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How to Teach Essay Writing: Sharing Experience
Essay writing might come naturally for a few people, but a lot of people find writing to be an insurmountable task. By teaching small portions such as writing paragraphs and later how to build five-paragraph structured essays, eventually your students will have all the necessary writing skills to easily compose wonderfully crafted academic essays.
Here are for tips for sharing the writing experience with your students:
- Set a Good Foundation: Don’t expect your students to understand essay writing right from the start. Focus first on teaching them the fundamentals of basic sentence structure and paragraph composition. This will help students develop better writing skills in the long run because they will gain confidence and understand the smaller components that make a great essay.
- Holding Your Students’ Hands: Everyone needs a little help with writing, especially when overcoming some of the more common obstacles. Teach them about the planning process, discuss writing blocks, discuss how to show and not tell. Make sure they learn each step well enough before moving on to the next lesson. Working with your students will also help you become a better teacher. As your students gain more confidence in their writing they will need your assistance less and less, meaning that you could spend more time planning the next stage.
- Using Concrete Assignments: Writing creatively is often quite abstract for new writers, and can be quite subjective. You should develop a writing curriculum that focuses on concrete writing assignments and allows for a wide variety of topics that fit the kind of writing being taught in the assignment. For instance, you should give your students a concrete frame to work into a specific paragraph that uses their creative ideas. Your students need to be taught the skills and given the tools to overcome writer’s block.
- Knowing Your Audience: Chances are you are teaching students in their early to mid-teens. Knowing the kinds of topics they would most be interested in will go a long way in getting them to enjoy learning how to write essays. Choosing topics that directly influence your students, such as different views about their favorite sports, television shows, movies and social media will hit closer to home and open doors for young writers.
Writing is an essential skill we will use throughout our lives. When teaching how to write essays, remember that you’re not alone. Find out what other teachers are doing to get their students to write better essays and pretty soon you’ll be able to get an effective curriculum going.
