Make Essay Writing for Students Easier with a Consistent Structure

We’ll admit it: our students wouldn’t be entirely off-base if they said we weren’t the most exciting teachers.

This doesn’t mean we didn’t try to engage our students in whatever content we were teaching, but we’re both creatures of habit who love a good routine. Kate probably ate the same lunch (complete with Scooby-Doo Baked Graham Crackers Sticks) every day of her teaching career. Steph gets real antsy if her day’s schedule looks like she might have to have her afternoon coffee at the wrong time (2:00 p.m.) or get home too late to read a few chapters before bedtime (10:30 p.m.).

Naturally, this love of routine spilled over into our teaching life. Daily agenda, bellringer routine, calendaring process, go-to activities, rinse-and-repeat unit plans . . . we’re fans of it all.

But nowhere did this consistency help us more than when it came to writing. Essay writing, for students, is probably the most daunting and overwhelming task we assign. And essay writing for students is one of our most dreaded topics to teach. 

One of the challenges when it comes to teaching essay writing for students is that there’s so much to teach, and there are multiple genres of writing we’re supposed to cover, each with its own conventions and guidelines. Essay writing for students can become this fractured, disjointed set of skills that’s always changing from essay to essay, teacher to teacher, and grade to grade.

While we won’t tell you we figured out all things writing, our ability to teach writing in a way that got results improved dramatically when we stopped worrying about covering all the things and instead focused on activities and strategies that allowed our students to practice the same core skills over and over again.

In a world that prizes high engagement and quick takes, we found that consistency, while sometimes a little bit boring, was exactly what our students needed.

Why Consistency is Essential When Teaching Essay Writing for Students

Strategies for Incorporating Consistency When Teaching Essay Writing for Students

Use the same paragraph structure for everything.

Once we developed and refined our 5C paragraph structure, we used it constantly. Short-answer questions on guided reading assignments, short writing assignments, written explanations on creative projects, longer essays, free-response tests and quizzes. If there was writing involved, our students were writing a 5C paragraph.

Not only did we want our students to practice a lot, but we wanted them to see that the 5Cs (claim, concrete evidence, context, commentary, connection) formed the basis of a strong written response, no matter what the specific task was.

Use the same terminology and basic structure for every essay type.

When our students hear the same words over and over, they’ll become more familiar with them. When we use the same basic terms no matter what writing type we’re focused on, our students will see that good writing is good writing, no matter what genre it falls into. The more we can demystify essay writing for students, the less daunting and dreadful it will seem to them.

Side note: If you teach creative narrative writing, the same structure you use for most other writing types won’t work, but you can still apply this principle of consistency by pairing a creative narrative writing assignment with a short story unit where you discuss elements of plot, setting, and character. This way, even with a creative assignment, your students’ writing is still grounded in a bigger picture.

Make your consistent structures and terminology part of your classroom culture.

If you’re using the same terms over and over, put them where students can see them. Hang posters. Link to them on your LMS. You want your students to be able to rattle off these terms without hesitation. (If you like our 5C paragraph structure, our paragraph writing lesson comes with a classroom poster, a student handout—perfect for your LMS—and bookmarks. You can also get the 5C bookmarks in our Free Resource Library.)

Emphasize the similarities between writing types before teaching the differences.

Of course there are unique conventions you need to teach for each essay type, but before you teach those, remind students that the core of each writing type is the same. This highlights that they’re using the same skills here that they’ve already learned: they’re not learning an entirely new skill every time they switch writing genres.

Not sure what’s included in that “core” of each writing type? Read on!

A Consistent Essay Structure that Works for Any Essay Type

Once we’d fallen in love with the 5C paragraph structure, we knew it needed to form the basis of the structured essay assignments we gave our students. It was a natural fit with argumentative and literary analysis essays, but we weren’t immediately sure how it would work for narrative and expository writing. We quickly realized, however, that the 5C paragraph is a natural fit for any essay type, requiring only subtle differences in the phrasing of our directions for students.

If you’d like to see how we apply this structure specifically to each of the writing types, you can click on the links in the previous paragraph, but here we want to focus on the core that remains the same, no matter what type of essay your students are writing.

Introduction

No matter what type of writing your students are doing, their introduction includes the same three basic elements.

Hook

In any piece of writing, the first task is to grab the reader’s attention. As hard as writing hooks often feels for students, we found that giving our students four options (anecdote, generalization, quotation, or starting fact) made this obstacle of a sentence more approachable.

Context

Background information is also needed in any essay type. Writing a literary analysis? Your reader needs a brief recap of the text. Writing an argumentative or expository essay? Your reader needs some basic facts—the 5 Ws (who, what, when, where, why) are a great starting point. Writing a personal narrative? Your reader needs to know who you are, how you ended up in whatever situation you’re about to describe, or why this moment in  your life is worth reading about.

Thesis Statement

Every essay has a guiding idea, and readers need to know what it is before they begin reading a student’s argument. A thesis statement doesn’t have to be debatable (as we often require it to be in an argumentative or literary analysis essay): a personal narrative still has a point or key takeaway it will build to, and an informative essay is organized around a key idea that the body paragraphs will unpack in more detail. Stating the main point from the outset helps readers to focus their attention and understand why they need to know the details that will follow.

Body Paragraphs

Certainly, at some point in their academic careers, students need to learn that there is no “rule” mandating that every essay be five paragraphs. But we always asked our students to write three body paragraphs because we think it’s a solid starting point that sets them up for success.

Not only is three body paragraphs a relatively manageable task, even in the timed setting that many of us rely on (especially as a way to assess AI-free student writing), but it tends to be an adequate amount of content for students to sufficiently support a point and, especially in more advanced writing, establish a line of reasoning.

Naturally, for the body paragraphs, we use our beloved 5C paragraph structure.

Claim

It doesn’t matter what type of writing our students are doing: each paragraph needs to begin with a topic sentence (something they learned many years ago), and by the middle and high school level, that topic sentence should be in the form of a claim that must be supported.

Concrete Evidence

Our students must also provide evidence to support that claim, regardless of the type of writing they’re doing. It’s probably fairly obvious how this works for an argumentative or expository essay (though many students do need help choosing effective evidence), but even in a personal narrative, the specific details a student provides (the actual narrative) are essentially the evidence that they will then need to tell us the significance of in later sentences.

Context

No matter what paragraph structure you use, it’s likely that you encourage your students to provide two sentences of commentary. But sometimes our students have no idea what to do with those two sentences of commentary.

It took us a while to figure out what, exactly, we wanted our students to do with those two sentences. For many years, we encouraged students to paraphrase their concrete evidence. We quickly found, however, that if students aren’t writing about Shakespeare, a paraphrase isn’t always necessary or meaningful. At the same time, we found it frustrating that students were dropping in miscellaneous quotations with no real acknowledgement of where they came from (equally jarring if they’re discussing a novel or a collection of research articles). As a result, the context sentence was born.

Regardless of essay type, students’ writing benefits from providing context for the concrete evidence they’ve provided. In a narrative essay, this probably looks like a little bit of extra detail about the event being described. In a literary analysis essay, it’s easy: tell us what’s happening in the text that surrounds the quotation. But even in an argumentative or informative essay, context is beneficial. It’s a great place to discuss the larger study that a piece of evidence is coming from or to define key terms in a technical quotation that readers might need to know. Providing this context sets students up for more successful commentary in the sentence that follows.

Commentary

It’s absolutely essential, regardless of the writing type, that students tell us why their evidence matters and how it supports their claim.

Again, this made clear sense for us with argumentative and literary analysis essays, but it’s essential for the other essay types, too.

For a personal narrative to be meaningful, students need to reflect on the story they’re telling. Commentary is where they do this; it’s where they show us why the details of this story matter.

Similarly, in an expository or informative essay, students need to explain why the facts they’re sharing matter; otherwise, they’re just summarizing other people’s ideas. Students can use their commentary to discuss the implications of the information they’ve provided, to discuss possible objections or limitations, or to show how one source is in conversation with another source. But again, this is how our students move away from merely narrating or summarizing to actually writing something that requires them to think and is worth their reader’s valuable time.

Connection

We stopped calling the final sentence of a paragraph a conclusion sentence after years of boring sentences that merely summarized the previous four sentences. We may struggle to pay attention sometimes, but we can certainly maintain focus for four sentences!

We found more success when we started telling our students to use the last sentence to connect their ideas to the next paragraph, bridging the gap between them and showing how one idea leads to another. When done well, this led to more cohesive essays with a more evident line of reasoning.

Conclusion

We all know that essays need a conclusion, but we don’t always do a good job of telling students how to write a conclusion, which means they often struggle to write a meaningful one. Regardless of the essay type, however, there are again three key elements that any conclusion should include.

Restated Thesis

Any good piece of writing brings the reader’s attention back to the main argument, reminding them what the point of all that reading was.

Synthesis

No matter what type of essay students have written, they’ve included a lot of information, and it’s helpful for them to tie it all together here, showing how it supports the thesis statement they’ve just reminded us of.

So What?

We’ve found that our students’ conclusions are far more interesting when they zoom back out to the larger picture by helping the reader to see the value in the ideas they have presented in the essay or even what to do with the information now that they have it. Even in a narrative or literary analysis essay, which may less naturally lend themselves to real-world implications or calls to action, it’s helpful when the student can help the reader see the value in engaging with their own story or the text they’ve written about, drawing attention to the universal elements of whatever they’ve been discussing.

Essay writing for students doesn’t have to be a mysterious world full of countless essay types, all with their own nitpicky conventions and subtleties. Are those nitpicky conventions and subtleties there? Sure. But we make essay writing for students easier and less intimidating when we help them see the consistent elements that make up good writing, regardless of type. And the less intimidating the process feels, the more likely they are to engage in the practice they need to be successful at this essential skill.

Start implementing a consistent essay structure in your classes today with our Five Paragraph Essay Writing Made Easy Bundle. It includes teacher presentations, student handouts, and essay-writing templates for narrative, argumentative, and expository writing, adapting the structure above to clearly fit each writing type. As a bonus, the bundle includes a mini-lesson on writing hooks and an introductory lesson to our 5C paragraph. Essay writing for students has never been easier!