Definition: An essay is a piece of writing where the author or writer presents an argument (and proof) OR organized information. (It can be about any subject!)

There are two main types of essays: Informational and Persuasive.

• Informational: Giving the reader detailed info; explaining a topic.

• Persuasive: Making an argument; claiming an idea is true + proving it.

Definition: A story is a telling of one event or a series of events; these can be real or imaginary. Narrative is another word for a story - they mean the exact same thing!

Important story parts:

• Character: A living being who interacts within a story.

• Setting: The where and when of a story; includes time of day, season, and weather.

• Plot: Main happenings of a story; the series of events that connect together to form the story.

Mind Blank? Most of our Writing Assignments give you questions to answer to guide you through, but here are some more if you are drawing a blank.

For Answering Questions: 

• Make a list of things you know about the topic. Compare them to the 5Ws + H: who, what, when, where, why, how?  If any of those questions aren't answered by what you know, fill it in by looking up the info and adding it to your answer.

• When asked about what you think about a topic, or to write about a memory, think of how we judge things from day to day: good or bad, helpful or worthless, fun or boring, important or not - those are good places to start.

For Essays & Book Reports:

• Though it might seem overwhelming, sometimes it helps to do research first--especially when you're forced to write an argument or compare things (ex: this vs. that). What you find might give you an idea of what to write about!

• Try to pick something you want to learn more about, or as close to something like that as you can imagine. This goes for book reports, too! Try to find a story that's close to something or about something you have an interest in.

• Often, our Writing Assignments give you a lot of options to choose from. That takes a lot of the work out of coming up with ideas! You should focus on thinking of how you feel or what you already know about these topics.

For Short Stories:

• Pick a feeling, then try to imagine a situation or problem that would make a character feel that way, then write about how they deal with it. Here's a link that will give you a random feeling if you can't decide. If you like fantasy or magic, you can write about that too!

• Click here to get a list of random words. (They include the definitions, but you might have to look up words in the definition if you don't know them.) Keep generating them until you get a feeling or object that you can put into your story. You might get a word that a character feels, or an item or place important to your character.

• Some of our assignments ask you to think of a memory and write about it. If you can't think of a memory or can't remember everything, it's okay to make something up, as long as it's believable and realistic.

Before you start planning, it's important to write down the ideas you have from using the methods above. DO NOT START WRITING OUT THE ASSIGNMENT BEFORE RECORDING YOUR IDEAS. Because if you take a break and forget, you'll lose all your work - and it's better to not have to do things more than once!

Here are a few ways to record your brainstorming that might help. Writing things out gives you space to add more ideas! When we stay stuck in our head, we usually don't add more.

• A List: boring, but tried and true. People go back to this for a reason.

  • Remember you can draw arrows to connect ideas, highlight, circle, underline, and other things to help remind you how the ideas are related.

• Try  making a Mind Map! Click the link for a Youtube video explanation on how to make one. (10 mins.)

What is a citation? To cite = to quote a book, article or paper as proof or evidence. So when you back up a point you're making using information or research from others, "citing" just tells us where you got the information from. It's giving credit to the person who did the research or put in the work writing the article.

Citation is made up of two parts:

1. Credit you put directly into the paper you're writing.

2. A page at the end of your paper (Works Cited) that lists publishing info from all the sources you used.

When you don't give credit to the person or group who gathered the info you're using, it's called PLAGIARISM, which can land you with an automatic 0 on your assignment. See below on basics for how to avoid this.

• Always include the name of the sources (the title of all the articles, or the names of the writers/authors) in your Writing Assignment.

• If you're using words DIRECTLY from the article/book, use quotes (""). If you are NOT using a direct quote, try to rephrase that information in your own words (paraphrase). ALWAYS MAKE SURE TO INCLUDE THE NAME OF THE ARTICLE OR AUTHOR TO AVOID PLAGIARISM.

Here are the steps for citing information correctly:

• There are 2 different ways to cite. Pick one of those, and do the next steps whenever you reference information that came from an article or book. You can copy the [light gray] text and replace the brackets [] with the right information to complete your citation.

Method 1, Easiest way to cite:

Here are some example sentences to use for citing: 

• According to [INSERT ORGANIZATION OR AUTHOR NAME HERE] (add information you found here).

• Studies done by [INSERT ORGANIZATION OR AUTHOR NAME HERE] show that (add information you found here).

• In the book [BOOK TITLE] by [NAME OF AUTHOR], (add details about what happens in the book)  

• [LAST NAME OF AUTHOR] says that "(insert quote here)."

Method 2, For longer quotes "":

If you use a longer quote, or want to use the quote exactly the way it is (there's no room to use the sentences above to paraphrase), you can (and should!) still add citation.

• If it's an article, at the end of the quote, add ([LAST NAME OF AUTHOR], "TITLE OF ARTICLE").

• If it's a book, at the end of the quote, add ([LAST NAME OF AUTHOR], [Page # that the quote comes from]).

Once you have the credit for articles or books you read or used info from in your essay, there's one last step! Making the Works Cited Page. Good job making it this far!

BUT THIS NEXT PART IS SIMPLE!

There's a formula for how you write out the info, and what order it goes in. If you can't find some of this info, you can skip that and go to the next piece of info. Here's the order/list:

1. Author.

2. Title of source (this would be the name of the article, video or book).

3. Title of container (this is where you found the info, like a magazine or encyclopedia, that might have a bunch of info in it at once),

4. Other contributors (usually, the article or book will tell you if someone else helped to write it),

5. Version (usually, the article or book will tell you if someone else helped to write it) - in a book, they keep this on a page with the publishing info; online, they usually tell you at the very bottom),

6. Number (if your book is part of a series, you would tell us if it's no.1 or no.2, for example),

7. Publisher,

8. Publication date,

9. Location (if you looked your source up online, the web address - a.k.a. link, or URL - would go here),

10. Date Accessed (for an online article, it's the date you looked at the website). 

In case it's not obvious, please save the websites you use for research on a paper. You will need to pull it back up to get this information.

• Real examples of what you would find on a Works Cited page:

Gibbons, Jerrica. The History of Pluto. Penguin, 2015.

Stern, Alan. Interview by David Levin. In Defense of Pluto. NOVA, 1 Jan. 2010, pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/defense-pluto.html. Accessed 23 May 2019.

“Why Is Pluto No Longer a Planet?” Library of Congress, 31 July 2017, loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/pluto.html. Accessed 23 May 2019.

• Click here for more examples (breakdown + highlight each part).