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 or 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 essay patterns: persuasive pattern and 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.
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.
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