How to Incorporate the Three Types of Common Core Writing in Your Class

For more information about the three types of Common Core writing, refer to our earlier The Three Types of Common Core Writing Defined post.

According to the new Common Core Standards, literacy is the responsibility of all subject teachers. In order to get students writing for these new standards, you’ll have to first understand what kind of writing they are expected to do. The three types of writing as defined by the common core are informative, argument, and narrative. Once you understand the three types of writing, you’ll still have to start incorporating them into your classes.

So how can subject teachers get students writing informative, argumentative, or narrative pieces?

These are my suggestions for including each of the three kinds of writing into your subject classes.

Use informative writing when you want students to straightforwardly convey information without any opinion.

Want to get a little more creative with this type of writing? Think about a specific audience. Students could create a picture book to explain the way that the parts of the cell work in conjunction with each other or they could write and publish an online blog post about the steps to changing a flat tire. They could create a how-to with illustrations or photographs to explain how a bill becomes law or the steps to solving a math problem. They could research famous examples of the growth mindset and then present that information to their classmates in a short informational essay. When they consider their audience and how best to convey content that they have learned in class, they will write informational essays that are meaningful and interesting.

When you want students to do more analysis, to really do some thinking and come up with their own ideas based on the evidence, then it’s time to assign an argumentative essay.

Want to really teach your students to think for themselves? Let them examine the evidence and come up with their own conclusions without a prompt of any kind. In many ways, this kind of writing is the most difficult, but it is often considered the most important kind of writing. Students need to learn how to think for themselves, and they have to learn that they can’t ignore the evidence when they formulate those ideas. So assign them an essay in which they argue why solar energy is key to reducing climate change or get them to write an in which they argue whether or not the American dream is available to all. Want a more practical outcome for an argument piece? Task students with researching a local issue—playground vandalism or river pollution or budget issues in the local school district—and then have them analyze the evidence, come up with a solution to the problem, and then write a letter to the local paper in which they argue why their solution is the best.

Assign a narrative piece when you want students to explore the bigger themes or emotions of a lesson in a less structured way.

Narrative writing might seem like a stretch for non-ELA classes, and for the most part, it really is the jurisdiction of the English teacher. But that’s not to say that you can’t incorporate creative writing in other subject areas as well. Perhaps students use the vocabulary that they have learned about human anatomy to create a poem, or maybe students write a short story in which the main character has to solve a math mystery and the narrative deals with themes of problem solving and perseverance. Historical fiction that is based on actual research and facts about a time period is great, and when students can convey the mood or atmosphere of that era—the excitement of the progressive era or the oppression of the industrial period on a young factory worker—they have understood the material at a whole new level. This kind of assignment doesn't have to be just something fun—narrative writing can help students to really internalize the ideas they are taught.

In fact, as long as you create the assignment around content and audience, you almost can’t go wrong. Don't worry about designing a rubric that takes off points for every single spelling mistake or grammar error. Students will feel defeated and you will spend hours marking up papers that probably won’t even be looked at.

Think about what you want students to know and how you want them to convey that content to a reader—as straightforward information, as an argument to convince their reader that their idea is the best, or as a narrative to convey the feelings or experience related to a topic.

Overwhelmed by the new requirements of the Common Core Standards? Check out this simple and informative infographic for more information.

Christina Gil was a high-school English teacher for sixteen years, but she recently left the classroom to follow a dream and move with her family to an ecovillage in rural Missouri. She believes that teaching creative writing helps students excel on standardized tests, that deeply analyzing and unpacking a poem is a fabulous way to spend an hour or so, and that Shakespeare is always better with sound effects. When she is not hauling water to her tiny home, she can be found homeschooling her two kids or meeting with her neighbors about the best way to run their village.

How to Incorporate the Three Types of Common Core Writing in Your Class

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