creative approaches to essay writing 1

• TARR’S TOOLBOX

Email Address

10 creative approaches for developing essay-writing skills

Overview: 10 tips for improving essay writing.

The knack of writing a good essay in a subject like history is a skill which is a challenge to acquire for many students, but immensely rewarding and useful. The ability to carry a reader along with a well-crafted argument is no easy feat, since it involves carefully synthesising the creative arts of the storyteller with the scientific rigour of the evidence-driven empiricist.

With this in mind, it is not enough to simply take in an essay, mark it and provide feedback, and then hurry on to the next lesson or activity. Much better is to take in a first draft of the essay, involve the students in some reflection and redrafting, and then take it in for final marking so that the advice is immediately being put into effect rather than going stale whilst the class awaits the next essay assignment several weeks later.

Listed below are a few activities that can be used to help students improve their essay-writing skills after their initial draft of work has been completed.

To accompany this post, you may wish to read these other entries on Tarr’s Toolbox:

• Compare first paragraph of several books to analyse stylistic techniques
• Develop links between factors using a “Connection Web” template
• “Linkage Bingo” to summarise and connect key factors
• Using Hexagon Learning for categorisation, linkage and prioritisation
• Visual essay-writing: cartoons, sticky-notes and plenty of collaboration!
• Use the “Keyword Checker” to ensure student essays cover the essentials
• Rubric Grids: Essay Marking Made Easy!
• Using the “Battleships” format to Teach Historical Interpretations
• Sticky-notes and project nests: collaborate, collate, categorise, connect
• Connecting Factors with “Paper People” display projects

Sample Exercises

1. analysis skills.

• “The Skeleton”

▪ Produce an essay plan which contains merely the first sentence of each paragraph. Leave space underneath each sentence so it can be completed.

▪ Pass your essay to a partner. Their job is to explain the points you make using evidence.

▪ Finally, take your essay back (or pass it to a third person) to write a conclusion.

• “Objection!”

▪ Take your own (or someone else’s) completed essay. Read out just the first sentence of each paragraph to a partner or to the class. If at any point anyone in the class thinks that an opening sentence is a narrative statement of fact rather than an analytical argument they should say “objection” and explain why. Develop your opening statements until the class is happy with the finished piece.

• “Flowchart”

▪ Take your own (or someone else’s) completed essay. Read out just the first sentence of each paragraph to someone else in the class, who has the task of summarising your argument on the board in the form of a flowchart.

▪ A poorly constructed essay will consist of simple narrative statements.

▪ An adequately constructed essay will consist of isolated analytical statements.

▪ A well constructed essay will consist of analytical statements, linked together in a logical way.

2. Narrative Skills: “Mr. Interpretation”

▪ Read out a sentence of factual detail to someone else in the class from your essay. Their job is to provide an analytical point that it illustrates, for example:

▪ Person 1 presents a fact – “Tsarina Alexandra was German by birth”

▪ Person 2 the interpretation – “Provides explanation for opposition to Tsar during WW1”

Any student unable to provide an interpretation promptly is “knocked out” of the game. The winner is the “last person standing”.

3. Source Evaluation Skills: “Mr. Sceptical”

▪ This is the same as “Mr. Interpretation” except a third person in each “round” has to show an awareness of the limitations of the evidence:

▪ Person 1 presents a fact – “Tsar Nicholas was ‘not fit to run a village post office’ (Trotsky)”

▪ Person 3 the limitations – “But Trotsky was a hostile witness”, “But the Russians were deeply loyal to the principle of Tsarism”.

4. Challenging the Question: “Mr. Angry”

▪ Take a list of sample questions from past exam papers. For each one, copy it down and then underneath explain

▪ What loaded assumptions are within it.

▪ Why these are quite obviously completely and utterly wrong.

5. Structural Skills: Where are the paragraphs?

▪The teacher should take an article available in a digital format (e.g. from the History Today archives), paste it into a Word document, and then remove all of the paragraph marks and (as a final act of stylistic sadism) make it ‘fully justified’. Students should then be presented with this essay from hell, and challenged to deduce by reading it carefully where they think that each of the original paragraphs began. This can then lead into a discussion about how a writer determines when to start a new paragraph – for example, when they are about to make a brand new point in relation to the question,

6. Structural Skills: How effective are the topic sentences?

7. avoiding stock responses: “rewrite the model essay”.

▪ Take a model essay or an article provided by your teacher which answers a central question.

▪ Now examine past exam papers to see what other questions have been asked on this theme. In what ways would you need to re-write and re-structure the essay to focus on this question given?

8. Focusing on the command terms: “Guess the title of the essay”

▪ Another technique is for the students to copy and paste the entire article / essay into a piece of Word Cloud software such as Wordle or Taxedo. Students then have to guess the title of the essay from the results. If a writer has clearly focused on the command terms then these will appear at a higher frequency in the word count and therefore will be displayed more prominently in the word cloud.

9. Only incorporate a quote / historiography when you DISAGREE with it

▪ Using quotes in essays is too often a technique used by students to avoid thinking for themselves. Worst of all is the paragraph which is effectively a potted summary of another writer’s point of view. To avoid this, students should be asked to remove any quotes which they actually agree with. Instead, they should use quotes as a means of setting up a debate and demonstrating clear evidence of independent thinking (“Although AJP Taylor argued that…(quote)…this does not bear close scrutiny because…(contrary evidence))”.

10. General advice: The shape of an essay

A. in the introduction….

▪ Demonstrate understanding of the question. Clarify any key concepts that are mentioned (“Marxist”, “Propaganda”); outline which events and time period you will consider, and why

▪ Signpost the reader through your essay . In other words, give a very brief overview of how you plan to tackle the question.

b. In the main body of the essay…

▪ Start each paragraph with an argument (analysis). If you read the first sentence of each paragraph when you have finished, you should find that you have a summary of your case.

▪ Proceed to explain this point using evidence (including quotes from historians). The more specific this evidence is, the better.

▪ Wherever possible, explain why this evidence is valuable, or acknowledge its limitations.

c. In the conclusion…

▪ Answer the question by such things as

▪ Showing how your factors link together

▪ Showing how it depends on where / when / at whom you are looking

▪ Challenge the question by tackling any assumptions within it:

▪ E.g. “Why did the League of Nations only last 20 years?” suggests that this is a dismal record; you could make the point that the surprising thing is that it lasted so long as this given all the overwhelming problems it faced.

Save £500 when you enrol by 30th September!

• 7 Techniques from Creative Writing You Can Use to Improve Your Essays

You wouldn’t have thought that essays have much in common with creative writing.

Creative writing, by definition, involves being ‘creative’: making things up, letting your imagination run wild. Essays are about being factual and objective, communicating ideas and arguments in the clearest way possible and attempting to enhance the reader’s knowledge, rather than their imagination. But while the literary devices and colourful tales we associate with creative writing are indeed out of place in an essay, these two very different kinds of writing actually have a few similarities. Above all, they’re both meant to be read by other people, and that means that they need to sustain the reader’s interest. So, are there any writing techniques you can borrow from creative writing to help make your essays more interesting and original? Yes there are, and in this article, we’re going to show you how. Before we start, if you’re interested in attending a summer school to help develop these skills, click the link.

1. Think about your reader

With creative writing, as with any kind of writing, your reader is your most important consideration. You need to know and understand whom you’re writing for if you’re to do a good job of keeping them interested. Let’s think for a moment about the kind of person you’re writing for when you’re writing an essay and what you need to do to write specifically for them:

• Teachers or university lecturers – they’re going to be marking your essay, so it needs to answer the question effectively.
• They’ve set the question and they probably have a pretty good idea of how you’re going to answer it – so be original and unpredictable; catch them by surprise with an unusual approach or structure.
• They’re going to be reading many other responses to the same question – so they may well be bored by the time they get to yours. Keep them interested!
• They’re probably going to be pressed for time – so they won’t have time to reread badly written passages to try to understand what you’re getting at. Keep your writing easy to read, succinct and to the point.

What all these points boil down to is the importance of keeping your reader interested in what you have to say. Since creative writing is all about holding the reader’s interest, there must be some lessons to be learned from it and techniques that can be applied within the more limited style constraints of the academic essay. We’ll now turn to what these are.

2. Three-act structure

The three-act structure is a writing device used extensively in modern writing, including for film and television dramas. These ‘acts’ aren’t as distinct as acts in a play, as one follows seamlessly on from another and the audience wouldn’t consciously realise that one act had ended and another began. The structure refers to a plotline that looks something like this:

• Set-up – establishes the characters, how they relate to each other, and the world they inhabit. Within this first ‘act’, a dramatic occurrence called an ‘inciting incident’ takes place (typically around 19 minutes into a film) involving the principal character. They try to deal with it, but this results in another dramatic occurrence called a ‘turning point’. This sets the scene for the rest of the story.
• Confrontation – the turning point in the previous ‘act’ becomes the central problem, which the main character attempts to resolve – usually with plenty of adversity thrown their way that hampers their efforts. In a murder mystery, for example, this act would involve the detective trying to solve the murder. The central character – with the help of supporting characters – undergoes a journey and develops their knowledge, skills or character to a sufficient degree to be able to overcome the problem.
• Resolution – the climax of the story, in which the drama reaches a peak, the problem is overcome, and loose ends are tied up.

This structure sounds all very well for made-up stories, but what has it got to do with essay-writing? The key similarities here are:

• The central argument of your essay is the equivalent of the main character.
• The essay equivalent of the set-up and resolution are the introduction and conclusion.
• The inciting incident in an essay encourages you to get to the point early on in the essay.
• The equivalent of character development in the second act is developing your argument.
• The equivalent of the supporting characters is the evidence you refer to in your essay.

So, applying the three-act structure to an essay gives you something like this:

• Set-up – the introduction. This establishes what you’re talking about, setting the scene. The ‘inciting incident’ could be the introduction of evidence that contradicts a common theory, or the highlighting of a central disagreement in how something is interpreted.
• Confrontation – you discuss the different problems surrounding the topic you’re writing about. You develop the argument using various bits of evidence, moving towards an overall conclusion.
• Resolution – the conclusion. You summarise and resolve the argument with your own opinion, by coming down on one side or the other, having weighed up the evidence you’ve discussed. You could perhaps tie up loose ends by offering an alternative explanation for evidence that doesn’t sit with your conclusion.

Using this structure keeps you focused on the central point, and stops you from waffling, because everything you write is working towards resolving your argument. The use of the inciting incident in the first ‘act’ encourages you to get to the point early on in your essay, thereby keeping the reader interested. The principles of good plot-writing are centred around the connection between different events that show cause and effect, and this central tenet of the three-act structure has obvious parallels with the way in which essays work through presenting evidence in support of arguments.

3. An attention-grabbing opening

An oft-spouted piece of advice in creative writing is to use an attention-grabbing opening. One way of doing this is to start with a ‘flashback’, which could disrupt the chronology of events by transporting the reader directly back to the midst of the action, so that the story begins with maximum excitement. In a murder mystery, for instance, the writer might skip a slow build-up and instead use the murder itself to form the opening of the novel, with the rest of the story charting the efforts of the detective to uncover the perpetrator and perhaps telling the events prior to the murder in a series of flashbacks. The same principle can be applied to essays, though it’s easier to use in some subjects than others. To take an example, let’s say you were writing about how the First World War started. Rather than building up slowly with the various factors, an attention-grabbing opening could (briefly) describe the drama of the Battle of the Somme, perhaps citing some statistics about the number of men involved and killed, and quoting some war poetry about the horrors faced by the soldiers on the Front Line. Then, to introduce the purpose of the essay and launch into your argument about what started the war, a phrase such as, “It seems hard to imagine that all this began with…”. Alternatively, a rhetorical question: “But how did these tens of thousands of soldiers end up in the mud and horror of trench warfare? The story begins several years earlier, with…” It may not be the standard way of writing an essay, but you’ll certainly score points for originality and perhaps ruffle a few feathers.

4. Extended metaphors

Creative writing often makes use of extended metaphors. For example, when Shakespeare wrote the passage in Romeo and Juliet referring to “It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!” he was using an extended metaphor. With this in mind, it’s time to revisit a point we made in a previous article about writing more original essays , in which we argued that, rather than battling on with trying to explain a complex concept in a straightforward way, it might be easier to use an analogy to convey the meaning by drawing comparisons, which people find easier to understand. A metaphor is a kind of analogy, so the similarities with creative writing are strong here. In our previous article we used the example of radioactive decay. An analogy for this is the pressure with which water escapes from a hole in a bucket. It does so exponentially, just as radioactive substances decay exponentially. In both instances, the rate of a consumptive process depends on how much there is left of whatever is being depleted, which results in an exponential rate of decay. This concept is so much easier to explain using the analogy of water flowing from a hole in a bucket, as you give your reader something familiar to visualise in order to explain a concept with which they are unfamiliar.

5. Interesting details about setting and location

Another way of keeping your reader interested is to bring your essay to life with details about setting and location, just as creative writers do. Essays can become quite dry if you focus solely on the academic problems, but you can make them more interesting by peppering them with details. This may not work quite so well for a scientific essay, but it’s certainly relevant for some humanities subjects, in particular English literature, history and archaeology. For example, an essay about the Roman emperor Augustus could mention that he lived a famously modest lifestyle, quoting details from Roman writers and archaeological evidence that support this: Suetonius mentions his “low bed” (interesting because of what it says about accepted standards of Roman beds!) and coarse bread and cheese diet, and the relatively small and non-lavish remains of his house on the Palatine Hill in Rome back up the idea of his having lived a modest life. Incidental details like these can actually prove to be more significant than you initially realise, and you can use them to build your argument; in the case of Augustus, for example, his modest lifestyle is particularly important when seen in the context of Rome’s troubled history with kings. As he gradually acquired more power and became Rome’s first emperor, he had to avoid coming across as being too ‘regal’, and the little details we know about his way of life are significant in light of this. So, not only have you brought your essay to life, but you’ve raised an interesting point, too.

Few writers get it right first time. Once you’ve written a first draft, read through it and think about whether the order of your points is optimal and whether what you’ve written actually makes sense. It’s easy in the age of computers to chop and change – you can simply copy and paste part of your essay into another part where it might fit better, and then make minor changes to your wording so that it flows. After you’ve finished editing, have a final read through and check that you’re happy with the wording. Don’t forget to proofread to ensure that your spelling and grammar is impeccable!

7. And finally… record your ideas

Creative writers swear by having a notebook with them at all times, ready to jot down any ideas that suddenly spring to mind. You can adopt the same principle for your essay-writing, because you never know when the inspiration might strike. Have a think about your essay topic when you’re out and about; you’d be surprised what occurs to you when you’re away from your normal place of study. As you can see, there are more similarities between two apparently unrelated kinds of writing than you might have realised. It is, of course, possible to go too far with the creative writing idea when you’re essay-writing: literary devices aren’t always appropriate, and your essay still needs to retain objectivity and conform to the more formal conventions of academic writing. But there are certainly techniques to be borrowed from creative writing that will help your essays stand out from the crowd and give your teacher or lecturer a welcome break from the monotony of essay-marking.

Comments are closed.

How to Write a Creative Essay: Useful Tips and Examples

Samuel Gorbold

Essay creative writing is not always seen as fun by most students, but the realm of creative essays can offer an enjoyable twist. The inherent freedom in choosing a topic and expressing your thoughts makes this type of paper a creative playground. Engaging in composing a creative essay provides an opportunity to flex your creative muscles. Yet, if you're new to crafting compositions, it can pose a challenge. This article guides you through the steps to write an impressive creative essay, helping you navigate the process seamlessly. In a hurry? Our writing service is there for you 24/7, with guidance and practical help.

What Is a Creative Essay

A creative essay is a form of writing that goes beyond traditional academic structures, allowing the author to express themselves more imaginatively and artistically. Unlike formal essays, creative ones emphasize storytelling, personal reflection, and the exploration of emotions. They often incorporate literary elements such as vivid descriptions, dialogue, and poetic language to engage readers on a more emotional and sensory level. Follow our creative essay tips to experiment with style and structure, offering a unique platform to convey ideas, experiences, or perspectives in a captivating and inventive way.

To answer the question what does creative writing mean, it’s necessary to point out that it departs from traditional academic writing, offering a canvas for artistic expression and storytelling. It diverges from the rigid structure of formal writings, providing a platform for writers to infuse their work with imagination and emotion. In this genre, literary elements such as vivid descriptions and poetic language take center stage, fostering a more engaging and personal connection with the reader.

Unlike a poem analysis essay , this form of writing prioritizes narrative and self-expression, allowing authors to delve into their experiences and perspectives uniquely. It's a departure from the conventional rules, encouraging experimentation with style and structure. Creative essays offer a distinct avenue for individuals to convey ideas and emotions, weaving a tapestry that captivates and resonates with readers on a deeper, more sensory level.

Creative Writing Essay Outline Explained From A to Z

Moving on, let's delve into how to write a creative writing essay from s structural perspective. Despite the focus on creativity and imagination, a robust structure remains essential. Consider your favorite novel – does it not follow a well-defined beginning, middle, and end? So does your article. Before diving in, invest some time crafting a solid plan for your creative writing essay.

Creative Essay Introduction

In creative essay writing, the introduction demands setting the scene effectively. Begin with a concise portrayal of the surroundings, the time of day, and the historical context of the present scenario. This initial backdrop holds significant weight, shaping the atmosphere and trajectory of the entire storyline. Ensure a vivid depiction, employing explicit descriptions, poetic devices, analogies, and symbols to alter the text's tone promptly.

Creative Essay Body

The body sections serve as the engine to propel the storyline and convey the intended message. Yet, they can also be leveraged to introduce shifts in motion and emotion. For example, as creative writers, injecting conflict right away can be a powerful move if the plot unfolds slowly. This unexpected twist startles the reader, fundamentally altering the narrative's tone and pace. Additionally, orchestrating a fabricated conflict can keep the audience on edge, adding an extra layer of intrigue.

Creative Essay Conclusion

Typically, creative writers conclude the narrative towards the end. Introduce a conflict and then provide its resolution to tie up the discourse neatly. While the conclusion often doesn't lead to the story's climax, skilled writers frequently deploy cliffhangers. By employing these writing techniques suggested by our write my college essay experts, the reader is left in suspense, eagerly anticipating the fate of the characters without a premature revelation.

Creative Writing Tips

Every student possesses a distinct mindset, individual way of thinking, and unique ideas. However, considering the academic nature of creative writing essays, it is essential to incorporate characteristics commonly expected in such works, such as:

• Select a topic that sparks your interest or explores unique perspectives. A captivating subject sets the stage for an engaging paper.
• Begin with a vivid and attention-grabbing introduction. Use descriptive language, anecdotes, or thought-provoking questions to draw in your readers from the start.
• Clearly articulate the main idea or theme of your essay in a concise thesis statement. This provides a roadmap for your readers and keeps your writing focused.
• Use descriptive language to create a sensory experience for your readers. Appeal to sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell to enhance the imagery.
• Play with the structure of your content. Consider nonlinear narratives, flashbacks, or unconventional timelines to add an element of surprise and creativity.
• If applicable, develop well-rounded and relatable characters. Provide details that breathe life into your characters and make them memorable to the reader.
• Establish a vivid and immersive setting for your narrative. The environment should contribute to the overall mood and tone.
• Blend dialogue and narration effectively. Dialogue adds authenticity and allows characters to express themselves, while narration provides context and insight.
• Revisit your essay for revisions. Pay attention to the flow, coherence, and pacing. Edit for clarity and refine your language to ensure every word serves a purpose.
• Share your creative writing article with others and welcome constructive feedback. Fresh perspectives can help you identify areas for improvement and refine your storytelling.
• Maintain an authentic voice throughout your essay. Let your unique style and perspective shine through, creating a genuine connection with your audience.
• Craft a memorable conclusion that leaves a lasting impression. Summarize key points, evoke emotions, or pose thought-provoking questions to resonate with your readers.

Types of Creative Writing Essays

A creative writing essay may come in various forms, each offering a unique approach to storytelling and self-expression. Some common types include:

• Reflects the author's personal experiences, emotions, and insights, often weaving in anecdotes and reflections.

Descriptive 

• Focuses on creating a vivid and sensory-rich portrayal of a scene, person, or event through detailed descriptions.
• Tells a compelling story with a clear plot, characters, and often a central theme or message.

Reflective 

• Encourages introspection and thoughtful examination of personal experiences, revealing personal growth and lessons learned.

Expository 

• Explores and explains a particular topic, idea, or concept creatively and engagingly.

Persuasive 

• Utilizes creative elements to persuade the reader to adopt a particular viewpoint or take a specific action.

Imaginative 

• These creative writing papers allow for the free expression of imagination, often incorporating elements of fantasy, surrealism, or speculative fiction.

Literary Analysis

• Learning how to write a creative writing essay, analyze and interpret a piece of literature, and incorporate creativity to explore deeper meanings and connections.
• Blends personal experiences with travel narratives, offering insights into different cultures, places, and adventures.
• Focuses on creating a detailed and engaging portrait of a person, exploring their character, experiences, and impact on others.

Experimental 

• Pushes the boundaries of traditional essay structures, experimenting with form, style, and narrative techniques.
• Combines elements from different essay types, allowing for a flexible and creative approach to storytelling.

As you can see, there are many types of creative compositions, so we recommend that you study how to write an academic essay with the help of our extensive guide.

How to Start a Creative Writing Essay

Starting a creative writing essay involves capturing the reader's attention and setting the tone for the narrative. Here are some effective ways to begin:

• Pose a thought-provoking question that intrigues the reader and encourages them to contemplate the topic.
• Begin with a short anecdote or a brief storytelling snippet that introduces the central theme or idea of your essay.
• Paint a vivid picture of the setting using descriptive language, setting the stage for the events or emotions to unfold.
• Open with a compelling dialogue that sparks interest or introduces key characters, immediately engaging the reader in the conversation.
• Incorporate a relevant quotation or epigraph that sets the mood or provides insight into the essay's theme.
• Begin with a bold or intriguing statement that captivates the reader's attention, encouraging them to delve further into your essay.
• Present a contradiction or unexpected scenario that creates a sense of curiosity and compels the reader to explore the resolution.
• Employ a striking metaphor or simile that immediately draws connections and conveys the essence of your creative essay.
• Start by directly addressing the reader, creating a sense of intimacy and involvement right from the beginning.
• Establish the mood or atmosphere of your essay by describing the emotions, sounds, or surroundings relevant to the narrative.
• Present a dilemma or conflict that hints at the central tension of your essay, enticing the reader to discover the resolution.
• Start in the middle of the action, dropping the reader into a pivotal moment that sparks curiosity about what happened before and what will unfold.

Choose an approach to how to write a creative essay that aligns with your tone and theme, ensuring a captivating and memorable introduction.

Creative Essay Formats

Working on a creative writing essay offers a canvas for writers to express themselves in various formats, each contributing a unique flavor to the storytelling. One prevalent format is personal writing, where writers delve into their own experiences, emotions, and reflections, creating a deeply personal narrative that resonates with readers. Through anecdotes, insights, and introspection, personal essays provide a window into the author's inner world, fostering a connection through shared vulnerabilities and authentic storytelling.

Another captivating format is the narrative, which unfolds like a traditional story with characters, a plot, and a clear arc. Writers craft a compelling narrative, often with a central theme or message, engaging readers in a journey of discovery. Through vivid descriptions and well-developed characters, narrative articles allow for the exploration of universal truths within the context of a captivating storyline, leaving a lasting impression on the audience.

For those who seek to blend fact and fiction, the imaginative format opens the door to vivid exploration. This format allows writers to unleash their imagination, incorporating elements of fantasy, surrealism, or speculative fiction. By bending reality and weaving imaginative threads into the narrative, writers can transport readers to otherworldly realms or offer fresh perspectives on familiar themes. The imaginative essay format invites readers to embrace the unexpected, challenging conventional boundaries and stimulating creativity in both the writer and the audience. Check out our poetry analysis essay guide to learn more about the freedom of creativity learners can adopt while working on assignments. 

Creative Essay Topics and Ideas

As you become familiar with creative writing tips, we’d like to share several amazing topic examples that might help you get out of writer’s block:

• The enchanted garden tells a tale of blooms and whispers.
• Lost in time, a journey through historical echoes unfolds.
• Whispering winds unravel the secrets of nature.
• The silent symphony explores the soul of music.
• Portraits of the invisible capture the essence of emotions.
• Beyond the horizon is a cosmic adventure in stardust.
• Can dreams shape reality? An exploration of the power of imagination.
• The forgotten key unlocks doors to the past.
• Ripples in the void, an exploration of cosmic mysteries.
• Echoes of eternity are stories written in the stars.
• In the shadow of giants, unveils the unsung heroes.
• Can words paint pictures? An exploration of the artistry of literary expression.
• Whispers of the deep explore the ocean's hidden stories.
• Threads of time weave lives through generations.
• Do colors hold emotions? A journey of painting the canvas of feelings.
• The quantum quandary navigates the world of subatomic particles.
• Reflections in a mirror unmask the layers of identity.
• The art of silence crafts narratives without words.
• The ethereal dance explores movement beyond the visible.
• Can shadows speak? Unveiling stories cast in darkness.

Examples of Creative Writing Essays

We've added a couple of brief creative writing essays examples for your reference and inspiration.

Creative Writing Example 1: Admission Essay

Creative writing example 2: narrative essay.

What Are the Types of Creative Writing Essays?

What is a creative writing essay, how to start a creative writing essay, what are some creative writing tips.

Samuel Gorbold , a seasoned professor with over 30 years of experience, guides students across disciplines such as English, psychology, political science, and many more. Together with EssayHub, he is dedicated to enhancing student understanding and success through comprehensive academic support.

• Plagiarism Report
• Unlimited Revisions
• 24/7 Support

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, generate accurate citations for free.

• Knowledge Base
• Academic writing
• A step-by-step guide to the writing process

The Writing Process | 5 Steps with Examples & Tips

Published on April 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on December 8, 2023.

Good academic writing requires effective planning, drafting, and revision.

The writing process looks different for everyone, but there are five basic steps that will help you structure your time when writing any kind of text.

Receive feedback on language, structure, and formatting

Professional editors proofread and edit your paper by focusing on:

• Academic style
• Vague sentences
• Style consistency

See an example

Table of contents

Step 1: prewriting, step 2: planning and outlining, step 3: writing a first draft, step 4: redrafting and revising, step 5: editing and proofreading, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about the writing process.

Before you start writing, you need to decide exactly what you’ll write about and do the necessary research.

Coming up with a topic

If you have to come up with your own topic for an assignment, think of what you’ve covered in class— is there a particular area that intrigued, interested, or even confused you? Topics that left you with additional questions are perfect, as these are questions you can explore in your writing.

The scope depends on what type of text you’re writing—for example, an essay or a research paper will be less in-depth than a dissertation topic . Don’t pick anything too ambitious to cover within the word count, or too limited for you to find much to say.

Narrow down your idea to a specific argument or question. For example, an appropriate topic for an essay might be narrowed down like this:

Doing the research

Once you know your topic, it’s time to search for relevant sources and gather the information you need. This process varies according to your field of study and the scope of the assignment. It might involve:

• Searching for primary and secondary sources .
• Reading the relevant texts closely (e.g. for literary analysis ).
• Collecting data using relevant research methods (e.g. experiments , interviews or surveys )

From a writing perspective, the important thing is to take plenty of notes while you do the research. Keep track of the titles, authors, publication dates, and relevant quotations from your sources; the data you gathered; and your initial analysis or interpretation of the questions you’re addressing.

Especially in academic writing , it’s important to use a logical structure to convey information effectively. It’s far better to plan this out in advance than to try to work out your structure once you’ve already begun writing.

Creating an essay outline is a useful way to plan out your structure before you start writing. This should help you work out the main ideas you want to focus on and how you’ll organize them. The outline doesn’t have to be final—it’s okay if your structure changes throughout the writing process.

Use bullet points or numbering to make your structure clear at a glance. Even for a short text that won’t use headings, it’s useful to summarize what you’ll discuss in each paragraph.

An outline for a literary analysis essay might look something like this:

• Describe the theatricality of Austen’s works
• Outline the role theater plays in Mansfield Park
• Introduce the research question: How does Austen use theater to express the characters’ morality in Mansfield Park ?
• Discuss Austen’s depiction of the performance at the end of the first volume
• Discuss how Sir Bertram reacts to the acting scheme
• Introduce Austen’s use of stage direction–like details during dialogue
• Explore how these are deployed to show the characters’ self-absorption
• Discuss Austen’s description of Maria and Julia’s relationship as polite but affectionless
• Compare Mrs. Norris’s self-conceit as charitable despite her idleness
• Summarize the three themes: The acting scheme, stage directions, and the performance of morals
• Answer the research question
• Indicate areas for further study

Once you have a clear idea of your structure, it’s time to produce a full first draft.

This process can be quite non-linear. For example, it’s reasonable to begin writing with the main body of the text, saving the introduction for later once you have a clearer idea of the text you’re introducing.

To give structure to your writing, use your outline as a framework. Make sure that each paragraph has a clear central focus that relates to your overall argument.

Hover over the parts of the example, from a literary analysis essay on Mansfield Park , to see how a paragraph is constructed.

The character of Mrs. Norris provides another example of the performance of morals in Mansfield Park . Early in the novel, she is described in scathing terms as one who knows “how to dictate liberality to others: but her love of money was equal to her love of directing” (p. 7). This hypocrisy does not interfere with her self-conceit as “the most liberal-minded sister and aunt in the world” (p. 7). Mrs. Norris is strongly concerned with appearing charitable, but unwilling to make any personal sacrifices to accomplish this. Instead, she stage-manages the charitable actions of others, never acknowledging that her schemes do not put her own time or money on the line. In this way, Austen again shows us a character whose morally upright behavior is fundamentally a performance—for whom the goal of doing good is less important than the goal of seeming good.

When you move onto a different topic, start a new paragraph. Use appropriate transition words and phrases to show the connections between your ideas.

The goal at this stage is to get a draft completed, not to make everything perfect as you go along. Once you have a full draft in front of you, you’ll have a clearer idea of where improvement is needed.

Give yourself a first draft deadline that leaves you a reasonable length of time to revise, edit, and proofread before the final deadline. For a longer text like a dissertation, you and your supervisor might agree on deadlines for individual chapters.

Now it’s time to look critically at your first draft and find potential areas for improvement. Redrafting means substantially adding or removing content, while revising involves making changes to structure and reformulating arguments.

Evaluating the first draft

It can be difficult to look objectively at your own writing. Your perspective might be positively or negatively biased—especially if you try to assess your work shortly after finishing it.

It’s best to leave your work alone for at least a day or two after completing the first draft. Come back after a break to evaluate it with fresh eyes; you’ll spot things you wouldn’t have otherwise.

When evaluating your writing at this stage, you’re mainly looking for larger issues such as changes to your arguments or structure. Starting with bigger concerns saves you time—there’s no point perfecting the grammar of something you end up cutting out anyway.

Right now, you’re looking for:

• Arguments that are unclear or illogical.
• Areas where information would be better presented in a different order.
• Passages where additional information or explanation is needed.
• Passages that are irrelevant to your overall argument.

For example, in our paper on Mansfield Park , we might realize the argument would be stronger with more direct consideration of the protagonist Fanny Price, and decide to try to find space for this in paragraph IV.

For some assignments, you’ll receive feedback on your first draft from a supervisor or peer. Be sure to pay close attention to what they tell you, as their advice will usually give you a clearer sense of which aspects of your text need improvement.

Redrafting and revising

Once you’ve decided where changes are needed, make the big changes first, as these are likely to have knock-on effects on the rest. Depending on what your text needs, this step might involve:

• Making changes to your overall argument.
• Reordering the text.
• Cutting parts of the text.
• Adding new text.

You can go back and forth between writing, redrafting and revising several times until you have a final draft that you’re happy with.

Think about what changes you can realistically accomplish in the time you have. If you are running low on time, you don’t want to leave your text in a messy state halfway through redrafting, so make sure to prioritize the most important changes.

Editing focuses on local concerns like clarity and sentence structure. Proofreading involves reading the text closely to remove typos and ensure stylistic consistency. You can check all your drafts and texts in minutes with an AI proofreader .

Editing for grammar and clarity

When editing, you want to ensure your text is clear, concise, and grammatically correct. You’re looking out for:

• Grammatical errors.
• Ambiguous phrasings.
• Redundancy and repetition .

In your initial draft, it’s common to end up with a lot of sentences that are poorly formulated. Look critically at where your meaning could be conveyed in a more effective way or in fewer words, and watch out for common sentence structure mistakes like run-on sentences and sentence fragments:

• Austen’s style is frequently humorous, her characters are often described as “witty.” Although this is less true of Mansfield Park .
• Austen’s style is frequently humorous. Her characters are often described as “witty,” although this is less true of Mansfield Park .

To make your sentences run smoothly, you can always use a paraphrasing tool to rewrite them in a clearer way.

Proofreading for small mistakes and typos

When proofreading, first look out for typos in your text:

• Spelling errors.
• Missing words.
• Confused word choices .
• Punctuation errors .
• Missing or excess spaces.

Use a grammar checker , but be sure to do another manual check after. Read through your text line by line, watching out for problem areas highlighted by the software but also for any other issues it might have missed.

For example, in the following phrase we notice several errors:

• Mary Crawfords character is a complicate one and her relationships with Fanny and Edmund undergoes several transformations through out the novel.
• Mary Crawford’s character is a complicated one, and her relationships with both Fanny and Edmund undergo several transformations throughout the novel.

Proofreading for stylistic consistency

There are several issues in academic writing where you can choose between multiple different standards. For example:

• Whether you use the serial comma .
• Whether you use American or British spellings and punctuation (you can use a punctuation checker for this).
• Where you use numerals vs. words for numbers.
• How you capitalize your titles and headings.

Unless you’re given specific guidance on these issues, it’s your choice which standards you follow. The important thing is to consistently follow one standard for each issue. For example, don’t use a mixture of American and British spellings in your paper.

Additionally, you will probably be provided with specific guidelines for issues related to format (how your text is presented on the page) and citations (how you acknowledge your sources). Always follow these instructions carefully.

If you want to know more about AI for academic writing, AI tools, or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy
• Deep learning
• Generative AI
• Machine learning
• Reinforcement learning
• Supervised vs. unsupervised learning

 (AI) Tools

• Grammar Checker
• Paraphrasing Tool
• Text Summarizer
• AI Detector
• Plagiarism Checker
• Citation Generator

Revising, proofreading, and editing are different stages of the writing process .

• Revising is making structural and logical changes to your text—reformulating arguments and reordering information.
• Editing refers to making more local changes to things like sentence structure and phrasing to make sure your meaning is conveyed clearly and concisely.
• Proofreading involves looking at the text closely, line by line, to spot any typos and issues with consistency and correct them.

Whether you’re publishing a blog, submitting a research paper , or even just writing an important email, there are a few techniques you can use to make sure it’s error-free:

• Take a break : Set your work aside for at least a few hours so that you can look at it with fresh eyes.
• Proofread a printout : Staring at a screen for too long can cause fatigue – sit down with a pen and paper to check the final version.
• Use digital shortcuts : Take note of any recurring mistakes (for example, misspelling a particular word, switching between US and UK English , or inconsistently capitalizing a term), and use Find and Replace to fix it throughout the document.

If you want to be confident that an important text is error-free, it might be worth choosing a professional proofreading service instead.

If you’ve gone over the word limit set for your assignment, shorten your sentences and cut repetition and redundancy during the editing process. If you use a lot of long quotes , consider shortening them to just the essentials.

If you need to remove a lot of words, you may have to cut certain passages. Remember that everything in the text should be there to support your argument; look for any information that’s not essential to your point and remove it.

To make this process easier and faster, you can use a paraphrasing tool . With this tool, you can rewrite your text to make it simpler and shorter. If that’s not enough, you can copy-paste your paraphrased text into the summarizer . This tool will distill your text to its core message.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Caulfield, J. (2023, December 08). The Writing Process | 5 Steps with Examples & Tips. Scribbr. Retrieved August 21, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-writing/writing-process/

Is this article helpful?

Jack Caulfield

Other students also liked, how to create a structured research paper outline | example, quick guide to proofreading | what, why and how to proofread, academic paragraph structure | step-by-step guide & examples, what is your plagiarism score.

Tech ed from Teacher-authors

Creative Approaches for Developing Essay Writing Skills

The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘essay’ as”

a short piece of writing on a particular subject

Most students write their first essay by third grade, probably enjoy the process because of its non-threatening narrative exploration of their thoughts, but by Middle School, the rules and requirements that made essay writing fun change:

In a school test, an essay is a written answer that includes information and discussion, usually to test how well the student understands the subject.

The Ask a Tech Teacher team came up with fresh rules we think are less threatening and more geared to enabling students to enjoy this important writing style. I think you’ll find some of these helpful:

As a college student, the ability to write well-written essays is an essential skill that transcends academic disciplines and serves as a vital tool for effective communication throughout one’s personal and professional life, yet the process of developing this aptitude often presents a formidable challenge that requires a multifaceted approach encompassing various creative techniques and methodologies. Exploring diverse writing exercises, experimenting with different perspectives, and seeking inspiration from various sources can cultivate creativity and enhance essay writing skills, with the option to have professionals write me an essay providing valuable insights and further honing one’s craft. Start small.

Laying the Groundwork

Before embarking on the journey toward mastering essay writing, it is imperative to establish a solid foundation by cultivating a deep understanding of the fundamental elements that constitute a well-structured and cohesive piece of writing. This involves a comprehensive grasp of grammar rules, sentence construction, paragraph organization, and the logical flow of ideas, as well as a keen awareness of the nuances of tone, voice, and audience. Mastering these basics is akin to acquiring the essential building blocks that will enable you to construct a sturdy and aesthetically pleasing literary edifice.

Embracing the Art of Reading

One of the most effective and time-honored methods for honing one’s writing skills is to immerse oneself in the works of accomplished authors and essayists. By actively engaging with a diverse array of literary genres, styles, and voices, one can develop a keen eye for the intricate interplay of language, structure, and storytelling. This exposure not only broadens one’s lexical horizons but also cultivates an appreciation for the artistry of wordsmithing and the ability to discern the subtle nuances that distinguish exceptional writing from the mundane.

The Beauty of Freewriting

Engaging in creative exercises such as freewriting, mind mapping, and storytelling can foster innovation and proficiency in essay writing skills, while seeking guidance from top essay writing services can offer valuable feedback and support in refining one’s craft to achieve academic excellence. Freewriting, the act of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and allowing thoughts to flow unencumbered by the constraints of editing or self-censorship, is a liberating and highly effective technique for unlocking creative potential and overcoming the dreaded writer’s block. This practice encourages a stream-of-consciousness approach, enabling the writer to explore ideas, experiment with language, and develop a more organic and authentic voice. By embracing the freedom of freewriting, one can tap into the well of subconscious creativity and cultivate a more fluid and expressive writing style.

Embracing Multimodal Approaches

In the digital age, the landscape of communication has undergone a profound transformation, paving the way for multimodal approaches that blend text with various forms of media, such as images, videos, and interactive elements. Incorporating these elements into the writing process can not only enhance engagement and understanding but also foster a more dynamic and multidimensional approach to storytelling and idea conveyance. By exploring the interplay between text and visual or auditory components, writers can develop a more holistic and immersive approach to their craft.

Collaborative Writing and Peer Review

The adage “two heads are better than one” holds true in the realm of writing, as collaborative efforts and peer review can yield invaluable insights and constructive feedback. Engaging in group writing exercises or participating in writing workshops not only facilitates the exchange of ideas and perspectives but also fosters an environment of constructive criticism and mutual support. Through this process, writers can identify areas for improvement, gain exposure to diverse writing styles, and ultimately refine their own craft.

Embracing Interdisciplinary Connections

Writing is not an isolated endeavor; rather, it is inextricably intertwined with various disciplines, ranging from philosophy and psychology to sciences and the arts. By exploring the connections between writing and these diverse fields, one can cultivate a more nuanced and multifaceted understanding of language, communication, and the human experience. For instance, delving into the realms of psychology can shed light on the cognitive processes that underlie effective storytelling, while engaging with the arts can foster an appreciation for the aesthetic and emotive dimensions of language.

Cultivating a Writing Routine

Akin to any skill, the development of effective essay writing abilities requires consistent practice and dedication. Establishing a regular writing routine, whether it be setting aside dedicated time each day or adhering to a weekly schedule, can foster discipline, momentum, and a sense of accountability. By making writing a habitual practice, one can overcome the inertia of procrastination and cultivate a mindset conducive to sustained creative output.

Embracing Experimentation

While adhering to established conventions and guidelines is crucial, it is equally important to embrace a spirit of experimentation and innovation. This entails stepping outside of one’s comfort zone, challenging conventional wisdom, and exploring uncharted territory in terms of subject matter, narrative structures, and stylistic choices. By embracing a willingness to take risks and push boundaries, writers can unlock new realms of creativity and forge their own unique literary path.

Seeking Mentorship and Guidance

No writer is an island; each individual’s journey toward mastery is enriched and accelerated by seeking out the guidance and mentorship of experienced writers, educators, and professionals. Whether through formal writing workshops, personal coaching, or informal mentorships, engaging with those who have walked the path before can provide invaluable insights, constructive feedback, and a supportive network that can help navigate the challenges and obstacles that inevitably arise along the way.

Embracing the Power of Reflection

The art of writing is not merely a linear process but a cyclical one, wherein reflection plays a pivotal role in fostering growth and continuous improvement. By taking the time to critically analyze one’s work, identify strengths and weaknesses, and actively seek feedback from others, writers can gain a deeper understanding of their craft and develop a more nuanced approach to their writing. This process of self-evaluation and introspection not only enhances the quality of one’s work but also cultivates a mindset of lifelong learning and personal growth.

In conclusion, developing essay writing skills is a multifaceted endeavor that requires a harmonious blend of technical proficiency, creative expression, and a willingness to embrace unconventional approaches. By laying a solid foundation, embracing the art of reading, exploring freewriting and multimodal techniques, engaging in collaborative efforts, fostering interdisciplinary connections, cultivating a consistent writing routine, embracing experimentation, seeking guidance, and reflecting on one’s journey, college students can unlock their full potential as writers and effectively navigate the complexities of crafting compelling and impactful essays. Remember, the path to mastery is a lifelong pursuit, but by embracing creativity and a growth mindset, the rewards are boundless.

Copyright ©2024 askatechteacher.com – All rights reserved.

Here’s the sign-up link if the image above doesn’t work:

https://forms.aweber.com/form/07/1910174607.htm

Jacqui Murray  has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a  K-12 technology curriculum ,  K-8 keyboard curriculum,   K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum . She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to  NEA Today , and author of the tech thrillers,  To Hunt a Sub  and  Twenty-four Days . You can find her resources at  Structured Learning.

Share this:

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Click to print (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)

Related Articles

2 thoughts on “ Creative Approaches for Developing Essay Writing Skills ”

Thank! Nice to hear from you.

Comments are closed.

We are a group of dedicated international technology teachers with tons of experience in teaching K-18 t ech, unraveling its problems, and making it exciting for kids (and adults). We blog here, teach online grad school classes, provide curricula (like K-12 Technology curriculum ,  K-8 keyboard curriculum,   K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum ). Jacqui Murray (the face of AATT) also authors tech thrillers,  To Hunt a Sub  and  Twenty-four Days . You can find our resources at  Structured Learning.

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address

Find Us, Follow Us

• 6,424,814 hits

Top Posts & Pages

Fun Typing Games

Emails/Newsletters

One-time donation, monthly donation.

AATT Resources

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Find books here…

Student Workbooks

Homeschoolers

Teaching Strategies

• Digital Literacy 0
• Flipped Class 0
• Frayer Model 0
• Habits of Mind 0
• Mindfulness 0
• Orton-Gillingham 0
• 7 Assessment Tools
• Benchmark assessments
• CC Assessments
• Common Core and Assessment
• Report Cards and Tech
• 13 Skills that Blogs Teach
• 3 Issues before schools blog
• Blogging and CC

Book Reviews

• CC Literacy
• CC Meets GA
• Endangered Minds

Chromebooks

• Chromebooks in Class
• Chromebooks–Pros/Cons

Common Core

• Adapt to CC
• Align Tech with CC
• CC and Blogs
• CC and keyboarding
• CC and publishing
• CC Classroom

Digital Citizenship

• 17 DigCit Topics
• 1st Grade DigCit
• 2nd Grade DigCit
• 3rd Grade DigCit
• 4th Grade DigCit
• 5th Grade DigCit
• 6th Grade DigCit
• Kindergarten DigCit
• Charts in Excel
• Excel and Arrays
• Shapes in Excel
• Tessellations in Excel

Featured Articles

• Are you a new tech teacher?
• Computers and Tech Teachers
• Create an inquiry-based class
• Twitter in Education
• You're a Geek now
• Create wallpaper
• 5 Favorite Apps
• IPads vs. laptops

Keyboarding

• 6 Ways to Make KB Fun
• Adults and keyboarding
• Do we need KBing?
• Handwriting vs. KB
• Is KB Cool?
• KB class in 25 minutes
• KB with ASCII art

Online classes

• Work remotely

Presentations

• 15-second presentation
• PowerPoint or Publisher

Problem solving

• 3-click rule
• Computer quits
• I Can Solve That
• Most common problems
• What if Computers Fail
• What if Tech Fails

Miscellaneous

• Structured Learning 0

Special Needs

• Special Needs–Reading
• Tech and Special Needs
• Entries feed
• Comments feed
• WordPress.org

Question? Click…

Any cookies on my website are used to ensure normal website functions (for instance, Youtube videos won’t work without their own identifiers). These cookies cannot be switched off because the website wouldn’t work properly anymore. However, these identifiers do not store any personal data.

Legal stuff

When you leave a comment, WordPress stores your gravatar name, IP Address, comment, and email address. Therefore, leaving a comment is considered a clear affirmative, specific, and unambiguous action as defined by the GDPR giving me consent to store this information, and permission to contact you in the future by email.

Your personal information will not be sold or shared with any third parties under any circumstances. Your information shall be retained until you unsubscribe or ask me to remove your data. If you feel your data has been misused, you have a right to complain to the  Hellenic Data Protection Authority  (HDPA). If you do not consent to the above, please don’t leave a comment.

AI Legal Notices

The content presented in this blog is the result of my creative imagination and not intended for use, reproduction, or incorporation into any artificial intelligence training or machine learning systems without prior written consent from the author.”

Copyright © 2024

Improve Essays with Creative Writing Techniques

Need some help with improving your essays? Have you ever considered using creative writing techniques to help you dive deeper into your own writing? Although you may have never considered how creative writing could benefit your own assignments, it actually has plenty of crossover with essays and other forms of academic writing.

What’s Included in an Oxford Summer Course?

10 creative writing techniques to improve your essays.

Want to improve your essay writing? Take notes of these 10 different creative writing tips to ensure your next assignment stands out against the rest.

1. Freewriting

In the first stages of your writing; whether it be essays or fiction, it’s always a good idea to sit down and brainstorm any initial ideas. In particular, freewriting is a popular creative writing technique used by lots of artists to help them begin to think and brainstorm their ideas.

Freewriting was developed by Peter Elbow in 1973, and similar to brainstorming, encourages the writer to keep writing without stopping. Writers are encouraged to write down every idea they can think of (no matter how wrong or irrelevant it may be – you can judge this later) and do so without worrying about grammar or spelling.

In turn, it’s believed that freewriting helps to:

• Increase the flow of ideas – reducing the chance of forgetting to include a good one.
• Helps to increase fluency when writing for longer periods of time.

For essays, this could involve writing the question in the middle of a piece of paper and then mind-mapping any thoughts or ideas that come to mind. This mind map can include literally anything that you can think of that’s relevant to your essay; from what types of questions you may need to cover in your essay, to previous pieces of text you’ve read that may be useful as evidence.

You don’t want to spend too much time on this section, after all – it is just an initial brainstorm. So, set yourself a timer for ten minutes, plug in your favourite playlist, and let the ideas flow naturally.

Using this creative essay writing technique will really help you to gather some initial ideas on what your essay might explore, and will get you ‘in the zone’ to begin your research and planning.

2. Create a Storyboard/Outline

Once you’ve gathered your initial thoughts on your essay topic, you’re going to want to start formulating them into a plan of how to tackle your assignment. After all, there’s nothing worse than sitting down in front of your computer and thinking “So, where do I go from here?”

Before it comes to putting pen to paper, creative writers always produce an outline of what direction their story is going to take and what it is they want their writing to say. For essays, it should be no different.

Storyboards are an excellent creative writing technique to help writers prepare narratives, either with a brief story outlining the plot diagram (or in this case, the ‘plot’ of your essay), or with an extended illustration of the story, broken into ‘frames’ (or in your case, into paragraphs).

Though it does not need to be long, you should still create a basic outline which includes; the introduction/the thesis, and the main points you want to discuss, followed by the conclusion that draws it all together and summarizes an answer to the thesis. Remember to include any evidence you may need to use to back up your points. Ultimately, as long as it’s clear and makes sense to you, it doesn’t matter how you go about creating your essay outline.

3. Think About Your Reader, Constantly

When it comes to writing, you must always bear your reader in mind. You need to have a clear understanding of who will be reading your essay and how you can write in a way that will hold their attention throughout it.

Creative writers, spend a lot of editing time to ensure that their writing is as engaging as it can be, often including lots of intricate details and additional snippets of information to enrich the story.

Although essay writing is usually limited by strict word counts and the genre in which you are writing, you should still make way for plenty of editing time during the writing process so you can make your essay as engaging as possible.

If you are writing an essay for a teacher who has set you the question, then they probably have at least another 15 or 20 essays to read in the marking process. Though it’s important for you to still include the obvious, it’s a good idea to try and be original in your writing – perhaps trying a new structure, or including arguments from lesser-known but still relevant thinkers and writers which may spark the reader’s interest.

Use a combination of different sentence starters and structures to keep your writing fresh and interesting. Good flow is critical to making your essay easy to read – so check this too as you’re editing through your writing. You want to create a fine balance between using new sentence starters and making your essay difficult to read.

4. Live Within Your Writing

Any great writer will tell you that the secret to their success is by living amongst their writing. Okay, not literally – but by knowing every minute detail that goes on within the realm of their story.

For example – they may be writing a short story about a knight who is on a conquest to rescue a princess from a tower. However, if you asked the writer what that character ate for breakfast, or what time they went to bed the previous night, they’d be able to give you an answer because they know their characters so well.

This should be no different from your essay writing. Make sure you know and understand every detail of your essay, and, if you have the room, expand on it within the body of your text.

These details can be anything from interesting facts about any Literature or writers you’re critically reviewing, to unique details about theories to demonstrate your reading around the subject. Remember, the more you can convince the reader that you are a master of your topic, the easier they will find it to grade you highly!

5. Always Create an Enticing Opening

If you ever pursue Creative Writing as a summer course or as a main subject in further education, one of the most common creative writing tips you’ll be given is to create the best opening possible. The start of your writing sets the entire premise for the rest of your work; you need to give the best impression possible to convince your readers that they will enjoy the text.

Creative writing often opens with a hook that will grab the reader’s attention from the start. Through ways of disrupting chronology, using vivid imagery, or posing thought-provoking questions, all writers aim to achieve maximum impact from the start and entice the audience to continue reading.

As with any good piece of writing, you need to ensure your essays have something enticing to offer the reader from the start. Your reader will make an initial impression of your writing right from the very first sentence: begin with a solid introduction and they’ll be keen to keep reading on.

There are a few ways to create an enticing opening. You could try using rhetorical questions to make them become active in their reading, or use imagery to paint the scene of your essay like you would as a creative writer. You could even include a quote from an authoritative writer which sums up the premise of your essay, demonstrating your wider reading.

Just remember, your tutor or teacher will probably have lots of other essays to mark. If you can make yours interesting and stand out from the very beginning, you’ll engage them much more than if you were to follow the same pattern as all your other classmates.

6. Enrich Your Writing with Detail

Ask any reader or writer what makes writing engaging, and they’ll tell you it’s all about the detail.

Read the two following excerpts of text:

“William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 23, 1564, to his parents Mary Arden and John Shakespeare. Shakespeare was the third child of eight.”

“On a quiet spring day on April 23, 1564, Mary Arden and John Shakespeare welcomed their third child, a son named William Shakespeare. Born and raised in the thriving market town of Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare grew up amongst a large family of eight siblings – but by no means did the business of family life ever affect his talents.”

Which one did you prefer? The one with the detail? Precisely.

Just as creative writers include plenty of detail and description to enrich their work, so should you with your essays. Essays can become quite dry if you solely focus on the academic, but you can include extra details to keep them exciting.

Though this may be difficult for essays with a strict word limit or ones that are quite scientific, you can definitely add relevant details to essays which are centred around the humanities, literature , theatre, or history . For example, if writing about a play by Bertolt Brecht, you can mention the political changes that were occurring in his home country in the time and how these influenced his work.

Including extra details and snippets of information will not only keep your reader engaged, but demonstrate your confidence to read around the topic and take your learning to the next level; this self-guided, independent study will really impress the reader and could earn you extra marks.

7. Don’t Conclude with Ambiguity

To be ambiguous or not – that really is the question. Creative writers often have mixed feelings about using ambiguity as an effective creative writing technique.

Sometimes, leaving an open ending can be great for letting the reader make up their own opinion on the subject, but most often, audiences are irritated by ambiguity because they want to know the full resolution of a story. But this is certainly a mistake you don’t want to make when writing your essay!

Ensure you always fully conclude your essay so the examiner/marker understands what you have learned during the process and what your final answer to the essay question is. Unlike creative writing, your teacher needs to know that you’ve understood and formed a final conclusion on your work – it’s literally what will earn you marks.

But you also need to make sure that this conclusion is clear and easy to find. With lots of essays to mark, your teacher will be looking for a clear and concise ending point – don’t be ambiguous or ‘fluffy’ or, like most readers, they will get frustrated.

8. Edit, Edit, Edit!

Editing is arguably one of the most important creative writing techniques all writers must use. It’s nearly impossible to write the perfect piece of literature in your first draft. Especially with essay writing.

Stephen King wrote in his memoir on the craft: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

And he makes a great point. When editing, especially when needing to cut down on word counts, it can be really difficult to comprehend cutting out sections of text you’ve spent time constructing with care.

But to make your work the best it possibly can be, you need to be brutally honest with yourself and ask the question; “is this really adding value to my work?” If not, scrap it and, if you have space in the word count – add something even more enriching.

Ensure that when you are planning your essay, you leave enough time to review and edit your first draft. Go back to it after a break and read it through with a fresh pair of eyes. You may spot some glaringly obvious mistakes which you may have missed in the first draft!

9. Peer Review

Using your peers to review your work is another effective creative essay writing technique to ensure your final piece of work is the best it can be.

Lots of creative writers will ask their friends, editors, and even focus groups to read and review their work as part of the editing process. Peer reviews can offer many insightful details including:

• Finding any loopholes or incomplete stories
• Checking for grammatical and spelling errors
• Help to cut out irrelevant details and ‘waffle’

Once you’ve completed and edited your essay, why not ask a friend or family member to read through and sense-check it. It’s worth asking someone outside of your class to read through, so not to give them any ideas for their own ideas! They’ll help you to identify any sections that don’t make sense, may need improvements, or have incorrect grammar or spelling.

Peer reviews can be daunting; your writing is a product that you’ve created all on your own, and it can be nerve-wracking for someone else to criticize your work. But remember that all criticism is there to help make your writing better and hopefully earn you more marks. It can only benefit your essay!

10. Keep a Note of Your Ideas

All great writers keep a notebook by their side, ready to jot down any ideas that they may think of or learn about. This is a great thing to do with essay writing too – you’ll be surprised how many ideas may pop into your mind randomly, such as when you’re out and about shopping, or on your commute to class – and they could be your best ideas yet!

This doesn’t just have to be during the process of writing just one essay. Any ideas that didn’t make the final cut for one piece of work may just be helpful for another in the future – so keep them in a safe place, should you ever need some inspiration!

How can creative writing techniques improve my essay?

Creative writing techniques can make your essay more engaging, detailed, and enjoyable to read. They can help you to think outside the box, create vivid imagery, and structure your work more appealingly.

Can I use creative writing techniques for scientific essays?

Yes, although scientific essays often have stricter guidelines, you can still use creative techniques to make your writing more engaging. This includes using detailed descriptions, creating an enticing introduction, and ensuring your conclusion is clear and concise.

How important is editing in essay writing?

Editing is crucial in essay writing. It allows you to refine your ideas, correct mistakes, and ensure your writing is clear and concise. It can also help you to cut out irrelevant details and improve the overall quality of your work.

Should I always use peer review for my essays?

While it's not always necessary, peer review can provide valuable feedback and help you to identify areas for improvement. It can also give you a fresh perspective on your work and help you to refine your ideas.

How can I make my essay stand out?

To make your essay stand out, use creative writing techniques to create an engaging introduction, detailed body paragraphs, and a clear conclusion. Ensure your writing is well-structured, free of errors, and includes interesting and relevant details.

Creative writing and academic essay writing actually have a lot more in common than you may have once thought; both ultimately aim to engage an audience and convey a particular message, theory, or point of view.

In this respect, using creative writing techniques within your essay planning and writing can help you to produce a more enriching, engaging and ultimately, better piece of work than you may have created before.

All the tips included in this list are regularly used by some of the most established writers in the world – so have been tried and tested with proven success. Begin using them in your next assignment and get ready to see your writing stand out against the rest!

Develop your Creative Writing Techniques this Summer

Want to take some time to improve your creative writing techniques? Put pen to paper and feel inspired with an English Literature and Creative Writing course this summer.

A Creative Writing summer course can teach you so much about writing and your own techniques, and can provide you with so many transferable skills to help benefit your academic writing in the future.

Join us in the spell-bounding city of Oxford, where you’ll have the opportunity to spend 2-weeks working on your craft, experiencing a new cultural setting, and making friendships with other passionate writers from around the world.

Ready to Join Oxford Summer Courses?

After submitting your application, we'll be in touch very soon to inform you of the outcome. Apply now to begin your journey with Oxford Summer Courses!

Share this article

Here are some creative writing tips: brainstorm freely, outline your ideas, consider your audience, immerse yourself in your writing, craft captivating openings, enrich your writing with details, avoid ambiguous conclusions, edit meticulously, seek peer feedback, and keep track of your ideas.

Get Our Newsletter

Oxford Summer Courses LTD

18 Beaumont Street, Oxford, OX1 2NA, United Kingdom

+44 01865 818403

Juniors 9-12

Oxford 13-15

Oxford 16-17

Oxford 18-24

Cambridge 13-15

Cambridge 16-17

Advanced Cambridge 18-24

Back-To-Back Courses

Four Week Enhanced Programme

Group Bookings

GDPR Notice

Privacy Policy

Terms and Conditions

Oxford Summer Courses is an organisation which contracts with the colleges of the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and London for the use of facilities, but which has no formal connection with the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and London.

Oxford summer courses © 2024, oxford summer courses is a company registered in england and wales with company number 08011543.

📕 Studying HQ

Creative Writing Essays: Tips, Examples, and Strategies

Carla johnson.

• June 14, 2023
• How to Guides

Creative writing essays are a unique type of academic writing that lets you show your creativity and imagination while still following the rules of academic writing. Creative writing essays are not like other types of essays that rely heavily on research and facts. Instead, they depend on your ability to tell a story, create vivid images, and make your readers feel something.

Writing creatively is important for anyone who wants to express themselves in a unique and interesting way, not just fiction and poetry writers. Whether you are writing a personal essay , a descriptive essay, or an argumentative essay, adding creative elements can help make your writing more interesting and memorable.

In this article, we’ll talk about what to do and what not to do when writing a creative essay . We’ll look at tips, examples, and ways to write well. By following these rules, you can learn how to write creatively while still meeting the requirements of academic writing.

What You'll Learn

Understanding Creative Writing Essays

To write a good creative writing essay, you need to know how this unique type of academic writing works.

A creative writing essay is a type of academic essay that uses elements of creative writing, like telling a story, building characters, and using literary devices. The goal of a creative writing essay is to get the reader’s attention and hold it while still getting the message or argument across.

There are different kinds of creative writing essays, such as personal essays, essays that describe something, and essays that tell a story . Each of these types of essays needs a different way of writing them, but they all need to include creative elements.

Dos of Creative Writing Essays

Here are some dos of creative writing essays to keep in mind when writing:

1. Choosing a strong and interesting topic: Choose a topic that is interesting to you and that will engage your readers. This will help to keep your writing focused and engaging.

2. Developing a clear and engaging thesis statement: Your thesis statement should clearly convey the message or argument you are making in your essay . It should be engaging and capture the reader’s attention.

3. Creating well-rounded and dynamic characters: Characters are an important part of any creative writing essay. Develop characters that are well-rounded and dynamic, with their own unique personalities, motivations, and flaws.

4. Using sensory details to enhance the story: Sensory details, such as sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures, can help to bring yourwriting to life and create a more immersive experience for your readers. Use vivid and descriptive language to evoke the senses and create a more vivid world for your readers to imagine.

5. Incorporating dialogue effectively: Dialogue can be a powerful tool for conveying information and developing characters. Use dialogue to reveal character traits, advance the plot, and create tension.

6. Utilizing literary devices to enhance the story: Literary devices like metaphors, similes, symbols, and images can make a story more interesting and help the reader understand it better. Use these tools sparingly and on purpose to make your effect stronger.

By using these dos in your creative writing essay, you can make it more interesting, easy to remember, and effective.

To write a good creative writing essay, you need to use your imagination, skills, and knowledge. By learning the basics of this unique type of writing and following the dos in this article, you can make a more interesting and effective creative writing essay. Remember to pick a strong and interesting topic, make characters that are well-rounded, use details and dialogue well, and use literary devices to make the story better.

Don’ts of Creative Writing Essays

To avoid common pitfalls when writing a creative writing essay, here are some don’ts to keep in mind:

1. Overusing adjectives and adverbs: While descriptive language is important in creative writing, overusing adjectives and adverbs can make your writing feel cluttered and overwhelming.

2. Using cliches and predictable plot lines: Creative writing is all about bringing something new and fresh to the table. Using cliches and predictable plot lines can make your writing feel unoriginal and uninspired.

3. Writing flat and uninteresting characters: Characters are an important part of any creative writing essay. Flat and uninteresting characters can make your writing feel dull and unengaging.

4. Forgetting to revise and edit: Like any form of academic writing, it is important to revise and edit your creative writing essay to ensure that it is polished and error-free.

5. Using weak verbs and passive voice: Weak verbs and passive voice can make your writing feel flat and uninteresting. Use strong and active verbs to create a more dynamic and engaging narrative.

Inspiring Creative Writing Essay Examples

To gain a better understanding of what makes a successful creative writing essay, here are some inspiring examples to analyze:

1. The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

2. “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe

3. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

4. “A Good Man is Hard to Find”by Flannery O’Connor

5. “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe

6. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber

7. “The Garden Party” by Katherine Mansfield

8. The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

9. The Love Song of J . Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot

10. “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell

By looking at these examples, you can see that symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony are often used in creative writing essays that work well. They also have well-thought-out characters, interesting plots, and language that evokes the senses and helps the reader picture a vivid world.

Each of these examples shows a different side of what it means to be human and helps us learn more about the world around us. These essays show how creative writing can captivate and interest readers, whether it’s about love, death, or what it’s like to be human.

Some of the most important things to learn from these examples are how important it is to have strong characters, use descriptive language well, and use literary devices to make the story better. By looking at these good examples of creative writing essays, writers can learn how to use the same techniques in their own work to make essays that are more interesting and effective.

How to Start a Creative Writing Essay with a Bang

Starting a creative writing essay in a way that captivates your reader is crucial for the success of your essay. Here are some different strategies you can use to start your essay with a bang:

1. Using attention-grabbing hooks to draw in the reader: Start with a provocative statement, a surprising fact, or a rhetorical question to pique the reader’s interest.

2. Crafting a strong opening sentence or paragraph: Create a vivid image or use descriptive language to set the scene and draw the reader into the story.

3. Starting in the middle of the action: Begin your story in the middle of a dramatic or exciting scene to immediately engage your reader.

4. Using an anecdote: Start with a personal anecdote that relates to the theme or message of your essay to draw the reader into your story.

By using attention-grabbing hooks and crafting a strong opening sentence or paragraph, you can hook your reader from the beginning and keep them engaged throughout your essay.

Elements of a Successful Creative Writing Essay

To write a successful creative writing essay, it is important to incorporate certain elements into your writing. Here are some elements to keep in mind:

1. Developing a strong plot and narrative structure: Your essay should have a clear beginning, middle, and end, with a well-developed plot that keeps the reader engaged.

2. Creating compelling and relatable characters: Your characters should be well-rounded, withunique personalities, motivations, and flaws that make them relatable and interesting to the reader.

3. Using descriptive language and sensory details: Use vivid and sensory language to create a world that the reader can imagine and visualize. This can enhance the reading experience and make your writing feel more immersive.

4. Incorporating dialogue and literary devices effectively: Dialogue can be a powerful tool for conveying information and developing characters. Literary devices like metaphor, simile, and symbolism can also be used to enhance the story and create deeper meaning.

5. Crafting a satisfying ending : Your essay should have a satisfying and conclusive ending that ties up loose ends and leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

To write a good creative writing essay, you need to use your imagination, skills, and knowledge. Use hooks and a strong first sentence or paragraph to get people interested in your essay right away. To make sure your story is successful, include things like a strong plot and story structure, interesting characters, descriptive language and sensory details, good dialogue and literary devices, and a satisfying ending. With these tips and elements in mind, you can write a powerful and memorable creative writing essay that engages and inspires your readers.

Creative Writing Essay Format

When it comes to formatting a creative writing essay, there are a few guidelines to keep in mind:

1. Use a standard font, such as Times New Roman or Arial, in 12-point size.

2. Double-space the text and use 1-inch margins on all sides.

3. Include a header with your name, the title of your essay , and the page number.

4. Use paragraph breaks to separate different ideas or sections of your essay .

5. Use italics or quotation marks to indicate dialogue or emphasize certain words or phrases.

Proper formatting is important to ensure that your work looks professional and is easy to read. By following these guidelines, you can create a polished and well-formatted creative writing essay.

When organizing and structuring your essay , consider using a clear and logical structure. This can include an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. You may also want to use headings and subheadings to break up your writing into sections and make it easier to follow.

Creative Writing Essay Topics

Generating creative writing essay topics can be a fun and creative process. Here are some brainstorming techniques and examples to help you come up with ideas:

Brainstorming Techniques:

1. Freewriting: Set a timer for 10-15 minutes and write down whatever comes to mind. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling, just write freely.

2. Mind Mapping: Start with a central idea and branch out with related ideas. This can help you visualize connections between ideas and spark new ones.

3. Listing: Make a list of words or phrases that relate to a central theme or idea. This can help you see patterns and connections between ideas.

Examples of Creative Writing Essay Topics:

1. A childhood memory that shaped who you are today.

2. A personal essay about overcoming a challenge.

3. A fictional story set in a dystopian society.

4. A character study of a family member or friend .

5. A descriptive essay about a memorable place .

6. An exploration of a unique hobby or interest.

7. A persuasive essay about a social or political issue .

8. A narrative essay about a journey or adventure .

9. A creative nonfiction essay about a historical event or person.

10. A personal essay about your relationship with nature .

11. A fictional story about a time traveler.

12. An essay about a defining moment in your life .

13. A character study of a famous historical figure .

14. A descriptive essay about a favoritefood or dish.

15. A personal essay about your experience with mental health .

16. A fictional story about a haunted house.

17. A persuasive essay about the importance of education .

18. A narrative essay about a difficult decision you had to make.

19. A creative nonfiction essay about a place that has special meaning to you.

20. A personal essay about your experience with a different culture.

21. A fictional story about a person with a superpower.

22. A character study of a famous author or artist.

23. A descriptive essay about your favorite season.

24. A persuasive essay about the benefits of exercise.

25. A narrative essay about a trip that changed your perspective.

26. A creative nonfiction essay about your first job .

27. A personal essay about your experience with discrimination .

28. A fictional story about a post-apocalyptic world.

29. A character study of a famous musician or athlete.

30. A descriptive essay about a favorite childhood memory.

It is important to choose a topic that is both interesting and manageable. Consider your interests and passions, as well as the audience you are writing for. Remember that a well-chosen topic can make your writing more engaging and effective, while also making the writing process more enjoyable and fulfilling.

Tips for Making Your Creative Writing Essay Interesting

– Using descriptive language and sensory details

– Incorporating conflict and tension into the story

– Developing complex and dynamic characters

– Using humor, irony, or suspense to engage the reader

To make your creative writing essay interesting and engaging, consider the following tips:

1. Use descriptive language and sensory details: Creating a vivid world for the reader to imagine can enhance the reading experience and make your writing more immersive.

2. Incorporate conflict and tension into the story: Conflict drives the narrative forward and creates tension that keeps the reader engaged.

3. Develop complex and dynamic characters: Characters with unique personalities, motivations, and flaws can make your story more relatable and interesting.

4. Use humor, irony, or suspense to engage the reader: Adding a touch of humor, irony, or suspense can make your writing more engaging and keep the reader hooked.

By using these techniques, you can make your creative writing essay more interesting and memorable for your readers.

Revision and Editing Tips for Creative Writing Essays

Revision and editing are important steps in the writing process. Here are some tips for revising and editing your creative writing essay:

1. Take a break: Step away from your writing for a few hours or days to gain a fresh perspective on your work .

2. Read your work out loud: This can help you catch errors and awkward phrasing that may not be immediately apparent when reading silently.

3. Get feedback from others: Share your work with others and ask for constructive criticism and feedback.

4. Look for common mistakes: Pay attention to common mistakes such as grammar and spelling errors, repetition, and inconsistencies.

5.Focus on clarity and conciseness: Ensure that your writing is clear and concise, and that your ideas are presented in a logical and organized manner.

6. Make sure your characters are consistent: Ensure that your characters’ actions, motivations, and personalities are consistent throughout the story.

7. Cut unnecessary words and phrases: Eliminate unnecessary words and phrases to tighten your writing and make it more impactful.

8. Check for pacing: Ensure that your story is paced well and that it moves at a pace that keeps the reader engaged.

9. Pay attention to the ending: Ensure that your ending is satisfying and that it ties up loose ends in a way that leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

By revising and editing your creative writing essay, you can improve the overall quality of your work and ensure that it is polished and error-free.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. what is a creative writing essay.

A creative writing essay is a type of essay that allows writers to express their creativity and imagination. It can take many forms, including personal essays , short stories, poetry, and more.

2. What are the elements of a creative writing essay?

The elements of a creative writing essay include a strong plot and narrative structure, compelling and relatable characters, descriptive language and sensory details, effective use of dialogue and literary devices, and a satisfying ending.

3. How do I make my creative writing essay interesting?

You can make your creative writing essay interesting by using descriptive language and sensory details, incorporating conflict and tension into the story, developing complex and dynamic characters, and using humor, irony, or suspense to engage the reader.

4. What is the best way to start a creative writing essay?

You can start a creative writing essay with a provocative statement, a surprising fact, or a rhetorical question to pique the reader’s interest. Alternatively, you can create a vivid image or use descriptive language to set the scene and draw the reader into the story.

5. How can I revise and edit my creative writing essay effectively?

To revise and edit your creative writing essay effectively, take a break, read your work out loud, get feedback from others, look for common mistakes, focus on clarity and conciseness, ensure consistency in character development, cut unnecessary words and phrases, check for pacing, and pay attention to the ending.

In conclusion, a creative writing essay is a powerful way to express your creativity and imagination. By incorporating the elements of a strong plot and narrative structure, compelling characters, descriptive language and sensory details, effective use of dialogue and literary devices, and a satisfying ending, you can create a memorable and impactful piece of writing. To make your essay interesting , consider using descriptive language, incorporating conflict and tension, developing complex characters, and using humor, irony, or suspense. When revising and editing your essay, take a break, read your work out loud, get feedback, and pay attention to common mistakes.

We encourage you to start your own creative writing essay and explore the many possibilities that this type of writing offers. Remember to choose a topic that is both interesting and manageable, and to let your creativity and imagination shine through in your writing. With these tips and techniques in mind, you can create a powerful and memorable creative writing essay that engages and inspires your readers.

Start by filling this short order form order.studyinghq.com

And then follow the progressive flow. 

Having an issue, chat with us here

Cathy, CS. 

New Concept ? Let a subject expert write your paper for You​

Have a subject expert write for you now, have a subject expert finish your paper for you, edit my paper for me, have an expert write your dissertation's chapter.

Typically replies within minutes

Hey! 👋 Need help with an assignment?

🟢 Online | Privacy policy

WhatsApp us

The Writing Process: A Seven-Step Approach for Every Writer

Aaron Burden / Unsplash.com

Main Writing Process Takeaways:

• Writing process refers to a series of steps that a writer must follow to complete a piece of writing.
• Having a  writing process  is essential to produce a wide range of content.
• Breaking down your text into different stages could ultimately improve content quality.
• A writing process or method includes the following stages: planning, drafting, sharing, evaluating, revising, editing, and publishing.
• The prewriting stage is the most critical stage of the writing process .

We all follow a writing process when creating an article or any written content. In most cases, this process becomes a routine that comes naturally rather than a step-by-step guide.

However, following a step-by-step writing process can come in handy, especially when dealing with challenging pieces. In this post, we will discuss the seven-stage writing method that you can use for writing high quality content.

What is the Writing Process?

Writing process refers to a series of steps that you must follow in order for you to complete a piece of writing . Writers may have different writing methods , but the writing stages are essentially the same. These stages break writing into manageable pieces from planning, drafting, and sharing to revising, editing, and publishing. That way, the task seems less laborious.

The primary strength of the writing process is its usefulness in producing a wide range of content. Whether you’re an academic writer, blogger , or screenwriter , it helps you write better, easier, and faster.

Read More: The Best Copywriting Courses For Beginners

Why is the writing process important.

Having a writing process will help you break your writing tasks into manageable parts, making the work less intimidating. As a result, you’re less likely to experience writer’s block. It could also aid in reducing the anxiety and stress that comes with writing. Also, breaking down your writing work into different stages could ultimately improve content quality.

It will allow you to focus on your piece. That way, you can tailor your content to address the specific needs of your target audience.

We could think of writing in terms of merely producing materials for readers to enjoy. But there’s more to the story.

With the right approach, writers usually undergo three stages — thinking, learning, and discovery — to produce excellent pieces. And such authentic writing usually makes lifelong learners and versatile writers.

Writers must always follow a writing process to be efficient and more productive.

It does not matter whether you are writing a thesis, academic report , research paper , essay, or blog content. The more organize your ideas are when you present them in text, the more you will be able to connect with your readers.

What are the 7 Steps of the Writing Process?

The EEF’s “ Improving Literacy in Key Stage 2 ” guidance report broke down the writing process into seven stages. This includes the planning , drafting, sharing, evaluating, revising, editing, and publishing stages. As writers become adept in these stages, they can quickly move back and forth, revising their text along the way. In other words, writing is not a linear process.

1. Planning or Prewriting

The planning or prewriting stage involves brainstorming, which takes into account your writing purpose and goal. It’s also the stage to connect your ideas using graphic organizers. The prewriting stage is when you ask the following questions:

• What will I write?
• What is the intended purpose of the writing?
• Who is the audience for your writing?

You need to do intent research to better understand what your target readers need. For instance, if you are writing for the web, you can take advantage of Google-Related Questions to know what the people are searching for online in relation to your topic.

Answering these questions ensures that you start your writing with the end in mind. Furthermore, you’ll be able to see your writing project through your audience’s eyes.

2. Create Your First Draft

Before your content is ready for publishing, you must have created a couple of drafts.

Thanks to the drafting process, you can write freely from the beginning to the end. What’s more, it provides a way to quickly draw from your outline or list of main plot points — depending on your writing process.

You could also use these stages to establish word count goals to get a rough idea of the project duration. This is especially important for creative writers such as novelists.

3. Share Your First Draft

After completing the first draft, it’s time to take a break and share the text with others.

While it may sound a bit scary at first, the feedback will help you evaluate elements of your writing. These include the composition, structure, and overall effectiveness.

Consider sharing your first draft in the following places:

• Your email list — if you have one
• Online writing groups and forums
• Social media groups for writers
• Social media group for a specific genre

In the end, you’ll know whether your first draft fulfills the intended purpose and appeal to your audience. The feedback also tells you if your writing is clear, enjoyable, and easy to read.

4. Evaluate Your Draft

This writing process involves doing a full evaluation of your first draft.

At this stage, you have to take the feedback that you’ve received into account. It’s also an excellent opportunity to address possible mistakes with grammar or mechanics.

For fiction writers, this writing stage allows you to ask whether the readers like your main character. Likewise, non-fiction writers have to ask if their content addresses their audience’s questions.

After evaluating your work, you can move to the revision stage of writing.

5. Revising Your Draft

Revision involves making changes to your work based on the feedback you received and thorough evaluation. This writing process is especially useful for fiction writers.

Along with correcting structural problems in your story, it also allows you to find loose ends and tie them up. You can also add or remove content to improve your write-up’s flow and usefulness.

When you’re done revising, you’ll have a new draft that takes you closer to your  writing goal .

At this point, your newest revision becomes your latest draft. After that, you may opt to edit your own work using a content writing and editing tool like INK or hire a professional editor.

6. Editing your Content

The editing aspect of the writing process is about eliminating possible errors in your revised content. These include elements that can affect your text’s accuracy, clarity, and readability.

The editing process also addresses misquoted content, factual errors, awkward phrasing, and unnecessary repetition. Not only does good editing make your work easier, but it also makes the text more enjoyable.

Specialized writing tools such as INK could prove useful for editing web content. But it’s best to avoid self-editing for books. Consider hiring a professional editor for novels and non-fiction books.

7. Publishing your Content

The last stage of the writing process involves sharing your text with your audience.

There are various ways to publish your content, depending on the content type. For example, you can share your book using self-publishing platforms such as Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and CreateSpace .

Whatever the writing may be, the writing processes outlined above will help you create an excellent piece.

What is the Most Important Step in the Writing Process?

Educators have not reached a consensus on the most important writing process . Some would argue that the prewriting stage is the most critical for completing a piece of writing.

After all, brainstorming is required to create an idea that’ll eventually become the content. Besides, writers can use the prewriting stage to avoid or overcome writer’s block.

Meanwhile, educators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill believe that the revision stage is the most critical. It’s when a piece of writing undergoes the most changes.

It could entail increasing the word count to supply as much information as possible. You could also rearrange some aspect of the manuscript to improve the content’s flow, pacing, and sequence.

Read More: 10 Effective Content Writing Techniques for Beginners

Found this article interesting?

Let Sumbo Bello know how much you appreciate this article by clicking the heart icon and by sharing this article on social media.

Sumbo Bello

Sumbo Bello is a creative writer who enjoys creating data-driven content for news sites. In his spare time, he plays basketball and listens to Coldplay.

How to Become a Successful Content Manager                                     

How Facebook Instant Articles Improves Your UX                             

4 Content Marketing Pitfalls and how to Avoid Them                     

How and why you Should Only Create Authentic Content                 

Here's how to Write Better Listicles                                                 

How Fighter's Blocks! Uses a Video Game to Solve Writer's Block

How to Come up With Writing Topics for Your Website                   

How Many Pages is 1000 Words?                                                               

Google Docs Machine Translation Grammar Suggestions now Live 

10 Best Content Writing Courses for Beginners                               

Tag Manager Verification Issue on Search Console Fixed             

10 Social Media Marketing Tips to Help You Succeed                     

Why the Dutch are Investing Heavily in Bangladesh Water Infrastru...

4 Techniques to Make Your Content More Persuasive                       

Comments (2).

One has to be careful with the brokers on the internet now. Last year I was scammed in the binary trade option by a broker I met on Instagram. I invested $14000 which I lost, I couldn’t make a withdrawal and I slowly lost access to my trade account for 3 months I was frustrated and depressed. After a few months, I met Mrs Lisa who is A recovery expert that works in affiliation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other law firm. she worked me through the process of getting my money back and all the extra bonus which I got during my trading. he can be of help to anyone who has a similar situation. You can contact him via her mail: Email Lisa.Eric @ proton.me WhatsApp +84 94 767 1524

Hello guys I wan to say this to whom it may concern. Investing in crypto was my husband ideal. I trade with sim ceypto platform not knowing they where sc!m and this made me lose almost all I had. Am only happy because I found help after reporting to Mrs Lisa Eric and she helped me recover all I lost to these fake crypto platform. My advice is that everyone need to be careful of the platform you deal with. If you have falling victim of these fake platform do not hesitate to file a complaint to Lisa via he mail ( Lisa.Eric @ proton.me ) she helped me and I believe she can help you too. Stay safe guys. You can visit WhatsApp +84 94 767 1524.

Link Copied Successfully

Sign in to access your personalized homepage, follow authors and topics you love, and clap for stories that matter to you.

By using our site you agree to our privacy policy.

Essay Papers Writing Online

Unlock your creativity with these inspiring college essay writing prompts.

As a college student, you may find yourself facing the daunting task of writing essays for your classes. While some essay prompts may seem dull and uninspiring, there are plenty of creative writing prompts that can spark your imagination and help you produce engaging and unique essays.

From personal experiences to imaginative scenarios, these creative college essay writing prompts will encourage you to think outside the box and showcase your storytelling skills. Whether you’re writing an admissions essay or a class assignment, these prompts will challenge you to explore new ideas and perspectives.

So, if you’re looking for a fresh approach to your college essays, take a look at these 15 creative writing prompts that will inspire you to craft compelling and memorable essays that stand out from the crowd.

Spark Your Imagination with College Essay Writing

Writing college essays can be a challenging but rewarding experience. As you start brainstorming ideas for your essay, it’s important to let your imagination run wild. Try to think outside the box and come up with unique angles and perspectives that will make your essay stand out.

One way to spark your imagination is to think about your personal experiences and how they have shaped you as a person. Consider writing about a moment that changed your life or a challenge you overcame. These personal stories can make your essay more compelling and give the admissions committee a glimpse into who you are as an individual.

Another way to get creative with your essay is to experiment with different writing styles and formats. You could try writing in the form of a letter, a diary entry, or even a poem. Mixing things up can help you find your voice and make your essay more interesting to read.

Ultimately, the key to sparking your imagination with college essay writing is to be open-minded and willing to take risks. Don’t be afraid to explore new ideas and push the boundaries of traditional essay writing. By letting your imagination run wild, you can create an essay that truly reflects who you are and what you have to offer.

Unleash Your Creativity with These Inspiring Prompts

Ready to take your college essay writing to the next level? These inspiring prompts will help you unleash your creativity and showcase your unique voice in your writing:

• Imagine you have the ability to travel to any place, real or fictional. Where would you go and why?
• If you could have a conversation with any historical figure, who would it be and what would you talk about?
• Write a story where you are the protagonist in a world where all your wildest dreams come true.
• Reflect on a personal experience that shaped your perspective or worldview.
• Describe a challenge you faced and how you overcame it, showcasing your resilience.

These prompts are designed to ignite your imagination and help you craft a compelling college essay that stands out. Get creative, be authentic, and let your voice shine through!

Explore Unique Topics to Stand Out in Your Admission Essay

When it comes to writing your college admission essay, choosing a unique and engaging topic can make all the difference. Admissions officers read through countless essays, so standing out with a fresh and creative topic is crucial.

Consider exploring topics that showcase your personality, experiences, and aspirations in a unique and compelling way. Instead of rehashing common themes like your volunteer work or a sports achievement, think outside the box and delve into topics that truly reflect who you are.

• Share a meaningful encounter you had with a stranger that changed your perspective.
• Discuss a book, movie, or piece of art that greatly influenced your worldview.
• Reflect on a personal failure or setback and how it ultimately shaped your character.
• Describe a unique hobby or passion that sets you apart from your peers.
• Explore a cultural tradition or heritage that has shaped your values and beliefs.

By choosing a unique and compelling topic for your admission essay, you can capture the attention of admissions officers and leave a lasting impression. Use this opportunity to showcase your creativity, thoughtfulness, and uniqueness to stand out in a sea of applicants.

Get Inspired by 15 Innovative College Essay Writing Ideas

College application essays are a great opportunity for students to showcase their creativity, personality, and unique perspectives. Here are 15 creative prompts to help you get started on your college essay:

• Write about a time when you faced a challenge and how you overcame it.
• Describe a person who has had a significant influence on your life and why.
• Imagine you could have dinner with any historical figure–who would it be and why?
• Discuss a book, movie, or artwork that has had a profound impact on you.
• Share a personal story that illustrates your passion for a particular hobby or interest.
• Reflect on a moment when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea.
• Discuss a problem in your community and propose a creative solution.
• Describe an experience that changed your perspective on life.
• Write about a time when you had to make a difficult decision and how it shaped you.
• Discuss a quote that resonates with you and explain its significance.
• Share a piece of advice that has stuck with you and influenced your actions.
• Imagine yourself ten years in the future–what do you hope to have accomplished?
• Reflect on a moment of failure or setback and how you grew from the experience.
• Describe a place that holds special meaning for you and why.
• Write about a topic that you are passionate about and why it matters to you.

These prompts are designed to inspire your imagination and help you craft a compelling and unique college essay that showcases your personality and accomplishments. Use them as a starting point to brainstorm ideas and stories that will captivate admissions officers and set you apart from other applicants.

Ignite Your Passion for Writing with Creative Essay Topics

Writing essays can be a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be boring! With the right topic, you can unleash your creativity and passion for writing. Creative essay topics not only challenge your critical thinking skills but also allow you to express your unique perspective in an engaging way.

Whether you’re exploring a personal experience, analyzing a thought-provoking question, or delving into a fictional world, creative essay topics offer endless possibilities for exploration. By choosing topics that resonate with you, you can truly ignite your passion for writing and produce compelling essays that captivate your audience.

So, don’t be afraid to think outside the box and embrace unconventional ideas. Let your creativity flourish and discover the joy of writing with these creative essay topics!

Related Post

How to master the art of writing expository essays and captivate your audience, convenient and reliable source to purchase college essays online, step-by-step guide to crafting a powerful literary analysis essay, unlock success with a comprehensive business research paper example guide, unlock your writing potential with writers college – transform your passion into profession, “unlocking the secrets of academic success – navigating the world of research papers in college”, master the art of sociological expression – elevate your writing skills in sociology.

Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

Four Strategies for Effective Writing Instruction

• Share article

(This is the first post in a two-part series.)

The new question-of-the-week is:

What is the single most effective instructional strategy you have used to teach writing?

Teaching and learning good writing can be a challenge to educators and students alike.

The topic is no stranger to this column—you can see many previous related posts at Writing Instruction .

But I don’t think any of us can get too much good instructional advice in this area.

Today, Jenny Vo, Michele Morgan, and Joy Hamm share wisdom gained from their teaching experience.

Before I turn over the column to them, though, I’d like to share my favorite tool(s).

Graphic organizers, including writing frames (which are basically more expansive sentence starters) and writing structures (which function more as guides and less as “fill-in-the-blanks”) are critical elements of my writing instruction.

You can see an example of how I incorporate them in my seven-week story-writing unit and in the adaptations I made in it for concurrent teaching.

You might also be interested in The Best Scaffolded Writing Frames For Students .

Now, to today’s guests:

‘Shared Writing’

Jenny Vo earned her B.A. in English from Rice University and her M.Ed. in educational leadership from Lamar University. She has worked with English-learners during all of her 24 years in education and is currently an ESL ISST in Katy ISD in Katy, Texas. Jenny is the president-elect of TexTESOL IV and works to advocate for all ELs:

The single most effective instructional strategy that I have used to teach writing is shared writing. Shared writing is when the teacher and students write collaboratively. In shared writing, the teacher is the primary holder of the pen, even though the process is a collaborative one. The teacher serves as the scribe, while also questioning and prompting the students.

The students engage in discussions with the teacher and their peers on what should be included in the text. Shared writing can be done with the whole class or as a small-group activity.

There are two reasons why I love using shared writing. One, it is a great opportunity for the teacher to model the structures and functions of different types of writing while also weaving in lessons on spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

It is a perfect activity to do at the beginning of the unit for a new genre. Use shared writing to introduce the students to the purpose of the genre. Model the writing process from beginning to end, taking the students from idea generation to planning to drafting to revising to publishing. As you are writing, make sure you refrain from making errors, as you want your finished product to serve as a high-quality model for the students to refer back to as they write independently.

Another reason why I love using shared writing is that it connects the writing process with oral language. As the students co-construct the writing piece with the teacher, they are orally expressing their ideas and listening to the ideas of their classmates. It gives them the opportunity to practice rehearsing what they are going to say before it is written down on paper. Shared writing gives the teacher many opportunities to encourage their quieter or more reluctant students to engage in the discussion with the types of questions the teacher asks.

Writing well is a skill that is developed over time with much practice. Shared writing allows students to engage in the writing process while observing the construction of a high-quality sample. It is a very effective instructional strategy used to teach writing.

‘Four Square’

Michele Morgan has been writing IEPs and behavior plans to help students be more successful for 17 years. She is a national-board-certified teacher, Utah Teacher Fellow with Hope Street Group, and a special education elementary new-teacher specialist with the Granite school district. Follow her @MicheleTMorgan1:

For many students, writing is the most dreaded part of the school day. Writing involves many complex processes that students have to engage in before they produce a product—they must determine what they will write about, they must organize their thoughts into a logical sequence, and they must do the actual writing, whether on a computer or by hand. Still they are not done—they must edit their writing and revise mistakes. With all of that, it’s no wonder that students struggle with writing assignments.

In my years working with elementary special education students, I have found that writing is the most difficult subject to teach. Not only do my students struggle with the writing process, but they often have the added difficulties of not knowing how to spell words and not understanding how to use punctuation correctly. That is why the single most effective strategy I use when teaching writing is the Four Square graphic organizer.

The Four Square instructional strategy was developed in 1999 by Judith S. Gould and Evan Jay Gould. When I first started teaching, a colleague allowed me to borrow the Goulds’ book about using the Four Square method, and I have used it ever since. The Four Square is a graphic organizer that students can make themselves when given a blank sheet of paper. They fold it into four squares and draw a box in the middle of the page. The genius of this instructional strategy is that it can be used by any student, in any grade level, for any writing assignment. These are some of the ways I have used this strategy successfully with my students:

* Writing sentences: Students can write the topic for the sentence in the middle box, and in each square, they can draw pictures of details they want to add to their writing.

* Writing paragraphs: Students write the topic sentence in the middle box. They write a sentence containing a supporting detail in three of the squares and they write a concluding sentence in the last square.

* Writing short essays: Students write what information goes in the topic paragraph in the middle box, then list details to include in supporting paragraphs in the squares.

When I gave students writing assignments, the first thing I had them do was create a Four Square. We did this so often that it became automatic. After filling in the Four Square, they wrote rough drafts by copying their work off of the graphic organizer and into the correct format, either on lined paper or in a Word document. This worked for all of my special education students!

I was able to modify tasks using the Four Square so that all of my students could participate, regardless of their disabilities. Even if they did not know what to write about, they knew how to start the assignment (which is often the hardest part of getting it done!) and they grew to be more confident in their writing abilities.

In addition, when it was time to take the high-stakes state writing tests at the end of the year, this was a strategy my students could use to help them do well on the tests. I was able to give them a sheet of blank paper, and they knew what to do with it. I have used many different curriculum materials and programs to teach writing in the last 16 years, but the Four Square is the one strategy that I have used with every writing assignment, no matter the grade level, because it is so effective.

‘Swift Structures’

Joy Hamm has taught 11 years in a variety of English-language settings, ranging from kindergarten to adult learners. The last few years working with middle and high school Newcomers and completing her M.Ed in TESOL have fostered stronger advocacy in her district and beyond:

A majority of secondary content assessments include open-ended essay questions. Many students falter (not just ELs) because they are unaware of how to quickly organize their thoughts into a cohesive argument. In fact, the WIDA CAN DO Descriptors list level 5 writing proficiency as “organizing details logically and cohesively.” Thus, the most effective cross-curricular secondary writing strategy I use with my intermediate LTELs (long-term English-learners) is what I call “Swift Structures.” This term simply means reading a prompt across any content area and quickly jotting down an outline to organize a strong response.

To implement Swift Structures, begin by displaying a prompt and modeling how to swiftly create a bubble map or outline beginning with a thesis/opinion, then connecting the three main topics, which are each supported by at least three details. Emphasize this is NOT the time for complete sentences, just bulleted words or phrases.

Once the outline is completed, show your ELs how easy it is to plug in transitions, expand the bullets into detailed sentences, and add a brief introduction and conclusion. After modeling and guided practice, set a 5-10 minute timer and have students practice independently. Swift Structures is one of my weekly bell ringers, so students build confidence and skill over time. It is best to start with easy prompts where students have preformed opinions and knowledge in order to focus their attention on the thesis-topics-supporting-details outline, not struggling with the rigor of a content prompt.

Here is one easy prompt example: “Should students be allowed to use their cellphones in class?”

Swift Structure outline:

Thesis - Students should be allowed to use cellphones because (1) higher engagement (2) learning tools/apps (3) gain 21st-century skills

Topic 1. Cellphones create higher engagement in students...

Details A. interactive (Flipgrid, Kahoot)

B. less tempted by distractions

C. teaches responsibility

Topic 2. Furthermore,...access to learning tools...

A. Google Translate description

B. language practice (Duolingo)

C. content tutorials (Kahn Academy)

Topic 3. In addition,...practice 21st-century skills…

Details A. prep for workforce

B. access to information

C. time-management support

This bare-bones outline is like the frame of a house. Get the structure right, and it’s easier to fill in the interior decorating (style, grammar), roof (introduction) and driveway (conclusion). Without the frame, the roof and walls will fall apart, and the reader is left confused by circuitous rubble.

Once LTELs have mastered creating simple Swift Structures in less than 10 minutes, it is time to introduce complex questions similar to prompts found on content assessments or essays. Students need to gain assurance that they can quickly and logically explain and justify their opinions on multiple content essays without freezing under pressure.

Thanks to Jenny, Michele, and Joy for their contributions!

Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo .

Education Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an e-book form. It’s titled Classroom Management Q&As: Expert Strategies for Teaching .

Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email (The RSS feed for this blog, and for all Ed Week articles, has been changed by the new redesign—new ones are not yet available). And if you missed any of the highlights from the first nine years of this blog, you can see a categorized list below.

• This Year’s Most Popular Q&A Posts
• Race & Racism in Schools
• School Closures & the Coronavirus Crisis
• Classroom-Management Advice
• Best Ways to Begin the School Year
• Best Ways to End the School Year
• Student Motivation & Social-Emotional Learning
• Implementing the Common Core
• Facing Gender Challenges in Education
• Teaching Social Studies
• Cooperative & Collaborative Learning
• Using Tech in the Classroom
• Student Voices
• Parent Engagement in Schools
• Teaching English-Language Learners
• Reading Instruction
• Writing Instruction
• Education Policy Issues
• Differentiating Instruction
• Math Instruction
• Science Instruction
• Advice for New Teachers
• Author Interviews
• Entering the Teaching Profession
• The Inclusive Classroom
• Learning & the Brain
• Administrator Leadership
• Teacher Leadership
• Relationships in Schools
• Professional Development
• Instructional Strategies
• Best of Classroom Q&A
• Professional Collaboration
• Classroom Organization
• Mistakes in Education
• Project-Based Learning

I am also creating a Twitter list including all contributors to this column .

The opinions expressed in Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

Sign Up for EdWeek Update

Edweek top school jobs.

Sign Up & Sign In

You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience.

How to Teach Creative Writing | 7 Steps to Get Students Wordsmithing

“I don’t have any ideas!”

“I can’t think of anything!”

While we see creative writing as a world of limitless imagination, our students often see an overwhelming desert of “no idea.”

But when you teach creative writing effectively, you’ll notice that  every  student is brimming over with ideas that just have to get out.

So what does teaching creative writing effectively look like?

We’ve outlined a  seven-step method  that will  scaffold your students through each phase of the creative process  from idea generation through to final edits.

7. Create inspiring and original prompts

Use the following formats to generate prompts that get students inspired:

• personal memories (“Write about a person who taught you an important lesson”)
• imaginative scenarios
• prompts based on a familiar mentor text (e.g. “Write an alternative ending to your favorite book”). These are especially useful for giving struggling students an easy starting point.
• lead-in sentences (“I looked in the mirror and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Somehow overnight I…”).
• fascinating or thought-provoking images with a directive (“Who do you think lives in this mountain cabin? Tell their story”).

Don’t have the time or stuck for ideas? Check out our list of 100 student writing prompts

6. unpack the prompts together.

Explicitly teach your students how to dig deeper into the prompt for engaging and original ideas.

Probing questions are an effective strategy for digging into a prompt. Take this one for example:

“I looked in the mirror and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Somehow overnight I…”

Ask “What questions need answering here?” The first thing students will want to know is:

What happened overnight?

No doubt they’ll be able to come up with plenty of zany answers to that question, but there’s another one they could ask to make things much more interesting:

Who might “I” be?

In this way, you subtly push students to go beyond the obvious and into more original and thoughtful territory. It’s even more useful with a deep prompt:

“Write a story where the main character starts to question something they’ve always believed.”

Here students could ask:

• What sorts of beliefs do people take for granted?
• What might make us question those beliefs?
• What happens when we question something we’ve always thought is true?
• How do we feel when we discover that something isn’t true?

Try splitting students into groups, having each group come up with probing questions for a prompt, and then discussing potential “answers” to these questions as a class.

The most important lesson at this point should be that good ideas take time to generate. So don’t rush this step!

5. Warm-up for writing

A quick warm-up activity will:

• allow students to see what their discussed ideas look like on paper
• help fix the “I don’t know how to start” problem
• warm up writing muscles quite literally (especially important for young learners who are still developing handwriting and fine motor skills).

Freewriting  is a particularly effective warm-up. Give students 5–10 minutes to “dump” all their ideas for a prompt onto the page for without worrying about structure, spelling, or grammar.

After about five minutes you’ll notice them starting to get into the groove, and when you call time, they’ll have a better idea of what captures their interest.

Did you know? The Story Factory in Reading Eggs allows your students to write and publish their own storybooks using an easy step-by-step guide.

4. Start planning

Now it’s time for students to piece all these raw ideas together and generate a plan. This will synthesize disjointed ideas and give them a roadmap for the writing process.

Note:  at this stage your strong writers might be more than ready to get started on a creative piece. If so, let them go for it – use planning for students who are still puzzling things out.

Here are four ideas for planning:

Graphic organisers

A graphic organiser will allow your students to plan out the overall structure of their writing. They’re also particularly useful in “chunking” the writing process, so students don’t see it as one big wall of text.

Storyboards and illustrations

These will engage your artistically-minded students and give greater depth to settings and characters. Just make sure that drawing doesn’t overshadow the writing process.

Voice recordings

If you have students who are hesitant to commit words to paper, tell them to think out loud and record it on their device. Often they’ll be surprised at how well their spoken words translate to the page.

Write a blurb

This takes a bit more explicit teaching, but it gets students to concisely summarize all their main ideas (without giving away spoilers). Look at some blurbs on the back of published books before getting them to write their own. Afterward they could test it out on a friend – based on the blurb, would they borrow it from the library?

3. Produce rough drafts

Warmed up and with a plan at the ready, your students are now ready to start wordsmithing. But before they start on a draft, remind them of what a draft is supposed to be:

• a work in progress.

Remind them that  if they wait for the perfect words to come, they’ll end up with blank pages .

Instead, it’s time to take some writing risks and get messy. Encourage this by:

• demonstrating the writing process to students yourself
• taking the focus off spelling and grammar (during the drafting stage)
• providing meaningful and in-depth feedback (using words, not ticks!).

Reading Eggs also gives you access to an ever-expanding collection of over 3,500 online books!

2. share drafts for peer feedback.

Don’t saddle yourself with 30 drafts for marking. Peer assessment is a better (and less exhausting) way to ensure everyone receives the feedback they need.

Why? Because for something as personal as creative writing, feedback often translates better when it’s in the familiar and friendly language that only a peer can produce. Looking at each other’s work will also give students more ideas about how they can improve their own.

Scaffold peer feedback to ensure it’s constructive. The following methods work well:

Student rubrics

A simple rubric allows students to deliver more in-depth feedback than “It was pretty good.” The criteria will depend on what you are ultimately looking for, but students could assess each other’s:

• use of language.

Whatever you opt for, just make sure the language you use in the rubric is student-friendly.

Two positives and a focus area

Have students identify two things their peer did well, and one area that they could focus on further, then turn this into written feedback. Model the process for creating specific comments so you get something more constructive than “It was pretty good.” It helps to use stems such as:

I really liked this character because…

I found this idea interesting because it made me think…

I was a bit confused by…

I wonder why you… Maybe you could… instead.

1. The editing stage

Now that students have a draft and feedback, here’s where we teachers often tell them to “go over it” or “give it some final touches.”

But our students don’t always know how to edit.

Scaffold the process with questions that encourage students to think critically about their writing, such as:

• Are there any parts that would be confusing if I wasn’t there to explain them?
• Are there any parts that seem irrelevant to the rest?
• Which parts am I most uncertain about?
• Does the whole thing flow together, or are there parts that seem out of place?
• Are there places where I could have used a better word?
• Are there any grammatical or spelling errors I notice?

Key to this process is getting students to  read their creative writing from start to finish .

Important note:  if your students are using a word processor, show them where the spell-check is and how to use it. Sounds obvious, but in the age of autocorrect, many students simply don’t know.

A final word on teaching creative writing

Remember that the best writers write regularly.

Incorporate them into your lessons as often as possible, and soon enough, you’ll have just as much fun  marking  your students’ creative writing as they do producing it.

Need more help supporting your students’ writing?

Read up on  how to get reluctant writers writing , strategies for  supporting struggling secondary writers , or check out our huge list of writing prompts for kids .

Watch your students get excited about writing and publishing their own storybooks in the Story Factory

You might like....

Creative Alternatives to the Traditional Essay

Tired of assigning (and grading) the same old essay unit after unit? This post will introduce you to 13 creative alternatives to the traditional essay that are sure to challenge and engage your students in a new way. Additionally, learn why it might be beneficial to stray from the five-paragraph essay every now and then.

Are your students stuck in the essay rut? Are they getting caught in a monotonous routine of read, discuss, write, repeat? Are you tired of reading crappy essays? (Yup. I said it.) It might be time to consider creative alternatives to the traditional essay.

I know, I know. Essays are a cornerstone of the secondary ELA classroom. But they aren’t the only way to assess student learning at the end of a novel or unit. Better yet, students who struggle to write traditional essays might thrive with an alternative assessment. Either way, it’s worth switching it up and allowing students to express their knowledge in different ways.

By this point, students have the foundation of analytical writing thanks to the five-paragraph essay. Now, it’s time to switch it up and expose them to new challenges. I’m excited to share 13 creative alternatives to the traditional essay you can try in your classroom.

1. Writing a Children’s Book

I love incorporating children’s literature in the secondary classroom whenever I can. So, why not challenge students to transform a novel into a children’s book, emphasizing a prominent theme from the text? Alternatively, you can ask students to rewrite the story, revising the characters and plot to be more kid-friendly. Both approaches require students to closely analyze the text, determine the most essential information, and transform it into an original piece. Imagine rewriting Jay Gatsby as a kid caught up in his desire for a particular toy? Or recreating the themes of Animal Farm at a petting zoo? I mean, the ideas are endless.

2. Story Rewrite (Satire, Parody, or Modernization)

Before students can offer any criticism or rewrites, they must first clearly identify and understand the various elements of the original text. After all, those elements will become the foundation of their updated piece. For example, adapting Lord of the Flies to be post-zombie-apocalypse is a great idea… as long as it reflects the tension between order and chaos! Therefore, creating an adaptation requires more than a deep understanding of the storyline. It also requires a strong sense of style, structure, and underlying message. While it can lead to fantastic results, this alternative is quite challenging for many students. Therefore, I recommend leaving this for more advanced students.

3. Student Curated Anthology

If you’re looking to have your students analyze a character or theme, consider having them create an anthology of poems, songs, artwork, or articles, to help them unpack their analysis. Not only does this alternative require students to dig deep into the assigned text, but it also encourages connections with other pieces. Choose between having your students annotate their selections or providing a small paragraph for each piece. Either way, these notes should help argue each piece’s meaning, connection, and significance. Therefore, students must be intentional about the pieces they include in their anthology as they consider how it all comes together to reflect their overall message and analysis.

4. Thematic Newspaper

A thematic newspaper is a two-birds-one-stone alternative perfect for analyzing themes and symbols. Not only is it an opportunity for students to express their textual analysis in a new way, but you get to teach them about the unique characteristics of journalism too. News stories might recap events from the plot, interview characters, or reflect the historical period, all coming together to analyze the chosen topic. Therefore, students must carefully plan each piece and how they will all work together to paint a picture. If you’re looking to make this a quicker assignment, simply have each student write one article for a collaborative newspaper.

5. Graphic Essay

Are your students super tech savvy? A graphic essay might just be the perfect creative alternative assignment. A graphic essay is a visual essay that incorporates traditional writing and pictures, graphics, videos, and emphasized text. Just like a more traditional essay, a graphic essay can be used to analyze and explore everything from characters to themes. However, this alternative allows for students to get more creative with technology and design. If tech isn’tyour thing, no worries. Your students can easily use the internet to help bring this assignment to life.

Creative Alternatives to the Traditional Essay: Shorter Writing Assignments

6. Quote-Round Up

I love this unique approach to a written assessment. Provide your students with a list of quotes. They must write a detailed paragraph connecting each quote to the novel, theme, or character. Alternatively, have students round up their own list of quotes to explain. Either way, students must exercise critical thinking, make meaningful connections, and display writing skills.

7. Annotations

If you’re looking for a quick way to assess student analysis of a text, an essay isn’t your only option. You can opt for annotations instead. This is a great way to evaluate students’ understanding of literary devices, diction, character development, etc. Consider requiring a mix of organic annotations, identifying literary elements, and analyzing themes, symbols, characters, and quotes. Of course, there’s not as much writing involved, but this assessment will provide tangible insight into students’ thought processes and comprehension as they read. Just be sure students understand how to annotate and be very clear about your expectations.

8. Essay Preview

If time is of the essence, skip the entire essay and have your students focus on writing a top-notch body paragraph. You can provide students with an introduction paragraph and have them apply their knowledge and skills in a body paragraph. Looking to add more autonomy? Give students a few thesis statements to choose from or have them create their own. Again, the main idea here is to have students focus on one body paragraph instead of the whole thing. Grading these will be a breeze yet allow you to provide constructive feedback for future growth.

9. Blog Posts

When assigning your students to write a blog post analysis, you can make it as similar or different to a traditional essay as you please. However, when it comes to essay writing, how many of your students get caught up in the “academic voice” and the rules of essay writing? They’re too busy trying to remember if they can use personal pronouns or not rather than focusing on their ideas. Having your students write a blog post gives them the freedom to express their thoughts about a novel or topic in a way that feels a little more natural and conversational. By giving students more freedom around how they write, they might just be able to focus more on what they write. Additionally, you can have students read each other’s posts and continue to dialogue in the comments. Assign a blog post after reading the novel or require them to write one every few chapters as they read!

More Creative Alternatives to the Traditional Essay

10. Board Games

After reading a novel, for example, have students recreate a traditional board game to reflect the text’s themes, symbols, plot, and characters. If they want to create their very own game, that works too! Regardless, this assignment is a creative way to get students to apply their understanding in a new way. The game might reflect a character’s development or address essential quotes and significant themes. There’s a lot of room for creativity here.

11. One-Pagers

As the name implies, this alternative assignment is limited to one page. Therefore, students must think deeply about the text before carefully choosing what they will include on their page. Talk about critical thinking! A one-pager might focus on a theme, essential question, or character. Students might include meaningful quotes, symbolic art or images, analysis, connections, and more. I like to think of these one-page-wonders as a highlight reel of a student’s analysis.

Psst… I have a whole post dedicated to using one-pagers in the ELA classroom .

12. Student Teaching

Teaching is hard work! It requires a deep understanding of the content and the ability to relay that understanding to others. For this alternative, let students be the teacher as they design and present an engaging mini-lesson to their peers. For example, let students take the reins instead of you pointing out all of the symbols of a novel! Additionally, they can teach lessons about a particular theme, historical context, or a character’s development. Unlike writing an essay, this alternative is highly interactive.

13. Sparknote-Inspired Infographic

I’m sure your students are familiar with Sparknotes or similar resources. They can be a great teaching tool or supplemental material, as long as they aren’t used as a reading replacement. One of the reasons why these resources are so great is because they do a great job at summarizing and synthesizing essential information. Infographics are an excellent way for students to do the same. Infographics require students to carefully select information to include while allowing them more creativity in presenting that information. Challenge your students to create an infographic that analyzes character development or theme and important symbols, for example. There are so many formats for infographics, and tools like Canva and Piktochart are great resources.

The Benefits of Creative Alternatives

Before you worry about standards and competencies, know that plenty of creative alternatives to the traditional essay require the same skill sets. Essays aren’t the only way to push your students to engage in critical thought and deep analysis. There are plenty of meaningful alternatives to consider and benefits to doing so.

• Avoid essay burnout: Trust me, I love a good traditional essay now and then. However, if it’s all we ask students to do, year after year, literary piece after literary piece, it will get stale. Students might start to resent the traditional essay. (Maybe some of yours already have?) These creative writing alternatives are a great way to switch things up and increase student engagement.
• Real-world application: There are many forms of writing and relaying information in the modern world. On the other hand, essays are very academic, meaning students will rarely need to write essays outside of a school requirement. Therefore, sprinkling in some creative alternatives to the traditional essay leaves room for a wider range of real-world writing.
• Targeting different learning styles: Not everyone writes good essays, and that’s okay – or, at least, it should be. Written essays aren’t the only way to measure a student’s comprehension or critical analysis. There are various reasons why students might struggle to write an essay. By providing different opportunities for students to express their learning and analysis of an idea or text, you allow all different types of students an opportunity to thrive.

Even More Benefits of Creative Alternatives

• New insights into student learning: Some students are strong essay writers, but that doesn’t mean they have strong analytical skills. A quick Google search can provide all sorts of support to help them write a decent essay, but that doesn’t mean they’re fully exercising their critical thinking skills. The truth is, they might just be good at the formula of, say, the five-paragraph essay. However, many of the alternatives mentioned in this post require students to express their learning in new ways, challenging them to think outside the box.
• A different challenge: I can hear it now, “what about rigor?” Worry not. Rigor isn’t lost in these creative essay alternatives. In fact, some might argue these alternatives require more work and deeper thought than more traditional writing. The last thing we want to do is churn out robotic-like students. Rather than training students to follow a “formula” for writing, challenge them to stretch their brains to express information in a new way.

Let’s face it, my teacher friends. The game has changed when it comes to writing in the ELA classroom. That doesn’t mean there isn’t any room for more traditional writing, like essays. However, I urge you to add in a little variety. Spice it up! Give your students a little more room to exercise their creativity and thinking without the contractions of the classic essay structure. You might be surprised by what your students create.

It’s worth noting that literary essays aren’t the only writing assignments that might need a revamp. If you felt inspired by this post, check out my post about alternatives for research papers too! Here’s to changing the game of secondary ELA.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Exploring Alternative Essay Structures: Creative Approaches to Organization

Essay writing is an essential talent in academia, however, the conventional essay structure is not exceptionally healthy for every subject matter or writing fashion. In this newsletter, we're going to delve into the idea of opportunity essay systems and explore how they provide particular benefits to students. By embracing innovative procedures for essay organization, college students can decorate their writing and captivate their readers in new and interesting ways.

Exploring Creative Approaches to Essay Organization

Narrative structure:.

Narrative essays offer a storytelling approach to bring thoughts and arguments. Unlike traditional essays, which regularly observe a rigid layout, narrative essays permit students to engage readers via vivid descriptions, individual improvement, and plot development. By adopting a narrative structure, college students can create compelling essays that resonate with their audience to an emotional degree.

Reverse Outline:

The reverse outlining approach offers a fresh angle on essay agency. Instead of starting with a thesis declaration and building assisting arguments, opposite outlining entails identifying key points and topics from present content after which arranging them right into a coherent structure. This technique helps college students refine their essay's attention, pick out gaps in their arguments, and ensure logical drift and coherence.

Problem-Solution Structure:

Problem-solution essays present a clear problem or difficulty and suggest feasible solutions to deal with it. This structure is particularly effective for addressing complicated topics and providing actionable recommendations. By outlining the hassle, reading its reasons and results, and providing sensible solutions, college students can interact with readers and inspire significant exchange.

Applying Alternative Structures in Your Writing

Choosing the right structure:.

Selecting the ideal essay shape relies upon different factors, inclusive of the nature of the subject, the supposed audience, and the writer's targets. Students have to take into account whether or not a narrative, hassle-answer, or another opportunity shapes pleasant and aligns with their writing desires and efficaciously conveys their message.

Incorporating Creativity:

Creativity plays a vital function in essay writing, and college students have to embody possibilities to inject creativity into their organizational technique. Techniques together with using descriptive language, incorporating anecdotes, or experimenting with unconventional formatting can raise an essay and make it greater engaging for readers.

Experimenting and Revising:

Writing is a manner of exploration and refinement, and college students must not hesitate to experiment with extraordinary essay systems throughout the drafting technique. By attempting out diverse procedures and seeking comments from friends or teachers, college students can identify what works high-quality for his or her writing style and make necessary revisions to enhance clarity, coherence, and impact.

In conclusion, exploring alternative essay systems offers college students a pathway to creativity, engagement, and a powerful communique. By stepping outdoor the confines of conventional essay codecs and embracing narrative, reverse define, hassle-solution, and other revolutionary processes, college students can increase their writing and produce essays that leave an enduring impression. Whether crafting a compelling narrative, imparting answers to pressing issues, or experimenting with new organizational techniques, college students have the opportunity to showcase their specific views and make significant contributions to their educational discourse.

• ESSAY EXAMPLES (17)
• ESSAY TIPS (48)
• ESSAY TOPICS (1)
• 2024 March (9)
• 2024 February (7)
• 2024 January (7)
• 2023 December (5)
• 2023 November (4)
• 2022 March (2)
• 2022 January (1)
• 2019 January (1)
• 2018 December (1)
• 2018 November (1)
• 2018 October (1)
• 2018 August (2)
• 2018 July (2)
• 2018 June (2)
• 2018 April (18)
• 2018 March (3)

Popular posts

Choosing a Topics to Write about in Argumentative Essay

26 April, 2018

Perceptions of Young Fathers Regarding Fatherhood

19 November, 2018

THE HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY

27 April, 2018

Human Resource

24 December, 2018

Ethics of Abortion

Your browser is not supported

Sorry but it looks as if your browser is out of date. To get the best experience using our site we recommend that you upgrade or switch browsers.

Find a solution

• Skip to main content
• Skip to navigation
• Macmillan English
• Onestopenglish
• Digital Shop

• Back to parent navigation item
• Sample material
• Amazing World of Animals
• Amazing World of Food
• Arts and Crafts
• Mathematics
• Transport and Communication
• Teaching Tools
• Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship
• Support for Teaching Children
• Vocabulary & Phonics
• Spelling Bee Games
• Phonics & Sounds
• The Alphabet
• Onestop Phonics: The Alphabet
• Alphabet Booklet
• Interactive Flashcards
• Warmers & Fillers
• Young Learner Games
• Stories and Poems
• Fillers & Pastimes
• Fun Fillers
• Ready for School!
• Topics & Themes
• Young Learner Topics
• Young Learner Festivals
• Festival Worksheets
• Art and Architecture
• Business and Tourism
• Geography and the Environment
• Information Technology
• Science and Nature
• Topic-based Listening Lessons
• Cambridge English
• Cambridge English: Preliminary (PET)
• Cambridge English: First (FCE)
• Cambridge English: Proficiency (CPE)
• Cambridge English: Advanced (CAE)
• General English
• News Lessons
• Topics and Themes
• Beyond (BrE)
• Beyond: Arts and Media
• Beyond: Knowledge
• Go Beyond (AmE)
• Go Beyond: Arts & Media
• Go Beyond: Knowledge
• Impressions
• Macmillan Readers
• A Time to Travel
• Life & School
• Skills for Problem Solving
• Digital Skills for Teens
• Support for Teaching Teenagers
• Games Teaching Materials
• Business and ESP
• Business Lesson Plans
• Business Skills Bank
• Business Top Trumps
• Elementary Business Lessons
• HR Management
• Let's Talk Business
• Business News Lessons
• ESP Lesson Plans
• Career Readiness
• Professional Communication Skills
• Cambridge English: Business (BEC)
• Everyday Life
• Celebrations
• Live from...
• Live from London
• Discussion Cards
• Writing Lesson Plans
• Life Skills
• Support for Teaching Adults
• Vocabulary Lesson Plans
• Language for...
• Vocabulary Teaching Materials
• Macmillan Dictionary Blog
• Vocabulary Infographics
• Kahoot! Quizzes
• Blog Articles
• Professional Development
• Lesson Share
• Methodology: Projects and Activities
• Methodology: Tips for Teachers
• Methodology: The World of ELT

Advancing Learning

• Online Teaching
• More from navigation items
• 1 Advancing Learning
• 2 Advancing Learning: The challenges of speaking
• 3 Advancing Learning: Confessions from an obsessive language learner: what I have learnt from continually studying languages for 32 years
• 4 Advancing Learning: Developing real conversation skills
• 5 Advancing Learning: Does anyone really need to use a dictionary?
• 6 Advancing Learning: Empowering students with paraphrasing strategies
• 7 Advancing Learning: EMI: English as a medium of instruction
• 8 Advancing Learning: The Fifth Skill – ‘viewing’
• 9 Advancing Learning: Five strategies to help students cultivate a growth mindset
• 10 Advancing Learning: Gamification
• 11 Advancing Learning: Global Citizenship Education in the ELT classroom
• 12 Advancing Learning: Guilt-free teaching – how your students learn more when you plan less
• 13 Advancing Learning: Helping very young learners improve their collaboration skills
• 14 Advancing Learning: How to approach essay writing
• 15 Advancing Learning: Long live 'Life Skills'!
• 16 Advancing Learning: Making blended learning useful and effective
• 17 Advancing Learning: Moving towards learning-friendly teaching
• 18 Advancing Learning: Multisensory learning in the inclusive classroom
• 19 Advancing Learning: Online Language Teacher Education
• 20 Advancing Learning: A practical guide to online professional development
• 21 Advancing Learning: The secrets of using learning routines with young children
• 22 Advancing Learning: Teaching mediation
• 23 Advancing Learning: Top tips for managing your pre-primary classroom

Advancing Learning: How to approach essay writing

By Kerry Boakes

• No comments

What different approaches to essay writing are there and how can they help your learners? Academic English specialist and teacher trainer Kerry Boakes explains three different approaches to essay writing and offers practical tips on how they can be used in the classroom.

Introduction

What approaches to teaching essay writing are there and what is useful to know when planning a writing lesson?

Process and product approaches are two of the most well-known, but more recently the genre approach has also gained credence. The product approach focuses on linguistic knowledge such as vocabulary, syntax and cohesive devices (Badger & White 2000). In other words, ‘ what ’ goes into an essay. The process approach is more concerned with facilitating the stages a writer must go through (Badger & White 2000). This could be referred to as the ‘ how’ of essay writing. The third approach – genre – is similar to the product approach but also incorporates social aspects such as the purpose of writing or the ‘ why ’.

As these approaches have their own distinct features there is an argument for the synthesis of all three (Badger & White 2000). Raising awareness of the ‘ what ’, ‘ how ’ and ‘ why ’ of essay writing are all useful in developing ability and confidence in tackling what is a challenging yet vital skill for second language learners.

Product: What goes into an essay?

Let’s imagine how these three approaches might look in terms of an essay title, for example, ‘Which has greater influence on a person’s personality: nature or nurture?’. A typical product approach has four stages: familiarization, controlled writing, guided writing and free writing. Familiarization might involve categorizing words or phrases or noticing linguistic features of a model text. At the controlled stage, learners can attempt to produce their own sentences using some of the language highlighted. A guided task could involve ordering ideas or producing one of the arguments in groups. The idea is that the learners are then sufficiently equipped with enough knowledge of the language features to attempt the free writing stage.

Process: How do you write an essay?

Exposure to the typical linguistic features of an essay could be helpful, particularly to learners who lack a range of vocabulary or awareness of the features of a particular essay type (in this case a compare and contrast essay). But what about the process of writing the essay? A typical process approach consists of four stages: pre-writing, drafting, revising and editing (Badger & White 2000). Learners can begin by brainstorming ideas for and against nature or nurture. They can then create a plan using their ideas, which would be used as the basis for producing a first draft. Learners can work in pairs or groups to improve the draft which they then edit. It is a non-linear approach so that learners can return to any stage if necessary (Hyland 2003).

Genre: What is the purpose of writing an essay?

It is the purpose of the essay that is central to the genre approach. When arguing nature over nurture for example, the writer may wish to persuade their audience that nature has far more influence on personality. Learners are exposed to model compare and contrast essays and analyse them for their linguistic features, such as language that is used to persuade. Learners might perform a task using the phrases in order to become familiar with this particular genre. They can be encouraged to evaluate who the writer is trying to persuade and why. It imitates the product approach by using a model text but also raises awareness of the social purpose of writing (Badger & White 2000). Therefore, when approaching an essay type such as discursive, opinion, advantages v disadvantages or cause and effect, learners should know the purpose of what they are writing and reflect on who their audience is.

Classroom ideas

Is it possible to combine these three approaches in the classroom? Do they complement each other? Which input is needed is perhaps better judged by the teacher. Each group of learners has different needs, so the different approaches are available to be drawn upon if and when required. Do your learners need more knowledge about the language, the context or do they need more practice of the skills required to become successful essay writers? If your learners are not used to planning before they write, then they might find elements of brainstorming and planning activities useful, or if they seem unaware of how texts actually work as communication, then a discussion about the purpose of writing could be incorporated. If further exposure to language or grammar is required, then noticing the features of a model text may prove more worthwhile.

1. An argumentative essay: A process approach

Novice writers often have difficulty selecting and generating ideas for arguments to use in their essay writing (Couzjin, M. & Rilaarsdam, G. 2005). An argumentative statement such as ‘ Do cats or dogs make better pets? Why?’ can be presented to learners to hone this skill. Choose a topic that doesn’t require any complex conceptual understanding so that they can focus solely on the experience of the process of preparing to write the essay.

Begin by asking for a show of hands so you can arrange learners into groups of those who agree and those who disagree with the statement. Facilitate a brainstorming activity whereby learners write reasons for their chosen argument on sticky notes. The groups can present their arguments to the class. Display the sticky notes and encourage learners to select the argument they believe is the most convincing. In smaller groups learners can practise discussing the sub-arguments of this main argument. Elicit an example of a main argument, e.g. ‘C ats are cleaner than dogs. ’ and a sub argument, ‘ They spend about 50% of their time grooming themselves. ’, then elicit a counter argument ‘ However, dogs can be easily hosed down after a walk. ’

Each group can prepare and present their sub arguments and counter arguments and the class can take notes in a table. Learners can select the most convincing arguments and evaluate why they chose them. This activity provides an opportunity to practise ‘ how ’ to write an essay and the learners can use their notes to prepare a first draft. They can then use the same process to attempt more challenging essay titles depending on their level and needs.

2. An opinion essay: A genre approach

Learners sometimes lack enthusiasm for writing because they are unclear what the purpose of writing is. Everything we write has a communicative purpose and raising awareness of this can lead to increasing confidence and enjoyment of writing. There are various ways of highlighting genre: matching essay titles or extracts of model texts and discussing the different features in style, language and syntax as well as reflecting on the different purposes of each genre. For example, the title ‘ There are more challenges than risks than benefits to new technology .’ is an opinion essay written to persuade and warn an audience of the dangers posed by modern technology rather than provide an unbiased or balanced view.

Another way to instill the concept of writing with a clear purpose, which also aids low level learners with greater fluency and reduces anxiety associated with writing, is by using learning logs. Learning logs are diaries where students write their reflections on what they are learning, how they are studying and any challenges they face. Linda Blanton recommends these are written at home on a weekly basis, the teacher is the sole audience and the topic is their writing class. This activity creates a purpose and highlights a specific audience to the writers (Blanton 1987). The teacher can limit the task to a paragraph or a page depending on the level of the learners. Blanton does not recommend correction of the writing but rather adding a comment either congratulating them on their progress or encouraging them with challenges they are facing. She also writes a weekly log to the whole class with observations regarding their writing and congratulating them on their achievements (Blanton 1987). This activity can also be very revealing for the teacher and any discoveries can be used to inform their teaching practice.

3. A compare and contrast essay: A product approach

If your learners need more help improving their linguistic writing ability, you can take a product approach focusing on topic related vocabulary, phrases relating to the specific genre as well as academic vocabulary. Using the example of a compare and contrast essay such as ‘Which is more important, emotional intelligence or intellectual intelligence?’ you can use extracts from model texts and analyse them for their specific features. Encourage learners to notice generic phrases that are characteristic of that genre, for example, on the contrary, similarly  and discuss changes in meaning. They can practise topic and academic vocabulary using matching exercises that test they have understood the meaning and gap fills that check they can use the language in context.

Even after a comprehensive analysis, discussion and practice of the language features, when it comes to the freer writing task learners may abandon this new found linguistic knowledge in favour of more familiar vocabulary. So how can we ensure they have the ability and confidence to use what they have learnt effectively?

Keeping a record of the new language is key and there are various methods you can employ. Quizlet  is an online learning tool that can be used in class by the learners themselves if they have internet access and laptops, or if you want to encourage more autonomy you could set it as a homework task. You can also prepare a set of flashcards and share this with your class. They can practise matching definitions and testing themselves online and print sets of flashcards. You can also set your learners the challenge of selecting some of the new language to incorporate into their free writing essay task. Recording and further practice of the new language will enable your learners to assimilate it and make it more accessible when producing the final essay.

The three approaches discussed offer distinct features and an assortment of all three is at the teacher’s disposal depending on the learners’ needs and wants. The use of learning logs as well as a needs analysis can inform the teacher at which point during the course each approach could be best employed to unleash their learners’ full writing potential.

Bibliography

• Badger, R. & White, G. 2000 A process genre approach to teaching writing . ELT Journal 54/2, p.153-160. Oxford University Press.
• Blanton, L. 1987 Reshaping ESL students’ perceptions of writing . ELT Journal Volume 41/2, p. 112-118. Oxford University Press
• Couzjin, M. & Rilaarsdam, G. 2005 Learning to Read and Write Argumentative Text by Observation of Peer Learners . Effective Learning and Teaching of Writing: A Handbook of Writing in Education. Second Edition. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Hyland, K. 2003 Second Language Writing . Chapter 1. Cambridge University Press.

About the author

Kerry Boakes is a CELTA and DELTA qualified English Language teacher currently working for the British Council in Oman. Before becoming a teacher she worked for NGOs in a range of educational and campaign roles. She has experience of teaching in Kenya, South Korea and Japan and has taught academic English at Sheffield International College and Sheffield University. She has also worked as a teacher trainer in refugee camps on the Thai Burmese border and managed a literacy project in partnership with Save the Children.

Find out more about how to prepare your students for academic success with Macmillan’s Academic English course Skillful Second Edition here:  http://www.macmillanenglish.com/courses/skillful-second-edition/

• advancing learning

Advancing Learning: The challenges of speaking

Advancing Learning: Confessions from an obsessive language learner: what I have learnt from continually studying languages for 32 years

Advancing Learning: Developing real conversation skills

Advancing Learning: Does anyone really need to use a dictionary?

Advancing Learning: Empowering students with paraphrasing strategies

Advancing Learning: EMI: English as a medium of instruction

Advancing Learning: The Fifth Skill – ‘viewing’

Advancing Learning: Five strategies to help students cultivate a growth mindset

Advancing Learning: Gamification

Advancing Learning: Global Citizenship Education in the ELT classroom

Advancing Learning: Guilt-free teaching – how your students learn more when you plan less

Advancing Learning: Helping very young learners improve their collaboration skills

Advancing Learning: Long live 'Life Skills'!

Advancing Learning: Making blended learning useful and effective

Advancing Learning: Moving towards learning-friendly teaching

Advancing Learning: Multisensory learning in the inclusive classroom

Advancing Learning: Online Language Teacher Education

Advancing Learning: A practical guide to online professional development

Advancing Learning: The secrets of using learning routines with young children

Advancing Learning: Teaching mediation

Advancing Learning: Top tips for managing your pre-primary classroom

Related articles.

Macmillan Dictionary Blog: Metaphor

By Dr Rosamund Moon

This article, by Dr Rosamund Moon, takes you through the fascinating world of metaphor and discovers how everyday words and phrases can have deeper, metaphorical meanings.

Macmillan Dictionary Red Words & Stars Pack

Learn about Red Words and how they can be utilized with the Macmillan Dictionary Red Words and Stars pack.

Current Themes: Coronation, an occasion for tradition and celebration

By Agustin Spada

Use this handy worksheet to get your students talking about the coronation ceremony.

No comments yet

Only registered users can comment on this article., more from advancing learning.

By Kateryna Protsenko

What is ‘conversation’ and how can teachers improve students’ conversation skills?  This article, by Kateryna Protsenko, looks at the different ways to improve this skill.

By Liz McMahon

What are the challenges of teaching curriculum subjects through English at Primary level? Liz McMahon looks at some of the issues.

By Russell Stannard

Russell Stannard details how his own language learning has given him insights into how to better teach his students.

Join onestopenglish today

With more than 700,000 registered users in over 100 countries around the world, Onestopenglish is the number one resource site for English language teachers, providing access to thousands of resources, including lesson plans, worksheets, audio, video and flashcards.

• Connect with us on Facebook
• Connect with us on Twitter
• Connect with us on Youtube

Onestopenglish is a teacher resource site, part of Macmillan Education, one of the world’s leading publishers of English language teaching materials.

• Privacy Policy
• Cookie policy
• Manage cookies

©Macmillan Education Limited 2023. Company number: 1755588 VAT number: 199440621

Site powered by Webvision Cloud

Creativity and Innovation in the Writing Classroom

Learn more about how to teach creativity and innovation along with, and as an important part of, traditional writing and research skills.

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” —Maya Angelou

Creativity is fundamental to the teaching of writing. Although WR 153 focuses specifically on creativity and innovation, all WR courses ask students to approach their reading, viewing, writing, and research in creative ways. One important approach to creativity is “design thinking,” which emphasizes that creativity is a non-linear, iterative process. Design thinking is based on two foundational assumptions:

• Everyone can be creative.
• Creativity can be taught.

The principles of design thinking can be used in any WR course to teach students that creativity is a process of asking questions, using multiple strategies and approaches in answering those questions, taking risks in conceiving and executing original work, developing and refining ideas in response to feedback, and learning from productive failure. The metacognitive aspects of design thinking invite students to think about their own creative processes and identify factors that promote creativity.

Although WR 153 is structured by the steps of the design process (understand, empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, assess/reflect), all WR courses can benefit from incorporating elements of design thinking and an emphasis on creativity and innovation. Approaching writing instruction in this way can:

• Increase student engagement by focusing on creative responses to problems that students care about;
• Give students a sense of agency as a result of greater choice in what to write and how to write about it;
• Encourage taking intellectual risks and reward productive failure as a means of learning;
• Help students develop skills that are transferrable to other academic situations and their professional lives; and
• Enhance students’ personal lives by allowing them to learn about themselves and their own creative potential.

Principles of Design Thinking

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative approach to creativity that involves between three and seven steps. Although it is based on theories of design practice that go back to the early twentieth century, it has most recently been popularized by the design firm IDEO and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, commonly known as the d.school. The process involves understanding the issues involved in a design project, empathizing with the audience for an end product, defining the scope of the project, generating ideas for and creating prototypes of the product, testing and assessing those ideas and prototypes, and revisiting the steps of the design process until a final product is created.

The complete set of seven steps can be applied to the writing process in a WR course:

Understand: Students develop a foundation for their work by exploring issues and approaches relevant to the course topic, as well as previous work in the field.

Empathize: Students practice empathy by demonstrating their awareness and understanding of the audience for whom they write or create.

Define: Based on their observations and insights, students articulate a problem or question that will motivate their work over the course of the semester.

Ideate: Students generate new ideas and possible solutions by challenging assumptions and engaging in a variety of creative activities.

Prototype: Students start to create solutions and implement their ideas into written, digital or other forms in order to capture ideas, but also redefine choices.

Test: Students share drafts with others in order to gain feedback and insight into improving final versions.

Assess/Reflect: Students reflect on and evaluate their peers’ and their own processes and final outcomes.

The steps of the design thinking process are not meant to be followed in a rigid way. They should be flexible and customizable to the particular project: students may need to define, ideate, and prototype multiple times and in various modes/genres before they are ready to create a final draft. The skills students gain in going though these steps should be transferrable to other projects and courses.

Learn more about design thinking:

• “What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?” by Rikke Friis Dam and Teo Yu Siang provides an overview of design thinking.
• David Kelly of IDEO explains the history of design thinking in “How to Design Breakthrough Inventions,” an interview with 60 Minutes .
• “How to Solve Problems Like a Designer,” which includes an interview with Tim Brown of IDEO, explains the basic principles of design thinking.

Understand and Empathize

The first step of the design process asks students to understand not only the course material, but also the resources necessary for their particular project. Since this usually involves additional reading/viewing, the “understand” step is part of the research and information literacy component of WR15X. Assignments that focus on this step may include conducting library or online research, categorizing research material using BEAM/BEAT, and creating annotated bibliographies.

Define, Ideate, and Prototype

Before they begin the process of generating ideas, it is often useful for students to define, at least in a preliminary way, what question or problem their paper/project is addressing. Assignments that help students define their projects may include questionnaires that ask students to state what they intend to work on and why, as well as more formal paper/project proposals.

In the IDEO design process, the goal of ideation is to generate a multitude of ideas without rejecting those that may seem impractical or even silly. Ideas can be rejected later, after a sufficient number of ideas have been generated. The most common ideation assignment involves various forms of brainstorming, often in teams. Ideas should be written down in some way, such as on sticky notes or index cards. To encourage divergent thinking in the brainstorming process, consider posting some fundamental principles in the classroom, such as these from IDEO:

• Defer judgment.
• Encourage wild ideas.
• Stay focused on the topic.
• Build on the ideas of others .

In the IDEO design process, prototypes are models that can be easily revised and even discarded if necessary. Prototypes for writing courses might include outlines, storyboards, slide decks, oral or video presentations, and preliminary drafts. Prototypes should be tested and assessed in some way that allows for reconsideration and revision before students turn in their final products.

Learn more about brainstorming and prototyping:

• “What is Brainstorming?” by Rikke Friis Dam and Teo Yu Siang provides helpful information and ideas for the ideation step of the design process.
• This example of “Brainstorming at IDEO” shows one popular way of brainstorming with sticky notes.

Test and Assess/Reflect

The final steps of the design process, testing and assessing/reflecting, are not meant to be the final steps in completing a student’s paper/project. After testing and assessing a prototype, students will likely need to reconsider and revise their papers/projects, which will take them back to earlier steps—they may need to conduct further research, generate additional ideas, or refine their prototypes. The design process is meant to be iterative, with students returning to steps in the process as needed until they have completed a final draft.  

Just as designers test their prototypes, students should test drafts of their papers/projects by sharing them with others. Assignments that focus on this step usually involve workshopping with one or more peers, but testing may also include making an oral or video presentation to the class, meeting with the professor or a writing tutor, or sharing the student’s work with any other reader/viewer capable of providing feedback. Students may also test their papers/projects using techniques such as reverse outlining to assess the strength and clarity of their arguments.

The final step in the design process, assessing the student’s work, may lead back to any earlier step as students come to understand what they still need to work on to complete their papers/projects. This step may also involve the broader metacognitive task of reflecting on the student’s creative process. Assignments that focus on this step may include a variety of reflective exercises, including a final reflection for the course.

A Note on Assessment

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” —Samuel Beckett

Because WR 153 courses can include such a wide range of papers and project, contract grading is recommended. Other WR courses that incorporate creativity and innovation may also wish to use contract grading, either for specific assignments or the course as a whole. More information on contract grading can be found here .

An important component of creativity and innovation is productive failure. We learn to create new things or develop new skills by failing and trying again until we succeed. Productive failure is failure that leads to new knowledge, insight, or innovation. Courses that focus on creativity can encourage productive failure by requiring prototypes that will be reconsidered and revised extensively, asking students to share examples of failure as valuable learning experiences, and assigning reflective work on how students have grown through failure over the course of the semester.

Learn more about productive failure:

Both readings below argue for the importance of productive failure. The Burger article contains specific examples of how to validate and reward productive failure in the classroom.

• “Next Time, Fail Better” by Paula M. Krebs, The Chronicle of Higher Education , May 11, 2012.

Further Reading

The quickest and easiest way to understand design thinking is to start with videos that explain the concept, where it originated, and how it can be used to address a variety of problems.

• In “How to Design Breakthrough Inventions,” David Kelly of IDEO and the Stanford d.school talks about design thinking in an interview on 60 Minutes and CBS This Morning .
• In “How to Solve Problems Like a Designer,” Vox provides a general overview of design thinking, featuring IDEO CEO Tim Brown.

If you would like to deepen your understanding of design thinking, there are a number of websites that address the concept in greater detail.

IDEO is a design and consulting firm that popularized the concept of design thinking. According to IDEO’s website, “Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategy. This approach, which is known as design thinking, brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows people who aren’t trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges.” The IDEO website has a number of useful resources on design thinking:

• A definition of design thinking .
• A brief history of design thinking .

IDEO U, the educational arm of IDEO, has a separate website that contain more information on design thinking as well as additional resources.

• What is design thinking?
• Resources related to design thinking .
• An overview of brainstorming .
• Resources related to innovation .

The Interactive Design Foundation provides useful information on design thinking on its website. According to “What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular?” by Rikke Friis Dam and Teo Yu Siang, “Design Thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. At the same time, Design Thinking provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It is a way of thinking and working as well as a collection of hands-on methods.” This article describes the basic concept of design thinking and five basic steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test.

Books on design thinking are generally aimed toward a popular audience. They draw on anecdotal evidence rather than research to support their claims, but they can be valuable resources for understanding how design thinking is applied in a variety of settings, including both corporations and the educational sector. To provide a sense of how design thinking developed over time, these books are listed chronologically:

• The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelly, Doubleday, 2001.
• Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation by Tim Brown, HarperCollins, 2009, revised and updated 2019.
• Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work by Nigel Cross, Bloomsbury, 2011.
• Design Thinking: A Guide to Creative Problem Solving for Everyone by Andrew Pressman, Routledge, 2018.
• The Design Thinking Toolbox: A Guide to Mastering the Most Popular and Valuable Innovation Methods by Michael Lewrick, Patrick Link, and Larry Leifer, Wiley, 2020.

Resources on design thinking in writing pedagogy:

If you would like to focus specifically on how the design thinking process relates to writing pedagogy, there are number of academic articles that address design thinking in the writing classroom as well as the larger issue of creativity as it relates to composition. To provide a sense of how the scholarship on creativity and design thinking in writing pedagogy developed over time, these articles are listed chronologically:

• “The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical Problem” by Linda Flower and John R. Hayes, College Composition and Communication 31.1 (1980), 21-32.
• “Process Paradigms in Design and Composition: Affinities and Directions” by Charles Kostelnick, College Composition and Communication 40.3 (1989), 267-81.
• “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking” by Richard Buchanan, Design Issues 8.2 (1992), 5-21.
• “Design and the New Rhetoric: Productive Arts in the Philosophy of Culture” by Richard Buchanan. Philosophy & Rhetoric 34 (2001), 183-206.
• “From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing” by Diana George, College Composition and Communication 54.1 (2002), 11-39.
• “Embracing Wicked Problems: The Turn to Design in Composition Studies” by Richard Marback, College Composition and Communication 61.2 (2009), 397-419.
• “Design as a Unifying Principle: English Departments in a New Media World” by Maureen Goldman, Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal 5.3 (2011), 249-257.
• “Sustainability as a Design Principle for Composition: Situational Creativity as a Habit of Mind” by Matthew Newcomb, College Composition and Communication 63.4 (2012), 593-615.
• “Design Thinking: Past, Present, and Possible Futures” by Ulla Johansson-Sköldberg et al., Creativity and Innovation Management 22.2 (2013), 121-146.
• “Writing in Design Thinking: Deconstructing the Question of Being” by Tassoula Hadjiyanni and Stephanie Zollinger, International Journal of Architectural Research 7.1 (2013), 116-127.
• Design Thinking and the Wicked Problem of Teaching Writing by Carrie S. Leverenz, Computers and Composition 33 (2014), 1-12.
• “What Can Design Thinking Offer Writing Studies?” by James P. Purdy, College Composition and Communication 65.4 (2014), 612-641.
• “Wicked Problems in Technical Communication” by Chad Wickman, Journal of Technical Communication 44 (2014), 23-42.
• “The UnEssay: Making Room for Creativity in the Composition Classroom” by Patrick Sullivan, College Composition and Communication 67.1 (2015), 6-34.
• “Design Thinking Via Experiential Learning: Thinking Like an Entrepreneur in Technical Communication Courses” by Jennifer Bay et al . , Programmatic Perspectives 10.1 (2018), 172-200.
• “Dissensus, Resistance, and Ideology: Design Thinking as a Rhetorical Methodology” by April Greenwood et al., Journal of Business and Technical Communication 33.4 (2019), 400-424.
• “Using Design Thinking to Teach Creative Problem Solving in Writing Courses” by Scott Wible, College Composition and Communication 71.3 (2020), 399-425.

General resources on creativity:

If you are interested in resources that focus on the larger issue of creativity, one place to start is with videos that define what creativity is and how it can be cultivated, including in an academic setting.

• Ken Robinson’s “What is Creativity” addresses the general issue of how we can both define and encourage creativity.
• Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Your Elusive Creative Genius” offers one way to think about creativity and deal with fear of failure.
• David Kelly’s “How to Build Your Creative Confidence” discusses how we can be more confident in our creativity and build creative confidence in others.

There are a number of books that focus more generally on creativity. Some of these books are theoretical, while some focus practically on how we can become more creative in work and life. The books by Tom and David Kelly, and by Sarah Stein Greenberg, approach creativity from the design thinking paradigm used at the Stanford d.school.

• Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, HarperPerennial, 1996.
• The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity , edited by James C. Kaufman and Robert J. Sternberg, Cambridge University Press, 2003, revised and updated 2019.
• The International Handbook of Creativity , edited by James C. Kaufman and Robert J. Sternberg Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Developing Creativity in Higher Education: An Imaginative Curriculum , edited by Norman Jackson, Martin Oliver, Malcolm Shaw, and James Wisdom, Routledge, 2006.
• Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All by Tom Kelly and David Kelly, HarperCollins, 2013.
• Habits of the Creative Mind: A Guide to Reading, Writing, and Thinking , by Richard E. Miller and Ann Jurecic, Macmillan, 2015, revised and updated 2020.
• Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways by Sarah Stein Greenberg, Ten Speed Press, 2021.

The following books are listed separately because they reflect creative practices in specific fields, such as creative writing, the visual arts, and dance. They contain ideas and exercises that are transferrable to writing classes and may be helpful in designing WR courses.

• The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron, Tarcher/Putnam, 1992, reissued 2002.
• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott, Anchor Books, 1994.
• The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp, Simon & Schuster, 2003.
• Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon, Workman Publishing Company, 2012.
• Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert, Riverhead Books, 2015.
• You Are an Artist: Assignments to Spark Creation by Sarah Urist Green, Penguin, 2020.

Approaches to Learning and to Essay Writing

Cite this chapter.

• John Biggs 4  

Part of the book series: Perspectives on Individual Differences ((PIDF))

1376 Accesses

60 Citations

1 Altmetric

The terms learning styles and learning strategies would seem to refer to two different aspects of student learning. Styles are stable ways of approaching tasks that are characteristic of individuals, while strategies are ways of handling particular tasks: styles are focused on the person, strategies on the task.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime
• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Unable to display preview.  Download preview PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

Teaching Writing

Demistyfying Academic Writing

Applebee, A. N. (1984). Writing and reasoning. Review of Educational Research , 54 , 577–596.

Article   Google Scholar  

Beaumont, J. G. (1983). How many brains for how many minds? Hemisphericity and education. Educational Psychology , 3 , 213–226.

Bereiter, C. (1980). Development in writing. In L. Gregg & E. Steinberg (Eds.), Cognitive processes in writing . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Google Scholar  

Biggs, J. B. (1978). Individual and group differences in study processes. British Journal of Educational Psychology , 48 , 266–279.

Biggs, J. B. (1987). Student approaches to learning and studying . Hawthorn, Victoria: Australian Council for Educational Research.

Biggs, J. B., & Collis, K. F. (1982a). The psychological structure of creative writing. Australian Journal of Education , 26 , 59–70.

Biggs, J. B., & Collis, K. F. (1982b). Evaluating the quality of learning: The SOLO Taxonomy . New York: Academic Press.

Britton, J., Burgess, T., Martin, N., McLeod, A., & Rosen, H. (1975). The development of writing abilities (11–18) . London: Macmillan Educational.

Brown, A., Bransford, J., Ferrara, R., & Campione, J. (1983). Learning, remembering and understanding. In P. H. Mussen (Ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology, Vol. III: Cognitive development . New York: Wiley.

Burtis, J., Bereiter, C., Scardamalia, M., & Tetroe, J. (1984). The development of planning in writing. In B. Kroll & C. G. Wells (Eds.), Exploration of children’s development in writing . Chichester: Wiley.

Entwistle, N. J. (1981). Styles of learning and teaching . Chichester: Wiley.

Entwistle, N., & Ramsden, P. (1983). Understanding student learning . London: Croom Helm.

Flower, L. (1980). Problem solving strategies for writing . New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Forster, E. M. (1968). Aspects of the novel . Harmondsworth, Mdx.: Penguin Books.

Glassner, B. M. (1980). Hemispheric relationships in composing. Boston University Journal of Education , 162 , 24–95.

Graves, D. H. (1983). Writing: Teachers and children at work . Exeter, NH: Heinemann Educational.

Halliday, M. A. K. (1974). Language and social man . London: Longmans.

Hausen, E. (1968). Linguistics and language planning. In W. Bright (Ed.), Sociolinguistics . The Hague: Mouton.

Hayes, J., & Flower, L. (1980). Identifying the organization of writing processes. In L. Gregg & E. Steinberg (Eds.), Cognitive processes in writing . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Hayes-Roth, B., & Hayes-Roth, F. (1979). A cognitive model of planning. Cognitive Science , 3 , 275–310.

Hounsell, D. A. (1984). Learning and essay-writing. In F. Marton, D. Hounsell, & N. Entwistle (Eds.), The experience of learning (pp. 103–123). Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press.

Humes, A. (1983). Research on the composing process. Review of Educational Research , 53 , 201–216.

Jaynes, J. (1976). The origin of consciousness . Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Marton, F., & Säljö, R. (1976). On qualitative differences in learning: I. Outcome and process. British Journal of Educational Psychology , 46 , 4–11.

McCutchen, D. (1984). Writing as a linguistic problem. Educational Psychologist , 19 , 226–238.

Meier, S., McCarthy, P., & Schmeck, R. R. (1984). Validity of self-efficacy as a predictor of writing performance. Cognitive Therapy and Research , 8 , 107–120.

Nold, E. (1981). Revising. In C. Frederiksen & J. Dominic (Eds.), Writing: The nature, development and teaching of written communication . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Rico, G. L., & Claggett, M. F. (1980). Balancing the hemispheres: Brain research and the teaching of writing . Berkeley: University of California.

Rose, M. (1984). Writer’s block: The cognitive dimension . Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Sagan, C. (1977). The dragons of Eden . New York: Random House.

Salgado, G. (1980). The novelist at work. In M. Seymour-Smith (Ed.), Novels and novelists (pp. 66–70). New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Scardamalia, M. & Bereiter, C., (1982). Teachability of reflective processes in written composition. Assimilative processes in composition planning. Educational Psychologist , 17 , 165–171.

Schmeck, R. R. (1983). Learning styles of college students. In R. F. Dillon & R. R. Schmeck (Eds.), Individual differences in cognition, Volume 1. New York: Academic Press.

Schmeck, R. R., & Phillips, J. (1982). Levels of processing as a dimension of difference between individuals. Human Learning , 1 , 95–103.

Smith, F. (1982). Writing and the writer . New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Steinberg, E. (1980). A garden of opportunities. In L. Gregg & E. Steinberg (Eds.), Cognitive processes in writing . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Van Rossum, E. J., & Schenk, S. M. (1984). The relationship between learning conception, study strategy, and learning outcomes. British Journal of Educational Psychology , 54 , 73–83.

Watkins, D. (1983). Depth of processing and the quality of learning outcomes. Instructional Science , 12 , 49–58.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Education, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Department of Psychology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois, USA

Ronald Ray Schmeck

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 1988 Springer Science+Business Media New York

About this chapter

Biggs, J. (1988). Approaches to Learning and to Essay Writing. In: Schmeck, R.R. (eds) Learning Strategies and Learning Styles. Perspectives on Individual Differences. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2118-5_8

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2118-5_8

Publisher Name : Springer, Boston, MA

Print ISBN : 978-1-4899-2120-8

Online ISBN : 978-1-4899-2118-5

eBook Packages : Springer Book Archive

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• Close {{message}}

Enrollment system is currently unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please try again later.

Creative Approaches to Writing the College Application Essay

Writing a compelling college application essay is a significant challenge for many students. This course employs a variety of experiences, prompts, and writing exercises to help you write essays that are narratively compelling, audience directed, persuasive, and unique to each writer. Learn strategies for overcoming writer’s block, identifying audience needs, and solving problems that will serve you not only as you draft your essays, but also as you transition to college. By the end of the workshop, you will have written a complete draft of a college application essay.

More details

You'll Walk Away with

• A complete draft of a college application essay
• Strategies for overcoming writer’s block, identifying audience needs, and solving problems
• High school students in grades 9–12
• High school students interested in perfecting their college application essay

Course Details

Course number.

HIGH1-CE9064