Types of essays demystified

Test

14 essay names but only 2 patterns        
                                           
College students are required to write essays. There are many types of essays, however, and they don't look much alike.

What are students to do?

More to the point, what are you to do? After all, your job is to make it possible for them to learn to write the kind of expository  prose demanded by colleges and employers.

Let's take a bird's eye view of various types of essays, or what English teachers call essay genres.

Persuasive essays
The most formulaic — and most easily teachable — writing style is the thesis-and-support or persuasive writing pattern. It is thoroughly expository, laying information out in so clear a manner that no sensible person would miss the point.

Obviously, the persuasive pattern is the basis for persuasive essays. However, it also is the chassis for various other expository essays, such as the

• Argument essay
• Classification essay
• Literary analysis
• Definition essay
• Descriptive essay
• Informative essay
• Illustration essay
• Comparison essay
• Contrast essay
• Compare and contrast essay
  

This list doesn't begin to cover the titles used to describe essays built on the persuasive pattern. To make things more complicated, thesis-and-support essays can be hybrids, such as a literary analysis that compares and contrasts two literary works.

Narrative essays
The least formulaic expository pattern is the narrative essay, which has much in common with imaginative writing. Unlike expository writing, imaginative or expressive writing isn't required to be obvious. Its value may come from making the reader dig to understand its subtlety.

Of all the types of essays, the narrative essay is the most difficult to teach or learn to write. Fortunately, ordinary people rarely     have any need to write a narrative essay. After high school, a student will probably write one narrative essay in college and never ever write another.

Narrative essays use fiction techniques like setting, plot, characters, and dialogue. However, unlike fiction, the narrative essay is primarily written to make a point rather than to entertain readers.

Narrative essays require a mature reflection on the significance of one's experience that few high school students can manage.     
         
If you plan attempt teaching narrative essays, I've provided some tips on teaching the narrative essay and a sample narrative      essay about teaching writing that I wrote in the format students use in their early attempts at narrative essays.

All students, however, can — and should — learn to write anecdotes, which can be used in lieu of several pieces of evidence in a body paragraph. Writing anecdotes eases students toward understanding the narrative essay.

You can also use reflective informal writing activities to move students toward the objectivity required to write a narrative essay. Ultimately, developing objectivity is more important than writing narrative essays.

Crossover essays

A few essay types incorporate both persuasive and narrative essay elements. They are:            
            

• Cause-and-effect essay
• Process essay
• How-to essay
  

Each of these essays includes a narrative element that's more than just a simple anecdote( [美]  [ˈænɪkˌdot],掌故, 趣闻, 轶事).            

Implications for teaching

Educational best practice is to teach writing in one essay genre until all students are competent in it.

After students master that one genre, they can learn to write another kind of essay readily by noting how it resembles or differs from the one they know.