Many types of essays become 2
Essay continuum shows how

 

Pick up any English text book and you will find a long list of types of essays that looks something like this:

• Argument essay
• Persuasive essay
• Cause-and-effect essay
• Classification essay
• Compare and contrast essay
• Comparison essay
• Contrast essay
• Critical essay
• Definition essay
• Descriptive essay
• How-to-essay
• Illustration essay
• Informative essay
• Literary analysis
• Narrative essay
• Process essay

If you are just starting out teaching writing to middle school and high school students, you might find the list daunting. How could you possibly ever teach all those different literary genres?

Think how your students will feel if they see that list! Yikes! I had to take the extra line spacing out of the list to keep from scaring myself so badly I'd never be able to write again.

That's the reason I skip the list. Instead, I tell my students there are two basic expository essay patterns: the thesis + support pattern of the persuasive essay and the narrative pattern. All the essays in that long list can be developed by adapting one or both of those patterns.

Whew.

I feel better already.

A side note: I have learned to say "thesis plus support" instead of "persuasive essay" when I'm talking about essay organization. That keeps students from being distracted by the emotional connotations of the word persuasive.

The essay continuum

All those different labels can be placed along a continuum with the persuasive essay at one end and the narrative essay at the other. Persuasion and narrative represent totally different ways of organizing material around a thesis statement.