Unit 1: Understanding and Teaching the Common Core Writing Standards

Analyses of Student Samples

Now, compare your responses to the annotated version of each essay below. To conclude this activity, read the analysis provided through the link under each essay.

Important Takeaway: As noted earlier, the blending and combining elements of the different writing types for rhetorical effect is an essential skill for success in college writing. All Common Core writing standards build toward the analytical writing of argument, which often blends two or three text types, as well as the purposes of writing to inform, argue, and analyze. As illustrated by the three student essays, students can and should learn this skill early and practice it across the grade levels. Seeing such blending in student and professional writing is again a reminder that the CCSS text types are broad categories of writing, not genres.

Search through some of the following text resources to see if and how professional and college writers combine text types for rhetorical effect, thereby creating blended or hybrid writing genres:

• A text you use in class — picture book, chapter, anthology, essay reader, etc.
• Digital texts: Time for Kids, Ranger Rick — National Wildlife Federation, or National Geographic Kids.
• Examples of the writing of university students: Prized Writing (twenty-one years of online anthologies of writing across disciplines by University of California Davis undergraduate students).

Download Analyzing Texts for Text Type Blending and Significance and chart your findings.