Teaching Expository and Informational Writing: Strategies That Actually Work

Expository and informational writing is the writing students will do most in school and most in their adult lives — reports, explanations, instructions, analyses, emails, memos. Yet it's often taught through a single-pass assignment with minimal instruction in the craft of explanation itself. Students who struggle with informational writing usually aren't struggling with writing mechanics; they're struggling with the thinking that writing is supposed to capture.

Here's how to teach expository writing in ways that actually develop the skill.

The Core Problem: Writing Before Thinking

Most expository writing struggles start with students writing before they've done enough thinking. They open a blank document and try to produce coherent explanation of something they don't fully understand yet. The writing is muddled because the thinking is muddled — and no amount of revision instruction helps if the underlying understanding isn't there.

The fix is separating thinking from writing explicitly. Before any drafting, students need to be able to:

• Articulate in a sentence what they're explaining and who the audience is
• Identify the 3-5 key ideas that the explanation depends on
• Explain each key idea clearly without looking at notes

If they can't do the last one, they're not ready to write. The writing assignment becomes a thinking assignment first.

Teaching Text Structure as a Tool

Expository writing has structures — ways of organizing information for a purpose. Teaching these structures explicitly gives students options rather than forcing them to reinvent the wheel with each assignment.

Common expository structures:

• Description — explaining what something is, including features, characteristics, examples
• Sequence — explaining steps, processes, or events in order
• Compare/contrast — examining similarities and differences between two or more things
• Cause and effect — explaining why something happens or what results from something
• Problem/solution — identifying a problem and explaining one or more solutions

Most expository writing uses one primary structure with secondary structures embedded. A report on climate change might have a cause/effect primary structure with description sections for key concepts and compare/contrast sections for different solutions.

Teach students to identify these structures in texts they read, then consciously choose structures for their own writing based on purpose. "What is this explanation trying to do? Help the reader understand what something is? Help them follow a process? Help them see why something happened?" — the answer drives the structural choice.

Introducing Explanation Before Persuasion

Many teachers teach argument and persuasion before they teach pure explanation, which creates a persistent problem: students learn to assert and support claims before they learn to explain. When they write informational pieces, they default to making an argument rather than explaining.

Explanation is a distinct skill from argument. An explanation asks "how does this work?" or "what is this?" — the goal is understanding, not agreement. A student explaining photosynthesis shouldn't be trying to convince anyone of anything; they should be trying to make a process clear.

Pure explanation assignments that don't have a thesis to argue are valuable precisely because they force students to prioritize clarity over persuasion. "Explain how the legislative process works to someone who knows nothing about it" or "explain what a prime number is and why mathematicians care about them" — these require the student to be a clear teacher, not an advocate.

Mentor Texts Matter More Than Rubrics

Rubrics tell students what their writing should have. Mentor texts show them what good writing looks, feels, and sounds like. For expository writing, mentor texts are essential because most students have very limited models of excellent expository prose in their heads.

Choose mentor texts that are genuinely excellent explanations of complex topics — science journalism, well-written encyclopedia articles, explanatory essays. Analyze them explicitly with students: What did the writer do at the beginning? How did they handle vocabulary the reader might not know? How did they use examples? Where did they use subheadings and why?

Then have students try specific techniques from the mentor text in their own writing, not wholesale imitation but targeted practice: "Write a paragraph that introduces a technical term the way this author did" or "Write an opening that doesn't start with a definition the way this piece does."

Teach the Paragraph as the Unit of Explanation

Most expository writing instruction focuses at the essay level (introduction, body, conclusion) when the actual work happens at the paragraph level. A paragraph in expository writing is a unit of explanation: one main idea, fully developed, with enough detail, example, and elaboration that a reader who knew nothing about the topic would understand it.

The three most common paragraph problems in student informational writing:

1. Underdevelopment — stating the main idea without explaining it. "Photosynthesis is important for the environment." Why? How? What exactly happens?
2. List padding — adding facts without developing any of them. Students mistake quantity for explanation.
3. Missing connection — explaining something accurately but not connecting it to the reader's existing knowledge or the paper's larger point.

Teach students to test each paragraph by asking: "If someone who knew nothing about this topic read only this paragraph, would they understand the main idea fully?" If no, what's missing?

Feedback That Improves Explanation

Standard feedback on expository writing — "be more specific," "elaborate," "unclear" — doesn't tell students what to do. Feedback that actually improves explanation is more concrete:

• "I don't know what you mean by [term] yet — define it here before you use it"
• "This fact doesn't connect to your main point — what's the link?"
• "I understand what happened but not why — add the explanation for why this caused that"
• "Your example is good but you haven't explained what it demonstrates — what should I take away from it?"

Peer feedback can be structured around specific explanation quality questions rather than open-ended "what's good and bad" feedback. "After reading only this paragraph, explain in your own words what the writer is saying. Write it here." If the reader can't paraphrase accurately, the explanation failed — and the specific misunderstanding tells the writer exactly what to fix.

Your Next Step

For your next informational writing assignment, add an explicit pre-writing thinking requirement: before students draft, they must be able to explain their topic out loud without notes. Have a partner listen and ask one question. If the writer can't answer it, they're not ready to write yet. That one step will improve the writing quality of every student in the room.