays we get determine what labels we choose to describe them. That's one reason why, if you pick up two different texts on writing, you are very likely to find different lists.

You can figure out what the Cambridge text means by "explanatory essay" by close examination of the writing prompts for such essays.

You will read many other authors who have far different lists than either me or your text. I wasn't familar with the text you mentioned, but I looked it up. From what I read, I suspect the authors are trying to reduce the complexity of essay writing for students by presenting fewer essay types, just as I do.

For students, lengthy lists of essay types are not only confusing but frightening. If you are a student and see a list of six or 10 or more essay types, you are going to start worrying that you won't be able to master them.

I don't want to make writing look any harder for my students than I have to. (My students are not eager writers to begin with.) The terms I use for teaching various aspects of writing are not necessarily textbook terms. Some of the usual textbook terms confuse novice writers.

I reduce essay writing to two approaches: the thesis and support pattern (most obvious in the persuasive essay) and the narrative pattern, which is predominantly chronological. Without taking time to teach types of essays, I use writing prompts to move students along the essay types continuum from thesis and support toward narrative.

In my opinion, essay types matter only if you are trying to teach students to categorize essays they read. Since my focus is teaching students to respond to writing prompts, the labels are irrelevant: the writing prompt tells does a better job of explaining what is required than any label can do.

I know that explanation doesn't tell you authoritatively how each essay type should be defined. I hope, though, that it makes you see that learning about types of essays is far less important than learning to write essays in response to writing prompts.