There has been much emphasis on paragraph types with special names of OERO, MESL, TEEL, PEEL, PETAL .. Each teacher or school ascribes to a particular acronym and suddenly the composition of an essay has taken on a life of its own. I am fielding many calls and enquiries lately from parents and students feeling exasperated by the looming deadline of an essay and the overwhelming belief that this style of writing is vastly different from anything else.
Don’t get me wrong, there is an art to crafting an essay and composing a strong line of argument. However, this is not the expectation for high school students (initially).
An essay is a series of paragraphs and paragraphs are a series of sentences –> more and more I am finding the main tenant of difficulty to lie in the structuring of a coherent sentence that starts with the thing to be written about!
- This essay will discuss
- The author argues
- The technique of … is used to …
- This is effective because …
To support students to write essays we initially need to support them to talk about movies and books using textual sentence stems – these can easily be found online (search sentence stems for essays) – I plan to release some resources for this soon on my TeachersPayTeachers store and in the meantime think about the main sentence starters you’d like to see your students use in their writing and start having them use this in their talking.
Sam
