Questions about essays

[hollyhock]

I am looking for some opinions about essays in order to figure out which direction I want to take with my 15yo son. He is not using a writing program and is writing across curriculum. He is doing ok, but I need a little clarity as to some basics about essays. Forgive my ignorance - I feel I should know these things already but I did not learn it in high school and this child is my guinea pig/oldest.

 

1. What is an essay, to you?

 

It seems that different writing books have differing opinions on this. The Lively Art of Writing treats every essay like an opinion or persuasive piece. Wordsmith Craftsman has many different types of essays (narrative, descriptive, compare/contrast, etc.). Writing with a Thesis combines the two, saying that every essay is proving a point, but it can be done using the different styles or types. I know that WTM focuses on persuasive writing at the high school level. Are these actually different definitions or am I missing something that would tie it all together? How do you define an essay in your homeschool?

 

2. How often does your child write one?

 

SWB says 1-2 a week. Many other programs only do a few per year. Which approach do you take? I suppose if one is using a writing curriculum, that would dictate what was written. How many do you think should be done?

 

3. If you require different types of essays, do you rotate through the different types? How often do you write each type?

 

4. Do you always require an outline (or other type of planning method), a rough draft and a final draft?

 

5. How much time do you give your student to complete the whole writing process?

 

6. What about timed essays? How often do you do those?

 

7. Does writing an essay usually mean the student is doing some kind of research to accumulate the knowledge required for the essay? Or do you only require essays about things the student knows a lot about? Some of both?

 

8. If you are not writing essays all the time (only 2 a month or a few per year), what other types of writing is your student doing?

 

 

Ok, that was a lot of questions. I've read many books about writing but it seems that every book and curriculum has its own way of doing it. Or do I just need to pick my favourite book or method and go with that?  :confused1:

[Pistachio mom]

The books that helped me with these issues include:

Robin Finley (from AG) Essay. She explains very specifically how to write a 5 paragraph essay (introduction to literary essay) This is now part of BBR 3. See the website below.

I am currently using Sharon Watson's The Power in Your Hands: which teaches about all kinds of essays. This is a super resource easy to use and comprehend. I wish I had learned to write like this.

 

Classical Forms like the Progymnasmata found in Veritas textbooks and Memoria textbooks give students who have trouble brainstorming a form to use. This has worked well for my oldest daughter who is on the other side of dealing with dysgraphia. 

 

https://writingwithsharonwatson.com/the-power-in-your-hands/

https://www.memoriapress.com/curriculum/writing-and-english-grammar/

https://www.analyticalgrammar.com/our-products/beyond-the-book-report/

 

In the beginning stages of teaching this writing process, I give separate grades for brainstorming, outlining, rough draft etc....  But honestly, I like best the way it is taught in PIYH. A clear rubric and procedure is outlined in each chapter . See the sample if you are interested.  If another "teacher" in the book said to do it, my daughter was much more coopoerative to do the prewriting steps. We are working on one type of essay at a time. She is doing the book slowly so to do a half credit in a year. I adapt the writing assignments to fit other content areas.

 

I will start working on times essays soon for SAT prep. Lee Binz recommends using a book of prompts written for the purpose of practice. I also have started collecting free ebooks of writing prompts from Sharon Watson from the homeschool freebies emails.

 

I know I did not answer you thoroughly, I will try to post later on this weekend.

[Pistachio mom]

About essays, I teach the essay as a piece of writing with particular focused purpose - called a thesis. I do teach that there are various types. Again, I like Sharon Watson's books with the way they explain this. I too have so many writing books. Her approach made sense to my high school student after a lot of struggling to teach her to use the writing process. It is written to the student, for a homeschooled student. I usually read these with my girl.

 

I have required outlines in the past. Calling it an outline, rather than a list made it harder for one of my children. We have developed our "list" with sticky notes too. The point is to create a structure for your paper.

 

About time,  it depends on the essay. For a simple 5 paragraph essay: Usually, first we decide the structure, then the body has to be written second day, intro and concl the next day, proofread and refine, to be turned in to me. This process usually takes about a week for a paper that requires minimal research. Other times, by student procrastinates and puts it all together in an afternoon. We will be doing another research report soon that will require  more time. I use the guidelines in the curriculum.  Dianne Craft also has a right brain writing technique on her website also that works really well. It teaches writing by putting sentences into little textboxes - very good for visual learners.

 

The point is for the student to learn to communicate well and support thoughts with logical reasoning and good documentation.

 

Types of writing we have done: biographical report, several persuasive essay, literary analysis, summaries, character sketch of one character from a book, opinion papers, last year - she wrote one related to biology and evolution/creation discussion, biblical analysis that relates to one of the hundreds of prompts in the Veritas textbook for Omnibus, comparing villains of 2 works of literature, review of a classical music concert, short fiction pieces... Right now my daughter is finishing up 2 papers: one about pros and cons of social media, another using quotations from Pride and Prejudice to show the way the author comments on various personalities and the society of her day.  We have a long way to go. Even after all the work I did with her in the elementary and middle school years, I finally feel like she is getting a great education in writing because of the textbook. Before, I was doing the best I could and always wondered if I was doing "enough."

 

If you are not confident in putting together your own program from what you have, I would recommend that you pick the one you like the best or that is a good fit for your student.  Also, there are some good essay courses online via Brave Writer and Rock Star Essay, etc.... I could not afford these options. Some of these are 6 or 8 week courses. For me, finding the right textbook was a big help since I was not a writing  major in college.

 

Good luck as you research!  If you look up some past threads about teaching essay writing, you will find good ideas. I did lots of copy/pasting from Lori D comments.  They are a tremendous help to me.

 

 

Edited October 15, 2017 by Pistachio mom

[Rosika]

1. I think "essay" is a broad term. I assign some which are open-ended opinion essays, some which are read-this-and-extrapolate essays, and some which are WTM-style persuasive essays. 

 

2. My current high schooler writes 1-2 per week outside of "writing class" plus he is using a writing curriculum. How many should be done would depend (IMO) on the student's strengths, needs, academic future, and potential career. 

 

3. I think different types are important to know, so I do attempt to rotate the assignments. I don't have a set number in mind, again because it depends on the student. A weaker writer I'll want to assign more; a stronger writer won't need to spend the time improving on this particular skill. One of my sons is a natural debater. He didn't need practice writing persuasive essays, but his ability to summarize wasn't as strong so he wrote more of those. Another son couldn't persuade his own self out of a paper bag, so we spent a lot of time on those. My goal is to practice what needs practicing without wasting time on what's been (mostly) mastered. 

 

4. No, I do not. I require an outline/planning method in the beginning when we're focused on learning those skills. Once the student demonstrates the ability to write a paper well without my scaffolding of these skills, they are no longer required. For some students I offer an incentive to do them, if I think they'd benefit more from doing it but it's not a hill I'm dying on for that particular kid. I don't require a rough draft, but 99% of the time they turn one in to me. Our approach is that the final grade is for the final draft. I will look at and assist with any rough drafts that are turned into me THE DAY BEFORE a paper is due. They've learned the importance of doing one :) 

 

 

5. I write out a syllabus for the entire semester or year ahead of time. All writing assignments have due dates known well in advance. They are responsible for ekeing out enough time to complete their process. I'd say it takes my son a week or so to complete the process, if he works on one part a day for about 45-60 minutes or so. 

 

6. We never did timed essays. It never occurred to me to! Fortunately, my kids so far have all managed to finish the timed SAT essay with decent scores. If I had a kid that needed help with this, I might work on one a month or so - depending on what my end goal was.

 

7. Some of both. Most of our assigned essays are for cross-curricular subjects so there is some level of pre-knowledge but also a need for accumulating more knowledge. Research is a very important skill IMO, so I try to ensure there is some level of it for most of our assignments - even if it's just researching within a textbook or book used for class (e.g., character studies for literature). 

 

8. We use the progymnasmata (Classical Composition) in addition to cross-curricular writing. Later this year we'll also do some creative writing with One Year Adventure Novel, but only because one son wants to do it with his friends. I'll probably have my upcoming students do some sort of creative writing, if not OYAN perhaps NaNoMiWro (?is that it?) or something similar. 

 

You may just want to pick a program and run with it  :lol: I finally had to, else my head was going to explode! 

[hollyhock]

Thank you! These replies are really helpful. I would love to hear more opinions. And yes, just picking a writing program and going with that would be so much easier, but at this point my son can't deal with those.

[KeriJ]

We are approaching writing the same way this year. :)  Not to give you another book to order, but Grading With a Purple Crayon has been a really helpful book for me for a diy writing program.  It is written to the parent and is a guide to teaching essays with options to personalize it for your own student.  I made a plan based on the book and am using Writer's Inc. for providing more detailed guidance.  I also pull from some of the resources that I have on hand.  It's going much better than I imagined. 

 

This blog post (simple though it is) gave me a big picture view as to how to break it down.  I am a whole to parts thinker and get overwhelmed with too many details.  So The Power in Your Hands is one of those programs that overwhelms me with details. 

 

Right now we are working on one essay type at a time.  I'm using the free sample of Epi Kardia's Essay course for a personal essay.  We just finished using the instructions in Writer's Inc. for an expository essay based on a science topic.  R&S has good instructions for a persuasive essay.  And we are doing narrative essays for history.  We are still doing basic CM history narrations twice a week, but will have assigned topics occasionally in addition to those.

 

I broke it down into small steps with about 30 minutes of writing scheduled every day.  So far it is taking around 2 weeks to get through the steps.

     1.  Read and take notes on assigned topic.

     2.  Make a plan (outline or list or graphic organizer) for writing. (more details involved in this....)

     3.  Begin writing body paragraphs

     4.  Write intro. and conclusion

     5.  Revise

 

It's a work in progress, but it's working for us at the moment. 

 

 

Edited October 16, 2017 by KeriJ

[Targhee]

On 10/16/2017 at 7:55 AM, KeriJ said:

We are approaching writing the same way this year. ? Not to give you another book to order, but Grading With a Purple Crayon has been a really helpful book for me for a diy writing program.  It is written to the parent and is a guide to teaching essays with options to personalize it for your own student.  I made a plan based on the book and am using Writer's Inc. for providing more detailed guidance.  I also pull from some of the resources that I have on hand.  It's going much better than I imagined. 

 

This blog post (simple though it is) gave me a big picture view as to how to break it down.  I am a whole to parts thinker and get overwhelmed with too many details.  So The Power in Your Hands is one of those programs that overwhelms me with details. 

 

Right now we are working on one essay type at a time.  I'm using the free sample of Epi Kardia's Essay course for a personal essay.  We just finished using the instructions in Writer's Inc. for an expository essay based on a science topic.  R&S has good instructions for a persuasive essay.  And we are doing narrative essays for history.  We are still doing basic CM history narrations twice a week, but will have assigned topics occasionally in addition to those.

 

I broke it down into small steps with about 30 minutes of writing scheduled every day.  So far it is taking around 2 weeks to get through the steps.

     1.  Read and take notes on assigned topic.

     2.  Make a plan (outline or list or graphic organizer) for writing. (more details involved in this....)

     3.  Begin writing body paragraphs

     4.  Write intro. and conclusion

     5.  Revise

 

It's a work in progress, but it's working for us at the moment. 

 

 

@KeriJ I’m very curious to see how your year of DIY writing rounded out - it sounded great! I found this thread looking for posts about Grading with a Purple Crayon because I am contemplating creating a writing program for DS this year. What forms of writing did you do? What resources were the most helpful? Advice in hindsight?

[KeriJ]

@Targhee, I would say we stuck with the plan for the most part.  But we lost some steam as we often do.  So, it was definitely a DIY year, but I feel we could have done more.  DD is tricky though.  She's a no-nonsense rule follower, and somehow I think that is playing out in our writing journey, but I can't put my finger on how exactly.  Too much detail in instruction overwhelms her, but left to her own, she does the bare minimum.  We're still finding our way.

Long story short, I ended up using pieces of Writer's Inc., R&S, Beyond the Book Report 3, Write With the Best 2, and then she wrote random essays for various topics.  Much of the year was CM type narrations to give her more chances to write freely since she was feeling bogged down by instruction at one point.  I'm sure I'm forgetting quite a bit of what she did, (I'll have to look), but off the top of my head she wrote on storms, Martin Luther, feudalism, cities in France, brief lit. analysis, book summary....  Throughout the year, we continued to generally follow the steps I listed above.

I will say that the simplest assignment that seemed to turn out the best was a R&S 7 assignment where she read from 2 sources, took notes, gave an oral report and turned it into a written paper.  Something about giving the oral report (to her dad) made the writing go much better for her. 

It was definitely nothing fancy, and probably considered more middle school level to some here, but I'm not going to sweat it.  I lean more CM for writing than anything.  Karen Glass's new book Know and Tell has been the most helpful book I've read in a long time, and my hope is to just follow that plan from now on, which is kind of what I was already doing.

[Targhee]

1 hour ago, KeriJ said:

@Targhee, I would say we stuck with the plan for the most part.  But we lost some steam as we often do.  So, it was definitely a DIY year, but I feel we could have done more.  DD is tricky though.  She's a no-nonsense rule follower, and somehow I think that is playing out in our writing journey, but I can't put my finger on how exactly.  Too much detail in instruction overwhelms her, but left to her own, she does the bare minimum.  We're still finding our way.

Long story short, I ended up using pieces of Writer's Inc., R&S, Beyond the Book Report 3, Write With the Best 2, and then she wrote random essays for various topics.  Much of the year was CM type narrations to give her more chances to write freely since she was feeling bogged down by instruction at one point.  I'm sure I'm forgetting quite a bit of what she did, (I'll have to look), but off the top of my head she wrote on storms, Martin Luther, feudalism, cities in France, brief lit. analysis, book summary....  Throughout the year, we continued to generally follow the steps I listed above.

I will say that the simplest assignment that seemed to turn out the best was a R&S 7 assignment where she read from 2 sources, took notes, gave an oral report and turned it into a written paper.  Something about giving the oral report (to her dad) made the writing go much better for her. 

It was definitely nothing fancy, and probably considered more middle school level to some here, but I'm not going to sweat it.  I lean more CM for writing than anything.  Karen Glass's new book Know and Tell has been the most helpful book I've read in a long time, and my hope is to just follow that plan from now on, which is kind of what I was already doing.

Thanks so much! 

[aprilleigh]

I just wrote a long answer for you and when I hit submit it reverted to the original attempt I never posted. I give up.

Short answer, pick your favorite. What the rest of us do isn't relevant unless it works for you and your son. The only other consideration is how much writing he'll be expected to do for whatever it is he wants to do with his life. If he wants to be a chef, it's safe to go light on the writing. If he wants to be a lawyer, he's going to need a much heavier writing program to prepare for that.

[KeriJ]

I'd also love to hear hollyhock's thoughts as we are farther along this year.

[hollyhock2]

20 hours ago, KeriJ said:

I'd also love to hear hollyhock's thoughts as we are farther along this year.

 

Thanks, KeriJ. Well... my thoughts on my original questions in my first post go something like this: I don't actually think it matters very much. ? How's that?

One thing I have learned over the years is that the essay format is useful for any type of writing. I used to think essays were kind of useless, like you did them in high school and college, but which careers actually require them in real life? I have since come to realize that the format of an essay, with an intro, body paragraphs and conclusion, is useful for any type of writing. So that has sort of become my definition of an essay. I have also picked a favourite approach and I'm going with it. For me, it's Know and Tell by Karen Glass. It makes the most sense to me, and is the most logical next step from what we have been doing. My oldest has been writing an essay per week - outline, rough draft, edit - plus daily narrations in other subjects that are 2-3 paragraphs. I try to pick topics from his history, science or economics lessons so then I don't worry so much whether they are a certain type of essay. The variety of topics usually produces a variety of essay types without me having to think about it much.

I think, in the end, if a student learns to write a coherent paper with an intro, body paragraphs and conclusion that is well-structured and grammatically correct, all the other stuff either doesn't matter too much or can be learned fairly easily.

Also, I have to add that I highly doubt my students will have careers where they need to write much, so this approach may be too relaxed for some, but it works here.