Teaching Analytical Writing: Essay Skeletons

Hi there! I’m back with the third installment of my series on teaching analytical writing. Last time, I explained the TIQA paragraph, which I see as the building block of an analytical essay, and described how I give students a lot of practice writing analytical paragraphs before moving onto essays.

When it’s time to move onto analytical essays, I lay the groundwork in a couple of ways. First, I tell students about the essay topics I plan to give them as we are reading the book they will be writing about. We look out for quotes that relate to those topics together, and I encourage them to look out for additional quotes on their own. That way they’re not starting from scratch when it comes time to find quotes for their essays.

Once we’ve finished the book, I have students choose an essay topic. I can provide scaffolding for students who need it by steering them toward one of the topics we found quotes for during class, while I can encourage other students to branch out to topics we haven’t spent much class time exploring or even to come up with topics on their own.

Next, each student creates an essay skeleton. The essay skeleton includes their thesis statement, their topic sentences, and the quotes they will use in their body paragraphs. (For eighth grade I require that at least one of the body paragraphs includes a second quote and follows the TIQATIQA format. For seventh graders I don’t require a double TIQA paragraph, but some students choose to write them.)

The essay skeleton provides the core of the essay that students will be writing. It isn’t too difficult for me to give prompt feedback to each student on a thesis statement, topic sentences, and quotes, and I find that it’s worth it to look at these elements of their essays before they move forward with drafting. The bottom line is, it’s impossible to write a successful essay without a decent thesis or with quotes that don’t match up with the thesis.

So how do you teach students to write a good thesis statement? Here is my explanation of thesis statements, adapted from a handout I made for seventh graders writing essays about Howard Fast’s novel April Morning. If students are struggling to grasp thesis statements, it can work well to create some faulty thesis statements, model the process of fixing one, and then have students work together to fix another.

Interested in tips for explaining topic sentences? Here’s my explanation of topic sentences, using the same example thesis from the April Morning thesis resource. It can work well to have the class practice breaking down a model thesis into effective topic sentences before students try to write their own.

Once students have their essay skeletons, they draft their body paragraphs, using the TIQA format, and then after that, we move on to introductions and conclusions. Next time I’ll explain my reasoning for leaving the introduction and conclusion until the end, and I’ll share handouts I use for those two parts of the essay.