Evaluate Your Informational Report

Tips for Writing Numbers

Click on the link form GrammarBook.com to learn more about how to writer using the rule of numbers.

Writing a Conclusion

A conclusion should

• stress the importance of your reason for informing
• give the paper a sense of completeness
• leave a final impression on the reader

Techniques for Closing:

• Summary: Summarize the content, presenting the information through a new angle rather than repeating everything directly.
• Reaction or feeling: Tell how you feel about the content.
• Image description: Describe a visual or sensory image related to the content.
• Image: Include a visual image (photo, drawing, clipart) related to the overall message.
• Quotation: Present an interesting quotation or fact related to what you have written.  You might need to write something before or after the quotation/fact so that it makes sense to the reader.
• Encouragement to reflect:  End with a statement that encourages readers to keep thinking about the concept.
• Encouragement to act: End with a statement that encourages the taking of some action(such as using less fossil fuel or continuing to look for real-life uses of math).
• Question: End with a question that encourages readers to keep thinking about the concept.

Writing a Great Introduction

After weeding through several mentor texts, our class came up with the following features that make a great intro.

1. Be at least one paragraph
2. First Sentence should "hook" you.  Click here for strategies.
3. Tell the reader what they are going to learn about in this paper.
4. Only use important facts.

Exploring How Authors Use Topic Sentences in Expository (Informational) Text

Our findings:

• Table of Contents- lets you know how the paragraphs are related
• Bold letters- important words
• Different lengths of sentences in a paragraph
• Opinions based on facts
• More than one paragraph on a page
• Include true facts
• Makes the reader feel like they are living in your writing
• Draw in readers/ audience
• Pictures help you better visualize the paragraphs
• Show then tell using pictures/ captions/ references to figures
• Important facts
• Long paragraphs can be divided into smaller paragraphs 
• Sometimes paragraphs look different like written in a comic form
• Diagrams, pictures, tables, charts, graphs, etc  help show what you're trying to tell in the paragraphs by adding information.
• Headings can have more than one paragraph on different pages.
• Topic/Main idea sentence

A paragraph has two jobs.

1. To tell you what you'll be reading about
2. Add details that help you tell it

Watch this video to learn more about how topic paragraphs are constructed.

Organizing our Informational Articles

Let's think about the structure of an informational article.  In all our mentor texts, we noticed that the structure falls into these categories:

Let's look at your research and begin organizing your article by completing a flowchart.  In google docs, open your draft then create a table and type the flowchart.

Review the research on your index cards.  Jot notes/ideas in the flow chart.  It is not necessary to cite anything or write complete sentences at this point.  Our purpose is to organize our thoughts.

Let's organize!