Types of Written Content

Even higher education writing sites don’t use the same terminology for essays. Byline was therefore designed with the idea that there are four types of essays that all the other types are based on:

The Narrative Essay (“Telling a Story”)

Includes:

• Biographical essays
• Autobiographical essays

The Descriptive Essay (“Painting a Picture”)

Offers more artistic freedom.

The Expository Essay (“Just the Facts”)

Structure: Thesis–Body–Conclusion
Often includes:

• Definition and example
• Comparison and contrast
• Cause and effect
• Analysis (Some analytical essays are Persuasive Essays.)

The Persuasive Essay (“Convince Me”)

Also known as the Argumentative Essay.
Structure is similar to the Expository Essay but contains an opinion.
Analytical Essays (such as the book report or review) are often types of persuasive essays.

Although presented in journalism terms, the writing in Byline corresponds to these four types of essays.

For example:

• Editorials are often persuasive essays.
• Hard news is usually a form of expository essay.
• Features are generally narrative or descriptive essays.
• Sports columns and features tend to be narrative or descriptive or a combination of both.

“Flex” Projects

To make the course accessible for younger or struggling students, six of the 22 writing assignments are marked as Flex Projects. This means students do not need to write the actual paper to receive full credit, provided they complete the readings, exercises, and outlining included in the Training Manual and Reporter’s Notebook.

Byline is divided into six units, with one Flex Project per unit. Students on the Flex Track complete 16 projects/essays by the end of the school year, instead of all 22. A student on the Flex Track will log at least 5,000 words, as contrasted with the 9,000+ logged by the standard student.

Grading

Grades are based on a point system. Points are awarded for four things:

• Training Manual lessons
• Reporter’s Notebook entries
• Completed project writing
• Unit tests

For a full breakdown on points and grading rubrics, please see the Teacher’s Guide pages 6–10 and 146–153. “Flex” projects are noted, and an adjusted grading rubric is provided.

Approach to Grading

Grading may be done at your convenience. However, we recommend teachers grade all the work for each unit at the end of the unit. This amounts to spending one or two hours each month when your student has completed all twelve unit lessons.

The main reason for grading at the end of a unit is that it allows your student(s) to be creative without feeling that they are being evaluated on their ideas. Many writing courses teach students to self-edit as they write. By separating the creative process from the analytical process, Byline helps students enjoy being creative. They need the freedom to jot down bad ideas as well as good ones, and that’s hard to do when someone is looking over your shoulder. Waiting till the end of the unit also allows students to change or expand answers as they progress, instead of feeling stuck with their previous answers because they have already been graded – which can be an extra obstacle to creativity.

Applying This to Groups

Our general suggestion to grade at the end of each unit is probably unrealistic for a group setting, considering how many students’ work you may have to evaluate. It is fine to grade more often, as long as you grade piece-by-piece rather than lesson-by-lesson. We recommend allowing students a gap of time between handing in a piece and receiving feedback on it—we suggest at least one week. It is much easier for students to be objective about their writing pieces after they have some emotional distance.

Reading

Additional Resources

Website

Our website offers a variety of extra items under the “Resources” tab, such as online auto-graded unit tests, writing aids, links to research tools and musical recordings referenced in the course videos, and other helpful articles.

Historic Journalism Podcast

The Byline Podcast is a great opportunity to supplement your student’s experience, and it’s completely free! Twice each month Daniel Schwabauer highlights captivating news stories of the past and digs deeper into the lives of the reporters who covered them. Listen on the podcast webpage, or wherever you download podcasts. See the Lesson Table for suggested points in the course to listen topodcast episodes.

Extra! Extra!

Dedicated to sharing fascinating old news stories we don’t have space to feature on the Byline podcast, this section of our website is a great place for students to supplement their coursework and find ideas for stories of their own.

0.5 History Credit (Optional)

With a little extra work, Byline can count as half a high school History credit. That’s in addition to a full Language Arts/English credit! Here is what’s required:

• • Read all the articles in the Metro and Retro World newspapers.
  • Read 3–5 stories from the Extra! Extra! page on the website or listen via the podcast.
  • Write two additional articles of 500–800 words using any of the strategies described in the program. These articles should be inspired by something in the printed newspapers or on the website/podcast, but can be hard news, feature stories, editorials, etc.

It is your decision whether you wish this half credit to be U.S. History or World History. If your student writes exclusively about U.S. events and personalities, list it as “U.S. History”; if, instead, your student covers historical topics in other countries, list it as World History. Visit the “Optional 0.5 History Credit” page on the website to find a handy breakdown of which podcast episodes relate to U.S. History and which ones to World History.

Contest

We run an end-of-year competition, The Witherspoon Awards, to showcase the work produced by the year’s reporters-in-training. The competition is framed as an award sponsored by the Metropolitan World’s fictional owner, Madge Witherspoon. The results are announced in a live webinar. See the contest webpage for information.

About the Instructor