Monica Almeida/The New York TimesHow does a bad economy affect businesses like Phoenix Decorating in Pasadena? We’re using this and other articles as models of writing about cause and effect. Go to related article »
Update | Sept. 2012: We’ll be exploring the new Common Core State Standards, and how teaching with The Times can address them, through a series of blog posts. You can find them all here, in the lesson plan category “Common Core.”
Last summer we took our first stab at thinking about how the Common Core Standards might apply to what we do on The Learning Network.
In that post, we offered suggestions for literacy strategies that we know work well with “informational text” — a category that includes pretty much everything The Times publishes every day.
Now we’d like to elaborate on that with more ideas for helping students understand common expository “text structures” like cause and effect, compare and contrast and problem-solution. These three, especially, are such staples of journalism that you can find multiple examples in every day’s paper.
Below, we’ve pulled out recent, student-friendly Times examples — in both print and multimedia — that illustrate each. We’ve also included a list of “signal words” commonly used in each. (A list borrowed, in part, from the work of Stephanie Harvey.)
Of course, the Times examples we include here are sophisticated pieces of writing. Just as it is impossible to find real-world, professional versions of that schoolroom classic, the five-paragraph-essay (the one with the thesis as the final line of the first paragraph, and topic sentences neatly heading each of the three body paragraphs), these pieces similarly resist a lockstep outline. Some may even cross categories. But each can illustrate for students how well a basic structure can work to lay out complex information.
After you’ve read a few from each category, try finding your own. We invite students and teachers to post more Times examples for each in the comment section below.