Common types of essays

It is always challenging to create academic content, which relates only to a specific style of an essay. Especially, when you have no idea what common types of essays are and how they differ from each other, right? Let us clear things up.

There are four main types of academic essays: descriptive, argumentative (persuasive), expository, and narrative. Each type of essay has its own special purposes and features.

Descriptive type

This type of essay is well known as the simplest one. Why? Descriptive style of writing is about creating descriptions of places, people, objects, emotions, situations, memories, experiences, etc. In other words, the descriptive style of an essay requires you to paint a picture using your own words. What is interesting is that this type is very flexible and gives you an opportunity to feel your artistic freedom.

Argumentative (persuasive) type

Almost all students and pupils have written an essay using a persuasive or argumentative type of academic writing. When writing an argumentative essay, you have to conduct research deeply, investigate the topic, formulate your own opinions, add opinions of experts in the field; compare that opinions, present relevant evidence to prove to your reader that you're right. Moreover, it is necessary to build your argumentation on examples, facts, logic and real cases, which is a little challenging for many students.

Expository type

Students mistakenly interpret the expository type of an essay as a part of an argumentative (persuasive) essay. What is required by this style? You should investigate the main idea, conduct research to collect relevant evidence and evaluate those pieces of evidence. Generally, expository style is used to write comparison essays, and the cause and effect essays, and “how to...” essays. Remember that your writing should be based on facts, not emotions or feelings.

Narrative type

Narrative type of an essay is known as telling a story to a reader about a real-life experience, or anecdote, or personal situation. You should make a true storytelling essay; however, it is also obligatory to focus on just an informative narrative, not a creative one. All well-written narrative essays include a conclusion built on a personal statement regarding the story you mentioned.

As you may see, there are different types of essays with specificities. At this stage, you are ready to write a brilliant essay. So, we wish you good luck!