Key to teaching essay writing
Think and teach strategically

If you are teaching essay writing to beginning writers like

• Eighth grader Josh,

• Tenth grader Caitlin,

• Clueless Kate, age 38,

the techniques used in the Iowa Writers' Workshop are probably not a good choice. Beginning writers need different kinds of help than people working on their MFA degree.

When I talk about teaching essay writing to beginners, I do not focus on the writers' ages. I define a beginner as anyone who cannot write a competent essay in an hour on a topic with which they are familiar.

You need to think and teach a strategic writing process appropriate to novices who — let's be honest about this — don't give a hoot about learning to write well.

A strategy is a set of procedures for accomplishing a specific goal. A strategic writing process is one that produces a clearly defined written product.

Different strategic processes are needed to produce a poem than to produce directions for installing replacement windows.

Even the students who are interested in writing need to become competent expository writers before they can go off to Iowa for two years to write their first prize-winning novels.

So, what do we do to start beginning writers off on the right foot?

We begin with the old standby: the 5-paragraph persuasive essay. It has been the best tool for teaching essay writing for centuries.

If you don't know why you should be teaching nonfiction essays instead of creative writing, check out best teaching practices.

If you find my approach is a bit beyond your students, the next best thing I've found is a homeschool family's explanation of the five-paragraph-essay. It's less detailed than my material, but entirely compatible with my approach to teaching essay writing.

Repetition aids learning

The folks at the Iowa Writers Workshop will probably say the five paragraph essay is boring, but that is precisely why it is useful for teaching beginners.

Beginners need sameness, repetition, and routine in order to learn the basics of how to write an essay.

If the rules change for every assignment, the kids who already think they "can't do this writing stuff" will give up.

Instead of starting by having beginning writing students think up a writing topic, give them one. That's what happens in the real world. Authentic writing prompts are given 99% of the time.

Then take students through a writing process for turning that topic into an essay.

Teach strategies for planning

The expository writing process has five stages. Of the five stages:

• Three are planning activities.

• One is composing.

• One is polishing activities.

When teaching essay writing to beginning writers of any age, emphasize the two parts of the writing process beginners often skip: planning and polishing.

The planning begins with a thesis statement. Students either get that from the writing prompt or develop it from options suggested in the writing prompt. If you do your job well, that step is easy for students.

The second step in planning is to prepare a three-sentence outline I call a writing skeleton™ showing the reasons for believing the thesis to be true. Students can create their outlines by following a template. Basically all beginners have to do is fill in the blanks.

As they complete the writing skeleton™, students are forced to employ a strategy for linking a working thesis with the topic sentences of paragraphs.

By creating sentence outlines for several different essays, students will learn the relationship between thesis and topic sentences in much the same intuitive way a driver learns the relationship between a certain amount of pressure on the gas pedal and how fast the car goes.

The third stage of planning is developing evidence to support the topic sentences. Here again there are strategies students can use for every essay. One strategy gives students a template so they don't have to develop an outline for each new essay.

Other strategies provide help students to:

• Assess what evidence they have and what they need to gather;

• Develop a plan for gathering missing evidence;

• Decide what to record in their comprehensive plan.

Sooner or later you'll find information about all those strategies for teaching essay writing here on this website. Don't honk. I'm writing as fast as I can!

Teach spiffy presentation strategies

You can teach development as a strategy for presenting evidence. Once students catch on, they no longer struggle with finding ways to "write more" about an idea.

Composing (drafting) is easy after all that planning. However, students need a way to bring some energy and zest to their writing. There's a strategy for that, too.

The entire final stage of the writing process is work. You can't make revising and editing fun, but you can teach students strategies for doing a thorough job with minimal effort.

Bonus for planning & presenting well

If you teach students how to plan essays and how to present them appropriately, you are unlike to have to deal with inappropriate evidence uses that violate copyright or result in plagiarism.

You must be sure you know the rules that govern source use. Many people do not know what copyright is or do not understand copyright applies to information on the Internet.

The consequences of plagiarism or copyright violation can be severe.

Teach strategies for self-monitoring

If students are going to learn how to write an essay and become competent writers, they have to learn to monitor their own behavior and correct their own work.

When Josh and Caitlin and Kate are competent essayists, you can relax. You only have to concentrate on teaching essay writing until students know enough to improve as writers without additional instruction.

Isn't that something to look forward to?