Narrative writing

  A narrative story tells a story based on a real or fictional person, place, event, or experience.  It should include specific detail to liven up the story.  It requires a beginning, middle, and ending that wraps up the story.  In grades 3-5 dialogue is a good idea.  The idea of a narrative is to tell a coherent story in chronological order that is interesting provides good detail and description, clearly expresses the writer's voice, is imaginative, and does not contain extraneous side stories.  It is not an essay, and therefore paragraphing is not a important.

 Expository essay

    An expository essay gives information and explains either why, how, or what.  The support in the middle of an essay should provide specific examples or relate an incident to further clarify or explain the topic with straying off topic.  The author is explaining, not trying to persuade.  Generally, an expository has 4 or 5 paragraphs.

Four Basic Elements of Effective Writing

Focus:

• clearly focus topic
• maintains focus using concrete main ideas
• remains unified throughout; lack loosely related details

Organization

• is structured; organized around a pattern
• arranges ideas logically
• uses transitional devices effectively, both between and within paragraphs

 Support

• proves and illustrates main points with ancedotes, examples, facts
• uses mature, precise word choice, accurate verbs, and specific nouns 

Conventions

• uses a variety of sentence structures
• is relatively free of mechanical and spelling errors