4 Must-Teach Essay Writing Skills to Boost Student Writing

By The Daring English Teacher


If you are tired of reading “This quote shows” or scanning over quoted evidence that is five lines long in your students’ essays, I’ve got the perfect solution to help you boost your students’ writing! Teaching these four essay writing skills is essential to transform decent, formulaic writing into stand-out, exemplary writing.

These are the four must-teach essay writing skills: writing effective commentary, writing in the third person, writing in the literary present, and properly using brackets and ellipses to pare down only the essential information for cited quotes.

However, Teaching these skills all at once is much too daunting of a task. Instead, teaching these skills one at a time and providing students with dedicated time to practice each skill before moving on to the next one is more beneficial and more effective. Furthermore, students must have a basic understanding of essay and formulaic writing before teaching these skills!

All of the resources mentioned below in skills 1-4 are available in a money-saving bundle that is sure to help improve your students’ writing: Focused Essay Writing Skills Unit - Teaching 4 Focused Writing Lessons.

Essay Writing Skill 1: Effective Commentary Writing

Teaching students how to write meaningful commentary is one of the best ways to see a dramatic improvement in their writing. After years of formulaic writing instruction and practice, many high school students are stuck at and almost refuse to move beyond the standard sentence starter “This quote shows…” that they’ve learned from their elementary and early middle school years.

It is worth noting that sentence starters such as the infamous “This quote shows…” are essential and developmentally appropriate for younger students during initial essay writing instruction. However, as these students transition to eighth grade and high school, expanding beyond “This quote shows…” helps a student elevate the commentary and analysis in their writing.

The two most effective strategies for teaching students how to write effective commentary are exemplar sentences and detailed sentence frames. These strategies are included in this teaching unit: Essay Writing Skills - How to Write Commentary and Analyze Quotes in Essays.

Exemplar sentences are crucial for students to learn this skill because they’ve been writing “This quote shows…” for so long that they need to see how to write commentary differently. The use of sentence frames helps students build off what they see with the exemplar sentences by providing them with the necessary framework for writing their commentary sentences.

Here is an example. Let’s take President Roosevelt’s famous quote from his speech about Pearl Harbor.

“Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

If students were to quote this in an essay, the goal is to move the commentary from “In this quote, the President states that the U.S. was attacked” to “In announcing the attack, Roosevelt makes it clear that the attack was planned ahead of time. Words like ‘suddenly’ and ‘deliberately’ show his audience that the U.S. was targeted and caught off-guard by the attack.” Do you see how powerful this difference is? The latter sentence would serve as an exemplary sentence for the students.

Here is what a sentence frame might look like:
When [author] __________, [pronoun] [strong verb] ________________________.


You can find more instruction, examples, and dedicated practice in this unit: Essay Writing Skills - How to Write Commentary and Analyze Quotes in Essays.

Essay Writing Skill 2: Writing in the Third Person

While students learn all about writing first, second, and third person during their early elementary years, there is a keen difference between being able to identify point-of-view and consistently writing in one point-of-view.

One of the best ways to quickly improve student writing is by teaching them to take themselves out of the essay. That is, stop writing in the first and second person.

Rather than having a student write, “I believe that schools should not require students to wear uniforms because uniforms restrict student expression,” the statement “Schools shouldn’t require students to wear uniforms because they limit and restrict student expression” is much stronger. One of the main reasons why the latter is a stronger statement is because it sounds more assertive and less wishy-washy. Just the phrase “I believe” detracts from the power of the student’s initial claim.

In my classroom, especially for the students who use the “I think,” or “I believe” sentence starters, I encourage them to use those phrases at first if they need to, and then delete the words afterward.


By teaching students how to write in the third person, students will gradually elevate their writing. You can teach this writing skill with this unit: Essay Writing Skills - How to Write in the Third Person. Your students will benefit from the unit’s side-by-side examples that clearly demonstrate to students why the third person is so much more powerful.


Essay Writing Skill 3: Writing in the Literary Present Tense

Once students have a solid understanding of writing effective commentary and consistently writing in the third person, another essential essay writing skill to teach them is the literary present tense.

When writing about literature, the literary present tense is the most conventional tense for academic writing. With the literary present, students wite about events and examples from literature in the present tense - as if they are currently happening.

The literary present is sometimes a difficult concept for students, especially because they already read the book, the events in the book already happened, and the characters already said that they said. The literary present tense extends beyond just works of literature too. It also applies to films, paintings, and other artistic expressions.

The best strategy for teaching students the literary present tense is exemplar sentences, and lots of them. Since writing in the literary present tense is so challenging for students, the more examples they see, the better. It is also helpful to employ the literary present tense as a teacher when discussing and reviewing literature in class. The more exposure students have to the literary present tense, the more they will begin to write with it naturally.

Rather than saying Romeo was lovesick for Rosaline at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, say that Romeo is lovesick for Rosaline. Rather than saying Romeo met Juliet at the masquerade, explain to students that Romeo meets Juliet at the masquerade.


In this resource, Essay Writing Skills - How to Write in the Literary Present Tense, the instructional presentation explains and breaks down the literary present tens, and there are multiple examples to help students understand how valuable it is.

Essay Writing Skill 4: Using Brackets and Ellipses in Quoted Evidence

One of the final essay writing skills to teach students is to use brackets and ellipses in the evidence they cite in their writing. This skill helps improve student essays in two unique ways: the essay will grammatically fit in the essay and students will only use the most crucial part of the quote.

By teaching students how to use brackets and ellipses in the evidence they choose for their essays, it helps the quotes fit in more seamlessly while also ensuring that the cited quote doesn’t take up a quarter of the page (because we’ve all read those essays).

To teach this skill, one teaching tip is to have students identify the entire quote they wish to use, highlight the most important part of it, and then begin their sentence by paraphrasing the beginning of the quote to add context to the evidence sentence. They can also remove unneeded material from the quote by using the ellipse.

From there, have students read part of their essay with the quote embedded aloud. This will help students identify any tense errors or ambiguous parts of the quote that can be eliminated and clarified using brackets.

To help your students effectively use brackets and ellipses in their cited evidence, you might be interested in this teaching unit: Essay Writing Skills - How to Use Brackets and Ellipses in Quotes and Evidence.

More Ways to Help Your Students

If you are looking for additional teaching tools and resources for helping your students become stronger writers, I’d like to recommend my teacher professional development book “Building Strong Writers: Strategies and Scaffolds for Teaching Writing in Secondary ELA” to you! I wrote this book to help teachers with writing instruction, and I filled it with strategies and actionable activities that teachers can immediately apply to their own classroom instruction!

You can also check out a previous blog post I wrote about breaking down the writing process. 

More Essay Skills Teaching Resources:




loading..
Back to Top