Common Core W.CCR.2 Explained

W.CCR.2–that’s the 2nd College/Career Readiness anchor standard within the Writing strand of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for ELA / Literacy–reads as follows:

Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.

As far as importance goes, informative/explanatory writing is a kissing cousin to argumentative writing, at least in terms of college and career readiness (CCR). Appendix A states that these two modes of writing are dominant in postsecondary education, and they are also dominant in the standards of well-performing countries (p. 41).

So what exactly is informative/explanatory writing?

How do the CCSS define informative/explanatory texts?

Once again, I’ll be heading to Appendix A (p. 23) for help in getting a handle on what exactly the CCSS means by informative/explanatory texts.

Informative/explanatory writing seeks to accurately convey information. It’s purposes are:

• to increase readers’ knowledge of a subject
• to help readers better understand a procedure or process
• to provide readers with an enhanced comprehension of a concept

Was this guy great, or not? Wait, that’s an argumentative prompt!

I’m a thinker who does better with examples; if you’re like me, try these examples from Appendix A on for size:

• What are the different types of poetry?
• What are the parts of a motor?
• How big is the United States?
• What is an X-ray used for?
• How do penguins find food?
• How does the legislative branch of the government function?
• Why do some authors blend genres?

Here are some examples that I might use in my world history classes next year:

• How did Alexander the Great hellinize the Middle East?
• Why was Genghis Khan so militarily successful?
• What were the positive and negative aspects of the Pax Romana?
• What were the main causes of the genocides of the 20th century?
• What were the main causes and effects of World War II?
• Why did Mao Zedong set the Cultural Revolution into motion?
• Why did the USSR collapse?
• What led European Christians to engage in the Crusades?
  

  What were this guy’s reasons for starting the Cultural Revolution? Now that sounds like an informative/explanatory writing prompt!

All right, before I get carried away with listing, let’s move on.

What genres could be included as informative/explanatory?

Many genres could be labeled informative/explanatory; here are some that Appendix A includes:

ACADEMIC GENRES

• literary analyses
• scientific and historical reports
• summaries
• précis writing

WORKPLACE AND FUNCTIONAL GENRES

• instructions
• manuals
• memos
• reports
• applications
• resumés

How does informative/explanatory writing differ from argumentative writing?

Both W.CCR.1 and W.CCR.2 call for writing that provides information, and Appendix A provides some help in keeping the two straight.

With argumentative writing, the aim is to get people to believe that something is true. With explanations, the aim is to answer questions about why or how because truthfulness is assumed. Argument seeks to persuade; explanation seeks to create understanding.

Compare these two writing prompts:

1. Was Alexander the Great truly great?
2. How did Alexander the Great hellenize the Middle East?

Notice how the first prompt brings up a debatable point; to tackle it, the writer will have to analyze available evidence, come to her own conclusion, and then marshal the evidence to advance her claim. In the second prompt, the spread of hellenism is not debatable. The writer simply needs to summarize the tactics that Alexander used to spread Greek culture.

What skills do students need to write informative/explanatory texts?

There are three main skills that W.CCR.2 mentions: selecting, organizing, and analyzing content. There are also two important qualities mentioned in W.CCR.2: accuracy and clarity. For my money’s worth, the best way to get students there is modeling those skills and qualities, both through pointing them out in professional mentor texts and writing examples of them in front of students.

As students practice this mode of writing, they’ll become increasingly adept at clearly and accurately explaining a topic, and they’ll start to get an eye for selecting and incorporating relevant examples. The key is giving them practice, whether it be with quick, paragraph-length explanations or of lengthier pieces.

Common Core W.CCR.1 Explained

W.CCR.1–that’s the 1st College/Career Readiness anchor standard within the Writing strand of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for ELA / Literacy–reads as follows:

Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.

Before exploring the actual standard, let’s discuss the “specialness” of argument within the CCSS.

Why is argumentative writing first?

Well, according to Neil Postman, Gerald Graff, and a bunch of other people and reports cited by the CCSS, argument is a pretty big deal.

On page 24 of Appendix A (i.e., the appendix containing evidence supporting the CCSS and a glossary of key terms), there’s a section called “The Special Place of Argument in the Standards.” It’s not a long read, but it’s packed with useful insights into why argument (and, in the early grades, opinion writing) has primacy of place in the standards. Below is my Sparknotes version of the section:

• Academia is an argument culture (Graff).
• Therefore “argument literacy” is crucial for success in academia.
• Argument isn’t about winning; instead, it’s “a serious and focused conversation among people who are intensely interested in getting to the bottom of things cooperatively” (Williams and McEnerney).
• In the the world of work, being able to back up opinions and ideas with strong evidence and sound reasoning is crucial.
• It has strong ties with research and knowledge-building, both of which are also important within the CCSS.
• It’s an important element in curriculum frameworks for numerous high-performing nations.
• It develops “capacities are broadly important for the literate, educated person living in the diverse, information-rich environment of the twenty-first century.”

 And that’s why argument comes first.

So what’s an argument, according to the CCSS?

In Appendix A, we find a meaty definition of argument. If you’ve read through Appendix A at all, you’ll easily believe that the below text was one giganto paragraph before I broke it down a bit:

Arguments are used for many purposes—to change the reader’s point of view, to bring about some action on the reader’s part, or to ask the reader to accept the writer’s explanation or evaluation of a concept, issue, or problem. An argument is a reasoned, logical way of demonstrating that the writer’s position, belief, or conclusion is valid.

• In English language arts, students make claims about the worth or meaning of a literary work or works. They defend their interpretations or judgments with evidence from the text(s) they are writing about.
• In history/social studies, students analyze evidence from multiple primary and secondary sources to advance a claim that is best supported by the evidence, and they argue for a historically or empirically situated interpretation.
• In science, students make claims in the form of statements or conclusions that answer questions or address problems. Using data in a scientifically acceptable form, students marshal evidence and draw on their understanding of scientific concepts to argue in support of their claims.
• [In elementary school:] Although young children are not able to produce fully developed logical arguments, they develop a variety of methods to extend and elaborate their work by providing examples, offering reasons for their assertions, and explaining cause and effect. These kinds of expository structures are steps on the road to argument. In grades K–5, the term “opinion” is used to refer to this developing form of argument.

If you teach ELA, history/social studies, science, or elementary, I hope the above bullet points are helpful. One way we can help students see the “argumentative culture” of academia is by teaching the ways that arguments differ by discipline.

Now that we’ve got some why and what questions handled, let’s look at the three steps contained within W.CCR.1.

Step 1: Make a claim about a substantive topic or text

For the sake of explaining this standard, let’s look at an assignment I’m preparing for Fall 2012. As part of our first trimester Odyssey unit, my 9th grade students will be reading a document that compares life in Athens and life in Sparta, and they will be arguing which polis would be the better place to live. My purposes in doing this are twofold:

1. I want them to build knowledge about the city states of ancient Greece.
2. I want them to practice argumentation.

Also, for the sake of hitting multiple strands of the CCSS in one assignment, my students won’t just be writing their arguments; they’ll be using them in a back-and-forth, whole class, graded debate.

Once they’ve had time to closely read and annotate the document, I’ll ask them to decide which polis they’ll be arguing for. For my indecisive students, I’ll remind them that the best debaters are those who can argue any side of an argument, and that they do need to chose a side.

Any time that my students make an argument, I want them thinking about these kinds of questions when they’re preparing their claim:

• Is your claim debatable? Is it intriguing? Is it clear
  • In the Athens-Sparta example, I’ll prompt them to think about how they can enhance their claim. Instead of simply writing, “Sparta would be a better place to live than Athens,” I’d push them to consider how to strengthen their language and clarify their claim. E.g., “Since I’m a woman, I would rather be dead in Sparta than alive in Athens.”
• Are there other claims that yours might be confused for? How can you make this clear?
• Do you have evidence in mind that can support your claim?

That last bullet point is key for moving on into Step 2.

Step 2: Support that claim with relevant and sufficient evidence

I teach my students that a great arguer starts with a ton of evidence, ranks it in order of relevance and strength, and then draws a line in the list where the evidence starts getting weak.

For the Athens-Sparta example, here’s a mini-list of prioritized evidence:

• Women in Athens were viewed as property. In order to live life out of the house, you had to be a  priestess or a prostitute.
• Women in Sparta were educated. They could play sports.
• Although women were assigned their husbands in Sparta, they were never viewed as property.
• In times of war, Spartan women were responsible for overseeing their husbands’ estates. This is a much more noble calling than being one more possession for an Athenian man.

If this were an argument based on multiple texts or a longer text, the list of evidence would be longer and some evidence would need to be eliminated from the argument for the sake of keeping it focused.

Step 3: Tie it all together with valid reasoning

The reasoning of an argument often usually answers why or how questions that I need to teach my student writers to anticipate:

• Why does this piece of evidence support your claim?
• Why is your claim superior to your opponent’s?
• How is your claim limited?
  • This one is key for students because they often think that argument is about winning, and that the only way to win is by making your claim appear perfect. But, unlike some kinds of persuasive writing, argumentation is based on logic and reasoning. An argument that strategically avoids mentioning any evidence contrary to its claim is always going to be a failed argument because the intelligent reader will smell a rat.

Once drafts of these Athens-Sparta arguments are written, I’ll have my students read them in pairs or triads, and then we’ll have our whole class back and forth debate.

Perhaps the biggest factor in developing “argumentative literacy” in my students has been giving them repeated exposure to reading, writing, speaking, and listening to arguments.

Even though I’ve only scratched the surface, I hope this helps 🙂