How to Write an Expository Essay

We have been spending a lot of our language arts class time preparing for Hillsborough Writes!, our district writing assessment. Patterned after Florida Writes!, the state writing assessment that eighth-graders must pass in order to be promoted, Hillsborough Writes! requires that students be able to write a 4-paragraph expository essay.

During the first semester our writing focused primarily on poetry, freewriting, creativity, sentence structure, grammar, and conventions. When we returned to school after the winter break, we started learning how to write expository essays. Isolated writing lessons are helpful, but I know that in order for students to understand the writing process, they must be able to clearly see how it works. That is why I model the process for my students from beginning to end. As a teacher, it is one of the most challenging tasks that I undertake, but I believe it is worth it. Several years ago, after attending a writing workshop, I made the decision to write a collaborative class essay with every writing class in order to model the process. This year was no different.

I began by teaching students how to brainstorm and do pre-writing, a process essential to effective writing, using my 4-square method. Then we read a model essay so students could see what a "6," the highest score a paper can earn, looked like. Students identified the essential parts of effective essays such as leads, topic sentences, examples, anecdotes, and conclusions. After that we discussed what to write about. The AM class chose to write about cruise vacations and the PM class decided to write about practical jokes. Together we wrote our 3-part prompts, and then students completed their individual pre-writing and wrote their own timed 45-minute expository essays. After I scored and returned their essays, we used their ideas to write a class collaborative essay. Students contributed their ideas while I, as recorder, wrote the class essay on the overhead. They were able to see exactly how to write an introduction, two sub-topic paragraphs, and a conclusion. When we finished, Sara typed up both essays, I proofread them, then we posted both essays on Tomlin Internal for other teachers to use in their writing classes.

In order to share our collaborative class essays with a broader audience, I have posted them here for our online readers:

AM Class Expository Essay: Cruise Vacations

PM Class Expository Essay: Practical Jokes