Newsela launched in 2013 with a bold mission: Meaningful classroom learning for every student. Today, our team constantly strives to deliver powerful solutions that inspire our users.
Students need writing practice across all subject areas to learn the relevant writing skills necessary for higher education, careers, and their adult lives. By practicing writing in subjects like ELA, social studies, and science, students get the chance to craft various pieces in multiple formats.
Today, we’re looking at six types of writing your students can practice across subjects and providing sample lessons you can use in your classroom immediately.
Different types of writing help authors reach the right audience, convey specific messages, and share information in the clearest way possible. Give students practice with these seven types of writing across all subjects:
1. Narrative writing
Narrative writing tells a story. This type of writing is familiar and accessible to most students because it often appears in books, TV shows or movies, video games, and oral stories. While all narratives don’t have to be in chronological order, it’s one of the most common ways to create this type of text with a clear beginning, middle, and end.
There are five main elements that any narrative text must have:
Plot: What happens in the narrative to take it from beginning to end?
Character(s): Who or what drives the plot?
Theme: What is the main idea or underlying message of the narrative?
Conflict: What problem or issue arises that affects the characters and plot?
Setting: Where does the narrative take place?
Narrative texts also rely on the narrator's point of view to share information and details with the reader. Whether told in first, second, or third person, point of view can affect how the audience sees the characters, follows the plot, and understands the theme.
Examples of narrative writing include:
Middle grade or YA fiction novels
Myths, fables, or fairy tales
Memoirs or autobiographies
Practice narrative writing in class
Use the Newsela ELA Hatch a Horrifying Plot text set to help students practice narrative writing. Students can learn how to create tales with the five main elements of narrative text using resources like:
An interactive video that explains the elements of fiction.
An article that explores what a rising action is in literature.
Expository writing explains concepts and shares information. It’s popular in nonfiction texts to help explain concepts or ideas. Expository writing is non-biased and contains facts, data, definitions, and statistics. It doesn’t try to persuade the audience to think a certain way.
For example, an essay on key moments in Harry Truman’s presidency would be an expository piece. “Why Harry Truman Was Our Best President” would be a persuasive essay instead.
Expository writing may also be confused with descriptive writing, especially when students learn about the two simultaneously. The biggest difference between them is that descriptive writing focuses on using the senses, while expository writing explains the details of a topic.
Examples of expository writing include:
Current event newspaper articles
Textbooks
Abstracts or summaries
Practice expository writing in class
Have students complete a short-form essay to practice expository writing. Use the prompt, “Why do dogs wag their tails?”
When students complete the activity on Newsela Writing, they can read an article on the topic at five different reading levels or have it read to them with a read-aloud feature. Students can use the article to inform their essay and cite relevant information in their explanations.
3. Technical writing
Technical writing helps make specialized, discipline-specific information more accessible to readers. It often includes step-by-step instructions, definitions, and summaries of complex information. It often uses expository and analytical writing elements within specific formats or templates. In fact, of all seven types, technical writing is most concerned with formatting and proper citations.
Technical writing doesn’t use figurative language, complex sentence structure, or creative writing elements. The tone of these texts is typically straightforward without a persuasive or biased angle. Unlike other types of writing, discipline-specific jargon is common in technical texts because the audience is familiar with it.
Examples of technical writing include:
Instruction manuals
Annual reports
Style guides
Practice technical writing in class
Need some writing practice ideas to add to your science lessons? Try our Science Writing text set. Students can learn how to craft pieces that go into a lab or science fair report, like the:
Report outline
Research question
Bibliography
4. Persuasive writing
A persuasive text, also called an argumentative or critical text, aims to get the reader or audience to see the author’s point of view on a topic or issue—and ultimately agree with it. This type of writing has subtle or overt biases and includes opinions, facts, quotes, and data. Persuasive writing often appears in nonfiction and focuses on a topic with at least two clear opposing sides.
Examples of persuasive writing include:
Opinion essays
Movie, book, or other media reviews
Advertisements
Speeches or debate transcripts
Practice persuasive writing in class
Have students complete a short-form argument to practice persuasive writing. Use the prompt, “Should breakdancing be an Olympic sport?”
When students complete the activity on Newsela Writing, they can read an article about Olympian Sunny Choi and her road to the 2024 Summer Olympic Games. Students can use the sentence checklist and rubric meters to ensure they include claims, evidence, and background information in their pieces.
5. Analytical writing
Analytical writing examines a topic or question from multiple angles. These pieces typically require writers to research or experiment, then group their facts and findings into categories or relationships.
Analytical writing may use elements of expository writing to share background information or research findings. Yet, it goes one step further by not just describing a topic but making hypotheses, examining data, and synthesizing something new.
Examples of analytical writing include:
Literary analysis essay
Results or findings section of a scientific paper
Historical event analysis essay
Practice analytical writing in class
Have students complete a short-form literary analysis to practice analytical writing. Use the prompt, “How does Poe build suspense?”
When students complete the activity on Newsela Writing, they’ll read “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe first, with the text included side-by-side with the writing prompt. Then, they’ll use at least two pieces of textual evidence to explain how Poe builds suspense in this story.
6. Creative writing
Creative writing focuses more on creative expression rather than sharing factual or objective information. This type of writing can use elements from all the other types, but reimagines them in new ways. For example, an author might use narrative writing, but try flashbacks instead of a linear construction.
The author doesn’t have to stick strictly to typical writing conventions in creative writing. They don’t have to tell any objective truths, cite facts or sources, or even adhere to the expectations of spelling and grammar. Instead, the primary goal is to elicit feelings, make the audience think, or simply share a creative work with others.
Examples of creative writing include:
Poetry
Plays
Creative nonfiction
Practice creative writing in class
Let students’ creativity flow with a Haiku project on Newsela ELA. They’ll learn:
What a haiku is.
How poets use haikus to share thoughts, feelings, and important information.
How to create their own haiku poem.
[Frequently asked questions about writing types](id-faq)
Still have questions about how the types of writing fit into your larger writing instruction and practice plans? Do your students still have questions about why the types of writing matter or how they compare to other literary terms they already know?
Browse these FAQs to get answers to any questions you or they may have on the topic.
Are genres and types of writing the same thing?
No, genres and types of writing are not the same things. Genres are categories of literary works, primarily fiction and nonfiction. Within those two are more subgenres like drama, poetry, horror, mystery, journalism, memoir, and more.
Genres help readers know what to expect before they start reading a text. For example, horror stories often contain scary, gory, or unexpected elements, while memoir tells details of a specific time or event in a real person’s life.
Genres can cross types of writing. For example, fiction and nonfiction both fit into creative writing. Realistic fiction, science fiction, and poetry may all use descriptive writing. Types and genres aren’t the same, but they work together to help authors decide how to convey information and readers decide if a text is something they’re interested in exploring.
Why is it essential for students to practice all types of writing?
Writing helps students learn critical thinking skills. It flexes their analysis, evaluation, and creation muscles more than just memorizing facts. Content knowledge is important, but learning is more than just collecting information. It’s what students do with that information that matters.
Practicing the seven types of writing helps students create tangible outputs that require them to intake, think about, share, and synthesize information. Practicing a variety of writing types in all subjects also helps:
Increase student engagement.
Gain disciplinary knowledge.
Boost writing scores on formative, interim, and summative assessments.
Are writing types and writing techniques the same things?
No, writing types and writing techniques are not the same things. Writing techniques are specific methods or strategies writers use to communicate information. You can use them within any of the six types of writing to make the purpose of the piece stick for your readers.
Descriptive writing, for example, is a writing technique. For example, someone writing a narrative may also use descriptive writing to share how a character or setting looks, sounds, or acts. It helps readers visualize something they can’t see or have never seen. It’s popular in fictional stories to help readers imagine fantasy worlds or what characters look like. Descriptive texts rely heavily on sensory details to convey a message, including sight, smell, sound, touch, and sometimes taste.
Descriptive writing may also use figurative language like metaphors and similes to compare the subject of the text to other people, places, things, or ideas.
Practice descriptive writing in class
Use the Newsela ELA Dizzying Descriptions text set to help students examine what it means to create descriptive writing. Students can learn how authors create a “movie” in their readers' minds by:
Watching a video about how to create descriptive stories.
Reading or rereading descriptive stories like “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “Vanishers.”
Adding descriptive paragraphs to their own story or essay drafts to practice what they learned.
How are the types of writing different from the purposes of writing?
The purpose of writing is why you share information. The type of writing is the format you use to do that. Explore the chart below to learn which purposes pair best with which types of writing:
Is a writing type the same as a writing style?
No, an author’s writing style is not the same as a writing type, or even the same as a writing purpose. An author’s writing style includes word choice, diction, sentence structure, and tone. It’s an author’s fingerprint or unique voice, and is easily recognizable.
For example, three students could write a literary analysis on Poe’s “The Raven.” The topic would be the same, the writing type would be the same, but how they shared the information on the page—even within the confines of a rubric or format—would differ.
[Nurture confident writers with Newsela Writing](id-newsela)
Newsela Writing is your writing assistant that helps students in grades 4-12 become confident writers. It gives immediate, rubric-aligned feedback and provides a continuous feedback loop that saves teachers time and increases student writing frequency and quality.
Newsela Writing can help students practice most of these seven writing types in any classroom. Not a Newsela customer yet? Sign up for Newsela Lite to start your free 45-day trial of our premium products—including Newsela Writing!
Everything you need to accelerate learning across ELA, social studies, and science
Products Overview
