Reading to Write: 4 Key Author Craft Elements of Expository Writing

May 6, 2025

Reading and writing are reciprocal processes. Decades of research shows that improving your reading proficiency improves your writing and vice versa. Helping students become competent writers is critical to success in school and in life. And yet, many teachers tell me that the recent intense focus on building reading skills and content learning can sometimes crowd out time they need to teach students to develop their writing skills. By leveraging reciprocity, though, we can do more in less time so we don’t have to choose between the two.

So, today I’m sharing several suggestions on using guided inquiry lessons (as described in my book Teaching Reading Across the Day) to leverage reading lessons about various elements of author craft into interconnected writing lessons (drawing from The Writing Strategies Book). Of course, you can use any type of lesson to call attention to author craft, but I think guided inquiry lessons are an ideal instructional tool to notice and name various elements of author craft. Additionally, guided inquiry lessons encourage students to examine their own reading and writing with an eye to questioning what they are doing well, where they need further work, and how they can improve going forward.

Since good writing (particularly a short blog post) focuses narrowly on key points, I’m concentrating this post on four key craft elements of expository writing, although the craft elements apply equally to persuasive, narrative, and descriptive writing as well.

Pay Attention to Punctuation

Punctuation is a powerful tool writers use to convey emotion; direct pacing; and determine relationships between words, phrases, and clauses. Make sure you choose a grade-level text that provides plenty of opportunities to see how that author uses punctuation to convey important points. For example, with older students you might examine Oh, Rats! (Marrin) to study how commas can be used to layer details or separate subordinate information within complex sentences. Studying an author’s punctuation choices can help students as readers to read with fluency and comprehension.

Then, once students have had an opportunity to study punctuation during a couple of reading-focused inquiry lessons, they are ready to practice during structured writing time using the mentor texts as models. There are many ways students can practice and refine punctuation while writing. Here are a few from my book, The Writing Strategies Book:

·       Don’t Overdo It—When students first learn a new punctuation mark, such as an exclamation point or an ellipsis, they might overuse it. Ask students to review their work and identify if they have used the same type of emphatic punctuation repetitively. Students can then contemplate if each use is merited or if they need to select different punctuation.

·       Group Words—Ask students to find a long sentence in their writing that might need some type of mid-sentence punctuation to better convey the information. This is a great way for students to determine if a particular sentence could benefit from commas, semi-colons, em dashes, etc.

·       Creating Complex Sentences— When you want to add more information into a sentence, you may add a dependent clause before or after the independent clause with a word such as although, as, because, if, or since and offset the information with commas. The dependent clause can’t be a sentence on its own; it needs the independent clause to make sense.

 Focus on Word Choice

Authors spend a lot of time selecting the right word or combination of words to relay meaning, express nuance, impart style, be precise about content, connect to the reader, and more. Select texts that allow you to point out key word choices that help the reader better understand the author’s purpose and meaning. At times, you may simply want to quickly explain the importance of a particular word. At other times, you will want students to discuss why the author might have used that word rather than another, what other words an author might have used, or how a different word might alter the meaning of the text. Messner’s Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt might be a great choice for a variety of grade levels. Study into an author’s word choices can help students’ reading comprehension.

When students are ready to carry over what they have learned about word choice into their own expository writing, here are a few suggestions (again, from The Writing Strategies Book) to get them started:

·       Convey Authority—As students read about a topic that they are going to write about, they can keep a list of domain-specific words that authors use to establish credibility. When they get ready to write about the topic, they can use the words in their own writing.

·       Use Precise Nouns—Often the right noun, and modifiers, can clearly establish a time or place or identify an individual or group and express a world of meaning. Ask students to underline each noun and consider if a more precise word or phrase might be better.

·       Shades of Meaning—Many teachers use paint chips samples to teach the nuance of word choice. You might write informative or descriptive on the lighter shades and illuminating or enlightening on the darker shades, for example. 

Finding the Main Ideas and Key Details

Establishing the key points of an expository text sets the reader up to fully understand the topic and the author’s perspective on that topic. For younger readers, you may want to select a text that has one main idea, such as Behold the Beautiful Dung Beetle (Bardoe) and work on identifying key details from the text and images to determine how the information the author includes supports the main idea. With older readers, a text such as Climate Change and How We’ll Fix it (Harmon and Lazano) will set you up to teach them to look for main ideas in the introduction or conclusion, consider how the structure can be used to articulate the main idea statement, or how to put the main idea(s) of each section to determine one, overarching main idea for the book. Identifying main ideas and key details leads to effective summarizing, one of the single most impactful reading practices for comprehension.

 Using mentor texts from the reading lessons, students can study how writers establish main ideas in expository texts, and do so in their own writing. Here are a few strategies from The Writing Strategies Book to help them make sure they clearly state and develop each idea.

·       Identify a Timeline—Establishing key moments might help students maintain a tight structure for an expository piece that takes place over a defined time.

·       Write a Title—Sometimes it can be difficult for students to determine the angle for their informational writing. They can start with brainstorming different titles to identify their focus. Or they create titles after the first draft as a way of determining what’s most important to concentrate on when revising.

·       Ask Questions—Sometimes students struggle to write about a topic simply because it’s too broad. Coaching them to ask questions, such as “What am I most curious about? What do I wonder? What do I think or believe about my topic?” can help them clarify the key points they want to touch on.

Establish the Setting

Too often we think about setting as being important only to fictional texts, but setting can be critical to every genre including expository text. Think about reading a history text discussing Napoleon’s march on Moscow. It’s important that students explore the setting, miles of isolated, brutally cold steppes, to understand one of the key reasons Napoleon’s military excursion into Russia failed. Or how a student’s level of familiarity with an urban setting may alter an early reader’s understanding of a text on animal life in the city such as Wild City (Hoare).

 To help readers transition from mentor texts with defined settings to writing an expository piece informed by setting, consider the following writing strategies from The Writing Strategies Book.

·       Notice Details—Ask students to use a photo of the principal location of their writing—a farm, a coral reef, a mountain—to determine key details such as colors or size or explore feelings such as isolated or teeming.

·       Borrow a Line—Ask students to start with a line about the setting from the mentor text. They can transfer that line and expand upon, contrast it to the setting of their writing, move it to a different time, etc.

·        Word Mapping—Have students write and circle a word important to the setting of their topic in the middle of a piece of paper. Working on their own or in pairs, ask students to brainstorm and write down words or phrases related to the central word. Now they can explore connections, new thinking, surprises, and how they might now write about the setting more clearly or in greater detail.

To explore how to use guided inquiry lessons to student author craft in various genres, check out Teaching Reading Across the Day. And for more on linking reading strategies on author craft to writing strategies on author craft, see The Reading Strategies Book 2.0 and The Writing Strategies Book. My team of consultants and I are here to support you in your school. If you’d like to invite us, please contact us for a free consultation!