There are two reasons you might now consider teaching students how to write ‘explainers’ in junior English. Firstly, in the new VCE English study design, the craft of writing AOS includes ‘explain’ as one of the four purposes for which students can write. Secondly, and perhaps more interestingly, explainers are a more and more common text that students are likely to come across and need to or want to produce later in life for work or personal interest.
An explainer is really any type of text that provides information about a topic. It can come in a range of formats – such as a video presentation, podcast, webpage or news article. Of course, the general purpose of explainers is to unpack complex information so that readers can understand it more easily. But beyond that, explainer texts usually have three other purposes:
*to make complex information understandable for people
*to present complex information in an interesting and engaging way
*to help people understand that a topic is important to think about
The following activities come from our updated edition of The Student Guide To Writing Better Sentences 2. This updated edition includes sections on how to write explainers, feature articles, personal text responses and reflective pieces. For more practical activities like the one above, come along to our free zoom workshop on using The Student Guide 2. Click here for information.
A key part of explainers is to provide information and then explain it. Here are some examples:
Even if women ruled kingdoms, wrote histories or composed music, their beauty is listed as one of their main achievements. What it all boils down to is that women are more likely to be remembered for their beauty than for anything else they achieved. |
Dungeons and Dragons adventures can be quite long. In fact, the average length of a campaign is five weeks and the the longest reported campaign ever was seven years. |
When teaching explainer writing in class, one activity when do with students is to
- pick a topic
- list as many facts as they can about that topic
- divide facts into groups
They can now have a go using one of the groups of information to practise explainer writing by stating a fact then providing more explanation. These sentence starters can be used to add a follow up explanatory sentence:
Add and emphasise previous information (insert comma icon) | Explain or summarise previous information | Impact of previous information |
In fact,… In point of fact,… Not only does…, it also… On top of this, | In other words,… In simple terms, what this means is… To put that into perspective… This really means… In plain language,… In a nutshell,… What it boils down to is that… | Consequently, In consequence, As a result, This leads to A result of this is that |
These sentence starters come from our new edition of The Student Guide To Writing Better Sentences 2. This updated edition includes sections on how to write explainers, feature articles, personal text responses and reflective pieces. For more practical activities like the one above, come along to our free zoom workshop on using The Student Guide 2. Click here for information.