Model Informative Essays

Video Transcription

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, everyone. I'm Mackenzie, and today we're learning about models of informative essays. Have you ever wondered how you can tell if a piece of writing is good? In this tutorial, we'll analyze an example of a definition essay, and we'll analyze an example of an analysis essay.

We'll first begin by analyzing an example of a definition essay. I'm going to show you the essay in its entirety. You'll need to take a moment to pause the video and read the essay. The essay is going to be several slides long, which means that when you have the first slide, unpause the video, and the next slide will appear. Then we will discuss.

This essay titled "Digital Ethics," written by Dan Richards, indicates that us that it is a definition essay. And here is how-- the very first sentence of the essay reads "netiquette, a hybrid word combining 'network' and 'etiquette,' essentially refers to the social code of the internet." This sentence not only serves as the beginning of the paper to grab our attention and introduce us to the topic, but also to demonstrate to us that this is going to be a definition essay. The essay is going to describe to us more about netiquette. And after having read the essay, you now know that the essay does, in fact, describe the definition of what netiquette is and why it's important.

The following sentence continues to define the idea of netiquette by stating that "netiquette-- how we communicate, treat others, portray ourselves, and protect ourselves online" is a question of ethics." The essay continues, then, to discuss the idea of ethics.

Because there's a lot that could potentially be said about the topic of netiquette or the ways in which we communicate online, this author had to set some parameters about what would be and would not be included in his definition of netiquette with regard to this particular piece of writing. This author chose to specifically focus on the idea of the ethics of netiquette. That's the parameter that he set for the ways in which he was going to define the topic of netiquette in this definition essay. He's using the idea of the ethics of netiquette to guide what he discusses in the writing.

He even uses a piece of supporting evidence from the rhetorical appeal of ethos-- ethics-- to help him to communicate the information. This essay gave us an example of what an effective definition essay might look like, and further analysis of the essay helped us to understand how a definition essay is organized and communicated.

We are now going to analyze an example of an analysis essay. Again, I'm going to show you the entire essay, which means that this will be several slides long. Pause the video, read the first slide. And when you've finished reading that slide, unpause the video. The next slide will appear. Then we will discuss.

This essay titled "Breaking Down an Image," written by Jenna Pack, is an example of an analysis essay. And here's how we know that-- the author has started with an image. This is an advertisement. And she's going to analyze the advertisement. We know that this is an analysis essay because an analysis essay sometimes can focus on an example of a text, such as an image, and then analyze the different components of that particular text or, in this case, image or advertisement.

Aside from the introduction and the conclusion of this essay, the essay is organized into small chunks or sections. Each of them focuses on a different element of the text that's being analyzed. That's part of the analysis of the analysis essay.

The author focuses on the audience, the context, the purpose, the tone, arrangement, location, scale, text, typography, font size, font color, color, connotation, and readability of the particular text being analyzed. Those are a lot of very intricate, small details included in this particular image. And she's looking at each one individually.

She's actually using the image itself as the main support or evidence for the information she's communicating in her essay. She's drawing the information from looking at the image itself. For example, when she discusses connotation, she's focusing specifically on the colors in the image, stating that they create a sense of coherence because they match one another. This example shows us the ways in which we can break down an example of a text and analyze it into smaller parts so that we can understand the text as a whole in greater depth.

Once we look at each of these individual pieces related to the advertisement we're analyzing, we better understand the advertisement in general. And that is what makes this an effective analysis essay. By looking at smaller components of one larger idea and analyzing each individual component, we can then draw more conclusions about the text being analyzed.

In this tutorial, we analyzed an example of a definition essay, and we analyzed an example of an analysis essay. Analyze writing to figure out if it is good. I'm Mackenzie. Thanks for listening.