Unit 2: Types of Academic Writing

2.1 Introduction and overview

This lesson will introduce learners to the four main types of academic writing. It will expound
on their features and the steps involved in writing those essays.

2.2 Learning Outcomes

By the end of the lesson, the learner should be able to:

✓ Demonstrate knowledge of the four types of academic writing
✓ Describe the features of each of the four types of academic writing
✓ Illustrate the steps of writing expository, narrative, descriptive and persuasive writing
✓ Distinguish between the different types of academic writing

2.3 Types of Academic Writing

There are four types of Academic Writing:
• Descriptive
• Narrative
• Expository
• Argumentative/Persuasive

2.3.1 Descriptive Writing

It is the clear description of people, places, objects, or events using appropriate details. An
effective description will contain sufficient and varied elaboration of details to communicate a
sense of the subject being described. Details used are usually sensory and selected to describe
what the writer sees, hears, smells, touches, and tastes. It sometimes called "showing writing"
is writing that describes a particular person, place or event in great detail.

Descriptive writing uses a lot of flowery adjectives and adverbs to describe what is going on
or how something appears. More than many other types of essays, descriptive essays strive to
create a deeply involved and vivid experience for the reader. Great descriptive essays achieve
this affect not through facts and statistics but by using detailed observations and descriptions.

What do you want to describe?

As you get started on your descriptive essay, it's important for you to identify exactly what you
want to describe. Often, a descriptive essay will focus on portraying one of the following:
• a person
• a place
• a memory
• an experience
• an object
Ultimately, whatever you can perceive or experience can be the focus of your descriptive
writing.

Why are you writing your descriptive essay?

When writing a descriptive essay, you often have a particular reason for writing your
description. Getting in touch with this reason can help you focus your description and imbue
your language with a particular perspective or emotion.

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Example: Imagine that you want to write a descriptive essay about your grandfather. You've
chosen to write about your grandfather's physical appearance and the way that he interacts with
people. However, rather than providing a general description of these aspects, you want to
convey your admiration for his strength and kindness. This is your reason for writing the
descriptive essay. To achieve this, you might focus one of your paragraphs on describing the
roughness of his hands, roughness resulting from the labor of his work throughout his life, but
you might also describe how he would hold your hands so gently with his rough hands when
having a conversation with you or when taking a walk.

How should you write your description?

Consider these two simple examples:
• I grew tired after dinner.
• As I leaned back and rested my head against the top of the chair, my eyelids
began to feel heavy, and the edges of the empty plate in front of me blurred with
the white tablecloth.

The first sentence tells readers that you grew tired after dinner. The second sentence shows
readers that you grew tired. The most effective descriptive essays are loaded with such showing
because they enable readers to imagine or experience something for themselves. As you write
your descriptive essay, the best way to create a vivid experience for your readers is to focus on
the five senses.
• sight
• sound
• smell
• touch
• taste

When you focus your descriptions on the senses, you provide vivid and specific details that
show your readers rather than tell your readers what you are describing.

2.4.4 Planning your descriptive essay:

When planning, you need to ask yourself the following questions
• What or who do you want to describe?
• What is your reason for writing your description?
• What are the particular qualities that you want to focus on?

Drafting your descriptive essay:

When planning, you need to ask yourself the following questions
• What sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures are important for developing your
description?
• Which details can you include to ensure that your readers gain a vivid impression
imbued with your emotion or perspective?

Revising your descriptive essay:

• Have you provided enough details and descriptions to enable your readers to gain a
complete and vivid perception?
• Have you left out any minor but important details?
• Have you used words that convey your emotion or perspective?
• Are there any unnecessary details in your description?
• Does each paragraph of your essay focus on one aspect of your description?

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 • Are your paragraphs ordered in the most effective way?

2. 3.2 Narrative Writing

The primary purpose of narrative writing is to describe an experience, event, or sequence of
events in the form of a story.
The general characteristics of narrative writing include:
1. Revealing something of importance – narratives make a point and that point is usually
defined in the first sentence but may appear as the last sentence in the first paragraph
2. Depicting characters and setting vividly – bring the story to life by using your senses to
depict the events of the story: how does it look, sound, feel, smell. Include the important events
that make up the story in enough detail for your readers to understand what happened while
avoiding any details that do not relate to the main point.
3. Showing, not telling – use vivid and precise verbs when describing your events.
4. Presenting events in a clear, chronological order – use a logical progression with good
transitions when moving from point-to-point.
5. Usually written in the first person, that is using, “I”. However, third person can also be used.

Types of Narratives
• Realistic Fiction
• Short Stories
• Folktales Tall tales
• Myths
• Fables
• Legends
• Autobiographies
• Fantasies
• Historical Fiction
• Mystery
• Science Fiction Plays

Writing a narrative essay

If you choose to write a narrative, it should be a story in which either you or someone you
know well was actually involved. You should avoid stories that simply recount accidents. What
I mean is this: a good story needs to have the element of choice in it. If you describe an accident,
youneed to show that decisions led up to it. This story should be about people, about the
decisions they make and the consequences that follow.

A narrative is a moving picture. Like description, narratives need to have a rich texture of
details so that the reader is seeing, hearing, smelling, and touching. The reader should
experience the story, not simply hear it.

Stories add the element of time to description. Often stories start at the beginning and then
follow the sequence of events chronologically. However, an effective variation on this pattern
is to start in the middle of things and then use flashbacks to fill in the background information.
This method is especially effective in holding the reader's attention.

There are two extremes you want to avoid in writing a narrative. First, you can simply tell the
story, event by event, without giving it any texture because you leave out descriptive details
and dialogue. At the opposite extreme is a narrative that attempts to tell everything, painting

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detailed descriptions of every scene, quoting everything that is said, even speculating about the
thoughts of the characters. A good narrative has texture, but it is suggestive rather than
exhaustive. After all, the reader's imagination needs some room to fill in details. Giving too
many details not only overwhelms the reader's imagination, it also slows the pace of the
narrative.

Pacing is an important concept in narrative writing. Basically, pacing means that the writer
sometimes slows the pace by putting more detail in, but sometimes she also hurries over details.
A good way to know where to put in details and where to leave them out is to think of a narrative
as consisting of episodes (smaller scenes that are strung together to make up a longer story). If
you divide your story into a few short episodes, then you want suggestive detail within the
episodes, but you want to hurry over the transitions between them. Think of episodes as pearls
on a string. Make the pearls full orbed; keep the string stringy. The reader dwells in the
episodes, but she needs to be oriented to them, and that is the function of the transitions.

As with description, point of view is important. What position is the story being told from?
Another way of talking about this is to talk about the story's narrator. The narrator is not the
writer, but the consciousness through which the story is told. Sometimes the story is told in
third person, which means that everyone is referred to as he, or she, or they. Sometimes,
however, it is told in first person, which means that the narrator refers to himself as "I" and is
actually involved in the story. Not all narrators are reliable.

The more sophisticated narratives become, the more problematic is the narrator. When the
narrator tells the story in first person, but details in the story lead the reader to suspect that the
narrator is not reliable, the result is irony. Irony is a narrative condition in which the reader and
the writer share a common judgmental attitude toward the narrator, or when the reader knows
more than the narrator and characters in the story.

For this assignment, it is probably better to tell the story as straight as possible. Irony is hard
to pull off successfully. If you want to experiment with narrative form, I would suggest that
you start somewhere in the middle of things and then use flashbacks. Also work on putting in
suggestive but not overwhelming detail and dialogue. Try dividing your story into short
episodes that build on each other. If you can pattern a sequence of events so that the story has
some kind of climax (a scene of great tension and even explosion) followed by a denouement
(a scene in which everything is worked out), you will have done more than many of us can.

2.3.3 Expository Writing

The primary goal of expository writing is to deliver information about an issue, subject,
method, or idea.

Exposition is explanatory communication, whether in speech or writing. So an expository

essay is an organized piece of prose which explains a specific topic or set of ideas to a
defined audience. Expository essays include those written for exams or for standardized tests
like the SAT. They may also be assignments composed outside of class.

Expository essays provide information and analysis. An expository essay may or may not
have an overt central argument, though it does set forth points of view on the topic. It differs
from the persuasive research paper in the level of research and argument it employs. While
an expository essay should be focused on a particular topic and illustrate its points with
specific examples, it doesn’t usually have the depth of research or argument that you need in

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a major research assignment. With an exam or a standardized test, for instance, the examples
you use to support your points will be based on the knowledge already inside your head.

What Are the Elements of an Expository Essay?

An expository essay does have certain baseline requirements that are standard in nearly every
essay type
• A clear thesis or controlling idea that establishes and sustains your focus.
• An opening paragraph that introduces the thesis.
• Body paragraphs that use specific evidence to illustrate your informative or analytic
points.
• Smooth transitions that connect the ideas of adjoining paragraphs in specific,
interesting ways.
• A conclusion that emphasizes your central idea without being repetitive.

How Do You Write an Expository Essay?

One common formula for the expository essay is the 5-Paragraph Essay. If you don’t have
much experience with essay writing, this is a good method to start with, since it’s basic and
straightforward. The 5-Paragraph Essay incorporates the elements listed above in the
following basic structure:
1. Introductory paragraph with a clear, concise thesis.
2. Three body paragraphs that offer evidence and analysis connecting that evidence to
the thesis.
3. A concluding paragraph that sums up the paper by reevaluating the thesis in light of
the evidence discussed in the essay’s body.

While the 5-paragraph structure gives you a helpful formula to work with, it’s only one among
many valid options, and its suitability will depend on other factors like the length and
complexity of your essay. If you’re writing a paper that’s more than 3 or 4 pages long, it
should be more than 5 paragraphs. In most cases, the structure of a longer essay will be similar
to that of the 5-paragraph essay, with an introduction, a conclusion and body paragraphs
performing the same basic functions—only the number of body paragraphs will increase. The
length of the paragraphs may also increase slightly in proportion to the length of the essay.

Writing Expository Essays: Guidelines and Tips

In order to write great expository essays, it's important to understand exactly what expository
writing is. Expository writing is any type of writing that is used to describe, explain, or inform.
In a nutshell, expository writing is used to convey information from writer to reader.

• STEP ONE: SELECTING A TOPIC

If your professor assigns you a specific topic to write about, then this step is
completed before you even begin. However, often the teacher will allow students to
choose their own essay topic, so it is important to be able to choose effectively. This
is also true is the professor proposed a broad topic, but demands that you write about
a particular facet of that larger subject.

Whenever choosing an expository essay topic, it is important to narrow down your

choice so that it is appropriate to the essay length requirements. For example, if the
professor has assigned a two-page essay, it is not a good idea to choose an expansive
topic such as "The History of the Civil War." There would simply not be enough

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 room within two pages to adequately cover the topic. Conversely, if the professor
wants an especially lengthy essay, do not choose too narrow of a topic so that it
becomes difficult to fill up the pages with information.

STEP TWO: CHOOSE A DEVELOPMENTAL PATTERN

There are a variety of ways to develop a custom expository essay, just as there is a
variety of ways to convey information. The following are just a few examples of the
developmental patterns you can adopt for your own essay:

Definition - This may be the most straightforward of the developmental patterns. As

its name suggests, you will simply use the expository essay to thoroughly define a
topic.

Example - In this developmental pattern, you will provide and describe an example of
a particular subject or group.

Cause and Effect - With this developmental pattern, you will illustrate the
relationship between to variables, one dependent on the other. Describe the many
ways in which this particular variable affects the other, and explain why it does so.

Classification - This developmental pattern is used to categorize multiple subjects

into separate or distinct groups by certain criteria.

Compare and Contrast - With this developmental pattern, the writer will examine
both the similarities and the differences between two or more distinct subjects.

STEP THREE: CHOOSE AN ORGANIZATIONAL PATTERN

The choice of organizational pattern really depends upon the length of the essay. For
shorter essays, teachers often espouse the "five paragraph" organizational pattern, in
which there is one introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a concluding
paragraph. Of course, this is not feasible if the essay is of longer length, but it is
important to provide both an introduction and a conclusion, regardless of length.

STEP FOUR: PERFORM ADEQUATE RESEARCH ON YOUR TOPIC

Too often students begin writing expository essays without first having learned about
their subject. If the teacher requires you to write the essay with knowledge from the top
of your head, then obviously you will not have to perform research. However, if this is
not the case then it is vital that you take some time to learn about your topic before
beginning to write. Doing so will only lead to a much stronger essay.

2.3.4 Persuasive or Argumentative Writing

In persuasive or argumentative writing, we try to convince others to agree with our facts, share
our values, and accept our argument and conclusions.
Elements toward building a good persuasive essay include

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Guidelines in writing an argumentative essay
1) A clear, concise, and defined thesis statement that occurs in the first paragraph of the
essay.
In the first paragraph of an argument essay, students should set the context by reviewing the
topic in a general way. Next the author should explain why the topic is important (exigence) or
why readers should care about the issue. Lastly, students should present the thesis statement. It
is essential that this thesis statement be appropriately narrowed to follow the guidelines set
forth in the assignment. If the student does not master this portion of the essay, it will be quite
difficult to compose an effective or persuasive essay.
2) Clear and logical transitions between the introduction, body, and conclusion.
Transitions are the mortar that holds the foundation of the essay together. Without logical
progression of thought, the reader is unable to follow the essay’s argument, and the structure
will collapse. Transitions should wrap up the idea from the previous section and introduce the
idea that is to follow in the next section.
3) Body paragraphs that include evidential support.
Each paragraph should be limited to the discussion of one general idea. This will allow for
clarity and direction throughout the essay. In addition, such conciseness creates an ease of
readability for one’s audience. It is important to note that each paragraph in the body of the
essay must have some logical connection to the thesis statement in the opening paragraph.
Some paragraphs will directly support the thesis statement with evidence collected during
research. It is also important to explain how and why the evidence supports the thesis (warrant).
However, argumentative essays should also consider and explain differing points of view
regarding the topic. Depending on the length of the assignment, students should dedicate one
or two paragraphs of an argumentative essay to discussing conflicting opinions on the topic.
Rather than explaining how these differing opinions are wrong outright, students should note
how opinions that do not align with their thesis might not be well informed or how they might
be out of date.
4) Evidential support (whether factual, logical, statistical, or anecdotal).
The argumentative essay requires well-researched, accurate, detailed, and current information
to support the thesis statement and consider other points of view. Some factual, logical,
statistical, or anecdotal evidence should support the thesis. However, students must consider
multiple points of view when collecting evidence. As noted in the paragraph above, a
successful and well-rounded argumentative essay will also discuss opinions not aligning with
the thesis. It is unethical to exclude evidence that may not support the thesis. It is not the
student’s job to point out how other positions are wrong outright, but rather to explain how
other positions may not be well informed or up to date on the topic.
5) A conclusion that does not simply restate the thesis, but readdresses it in light of the
evidence provided.
It is at this point of the essay that students may begin to struggle. This is the portion of the
essay that will leave the most immediate impression on the mind of the reader. Therefore, it
must be effective and logical. Do not introduce any new information into the conclusion; rather,
synthesize the information presented in the body of the essay. Restate why the topic is
important, review the main points, and review your thesis. You may also want to include a
short discussion of more research that should be completed in light of your work.

A Complete Argument
Perhaps it is helpful to think of an essay in terms of a conversation or debate with a classmate.
If I were to discuss the cause of World War II and its current effect on those who lived through
the tumultuous time, there would be a beginning, middle, and end to the conversation. In fact,
if I were to end the argument in the middle of my second point, questions would arise

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concerning the current effects on those who lived through the conflict. Therefore, the
argumentative essay must be complete, and logically so, leaving no doubt as to its intent or
argument.

The Five-Paragraph Essay

A common method for writing an argumentative essay is the five-paragraph approach. This is,
however, by no means the only formula for writing such essays. If it sounds straightforward,
that is because it is; in fact, the method consists of:
1) An introductory paragraph
2) Three evidentiary body paragraphs that may include discussion of opposing views and
3) A conclusion.

Longer Argumentative Essays

Complex issues and detailed research call for complex and detailed essays. Argumentative
essays discussing a number of research sources or empirical research will most certainly be
longer than five paragraphs. Authors may have to discuss the context surrounding the topic,
sources of information and their credibility, as well as a number of different opinions on the
issue before concluding the essay. Many of these factors will be determined by the assignment.

2.4 Summary
There are four main types of academic writing discussed in this chapter. Each of these have
their special features and ways of execution. As a learner, it is important to know the type of
writing that you need to use at different times.

2.5 Personal Reflection

1. Write an essay of your own topic to demonstrate the four different types of academic
writing
2. Using the stories provided in the appendices, illustrate the main features of the different
types
3. Compare and contrast expository and argumentative essays

2.6 References
Becker, H. S. (2007). Article. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cumming, A. (2006). Goals for academic writing: ESL students and their instructors. John
Benjamins Publishing Company.

Flemming, L. E. (1986). Making your point: A guide to college writing. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co.

Murray, R. (2006).Handbook of academic writing: A fresh approach. Moore: Sarah Open

University Press.

Peter, C. B. (1994). Eldoret: Zapf Chancery.