The Main Types Of An Informative Essay: Tips For High School Students
High school students are frequently asked to compose informative papers on a wide variety of topics. To succeed, it is essential to read the writing prompts or questions from your assignment carefully, and decide which essay type to pursue. Informative, or in other words, expository papers, can be subdivided into several main groups. They are very similar in nature, and all of them have one common aim: to share information on some issue in an objective and unbiased way. Facts, examples, and statistics are cornerstones of this kind of academic writing. Here are some tips for high school students on how to distinguish different types of an informative essay and how to treat each of them.
- Describe the process of completing a task in a process essay.
- Interpret and make conclusions in an analysis essay.
- Divide an issue into categories in a classification essay.
- Explain the meaning of an issue in a definition essay.
- Look for causes and discover effects in a cause/effect essay.
This type of informative writing explains how to do something and what steps should be taken to succeed. The steps are usually provided in a chronological order. Topic examples for such a paper may sound like, “psychological tricks on how to make children read more.”
You should analyze all information on an issue to create a strong analysis paper. Collect data on some event, problem, or idea, find out how the data correlate, and draw your conclusions. For example, such a paper may be devoted to analyzing the results of an experiment about breakfast preferences among schoolchildren.
In this type of informative writing, you should describe things in terms of the categories they belong to. A paper about different hospitality styles all over the world is an example of classification writing.
If you have to describe what something is, don’t turn to a dictionary. Suggest your view on the subject or discover what other people think of it. A proper topic example for a definition paper will sound like, “What does it mean to be a patriot?”
What are the causes of a particular event, phenomenon, or thought? What are the effects? Combine these two analyses in your informative research project, and you’ll be able to see the whole picture. A paper about the causes and effects of teens’ inferiority complexes belongs to this writing type.
As you see, information can be shared with your reader in many possible ways. Choose any informative writing type you like, stick to it, and you will get a quality paper as a result.