How to teach essay writing in a fun way – A guide

  • How to teach essay writing in a fun way – A guide

Helpful tips and guidance to essay writing...

Essay writing can not be considered fun at all, especially when combined with other assignments, and tough deadlines. Still, what should teachers and professors do to change the hatred/boredom in love or at least slight excitement?

Logically, to assume, making jokes with students about their burden of writing essays won’t work. Yet, conducting lessons with games might be a go-choice.

Let’s learn how to make this assignment entertaining.

Preparing the persuasion of students

You might agree that assignment of essays simply would not be considered a prize. So, a professor has to first share their own considerations about an essay. For instance,

Share your funny stories when you have been assigned essays
It can be either your failures in delivering them or stupid mistakes you have made. You should be sincere and demonstrate students that you had experience before the same opinions about writing as they have now.

Share some tips on writing them faster
During the first essays (when the studying course only started), share with them alone helpful sources or materials which may fasten their writing. It will strengthen your bond with students, and they will be eager to speak to you about their hurdles.

Make advances with missed deadlines
If one or more students lag behind others, no need to turn on your inner “devil”. Find the excuse for such an event, and give one more chance to deliver the paper without lowering the grade.

When proceeding with the above-mentioned tips, you have a favourable ground for your students to consider you as a cool professor.

Writing humorous essays

If applicable in your educational establishment, you can change the curriculum regarding the essays a little.

1. Assign students to their preferred topics
Discuss with the students the upcoming essays, and learn what they find interesting researching and writing about.

Yes, the topics should correspond to the set requirements, but you should give some freedom to them too.

Such intentions will be appreciated because you’re not “suffocating” them with a trite theme.

After the discussion of the selected topics, say that there will be a competition in declamating the essays with other students.

For instance, who will persuade the students with their delivered ideas? Otherwise, speak to the headmaster about the college/university competition on the best essays of the studying course.

2. Use Pictures
Manage to find one picture (demonstrating nature, one or another phenomenon or event) and simply tell students to discuss what they see in an essay. The main goal is not to give any other requirements or hints to the picture.

Such exercises will definitely puzzle their heads with considerations, and they will literally reinvent the wheel of what to write about the best.

Upon receiving the essays, you can all read them and compare the answers. In the end, you can just make jokes to students by saying – that the picture did not carry any hidden mystery, and you just wanted to see how students’ imagination works.

3. Play with Grammar
For language classes, or particularly English, you can assign students to write an essay by using in every sentence one certain word without any exclusions. Or, it can be an essay written in one grammar tense only.

To assume logically, the whole context will be fun. On the other hand, it can help students to practice in grammar and have a cheerful class by listening to each other.

4. Assign essay with different endings
Read one random story to your students, and ask them to write an essay by developing the conclusion or ending. How does it work? By completing the task, you will again read the story to students, and then ask one by one to proceed with the ending. It will help to find out the variations to the ending, and understand who was the most creative one in terms of happy or tragic conclusions.

5. Ask about students’ personal opinions
If you want to understand what students think about essay writing, ask them to write one where they can discuss what an ideal essay from their point of view should look like. For the best results, announce that it can be an anonymous task if they are scared to share with you sincere feedback. Students will feel like they really affect the studying curriculum, and can add changes to essay requirements.

6. Ask different year groups to write the same essay
What can be better than exchanging knowledge between courses? Ask your colleague about assigning the essays to different topics. Once done, conduct a class with both classes. The freshman year will compete against the senior year.

You will see how one topic can be considered by different age groups. Yet, every delivery of the essay should not be classified as a competition, but just as a fun exercise. In the end, all years should be rewarded with some guilty pleasures to leave a good imprint on their attempts.

7. Ask students to exchange their papers
Last but not least, an exercise for fun writing is the exchanging of papers. For instance, all the students are assigned a paper on one topic.

After delivering all of them to you, you distribute the papers randomly among other students. One by one, they should read it and share their opinion on the writing. It can initiate negotiation within the class.

Yet, you should ensure that your students do not mind having their essays read by others.

If you are a student who still cannot manage essay writing in a professional way, you can first refer to an essay writing service where your custom paper will be done by academic experts.

You can pick up the highly qualified writer who fits your liking and requirements, and access the affordable pricing.

Note, with such custom writing services, you can also order samples that will only hint at tips of paper writing. They come occasionally on a free basis, so you do not spend a penny. Yet, do always try to cope with the task alone because writing will stalk you for your whole life.

Pie Corbett