identifying the text structure of an essay

Understanding Text Structures: Exploring Examples and Strategies

Understanding text structures is vital to improving reading comprehension and writing abilities. Text structures refer to how a piece of writing is organized, helping the reader understand the flow of ideas, the connections between concepts, the main ideas, and the author’s purpose. Several common text structures are used in literature, nonfiction writing, and other types of writing. This blog post will provide examples of these and nonfiction text structures and discuss strategies for teaching students to identify and use them in reading and writing.

Descriptive Text Structure

Descriptive text structure is one of the most commonly used structures, especially in literature. In a descriptive text structure, the author uses vivid words and detailed descriptions to create a picture in the reader’s mind. For instance, a paragraph describing a person’s life, appearance, habits, or character traits would be an example of descriptive text structure. The paragraph or main idea is often stated in topic sentences, and the following sentences provide supporting details and main ideas.

Sequence/Chronological Order

Sequence or chronological order is a common text structure, particularly in historical texts or any writing detailing a sequence of events or a process. As the name suggests, information in this type of text is organized according to the order in which events happen. It could be a sequence of steps in a recipe or events in a person’s life. Signal words like “first,” “then,” “next,” “finally,” etc., help the reader identify this very effective text structure.

Compare and Contrast

The text structure is used when the author wants to highlight the similarities and differences between two or more things. It’s commonly seen in essays where two topics are being examined side by side. This structure encourages critical thinking as it requires the reader to understand the unique characteristics of each item and how they relate to each other. Words and phrases like “similar,” compare, contrast, “in contrast,” “both,” and “on the other hand” signal the main idea behind this structure.

Problem and Solution

In the problem and problem solution text structure, the author presents a problem and then provides one or more possible solutions. The text structure is often used in persuasive writing or nonfiction passages addressing real-world issues. The main idea usually centers on the one problem solution, and the supporting details discuss potential solutions and their implications.

Cause and Effect

Cause and effect text structure explore why things happen (causes) and what happens as a result (effects). This text’s structure is commonly found in scientific and historical texts. The author’s purpose might present an event (cause) and discuss its impacts (effect). Signal words for this structure include “because,” “as a result,” “therefore,” and “thus.” These example paragraphs are only a few examples of text structures. Recognizing these structures when students read, and using them when they write, can significantly improve their understanding and communication of ideas. The following section explores teaching strategies to help students master these text structures.

Strategies for Teaching Text Structures

Explicit instruction and graphic organizers.

One effective strategy for teaching text structure is through explicit instruction. This involves:

• Clearly explaining the various structures.
• Pointing out signal words and phrases.
• Providing text structure examples for students to examine.

Nonfiction passages can be especially useful, as they often have clear structures that students can identify and discuss.

The Power Of Visuals

To help students visualize the organization of each structure, using graphic organizers can be extremely beneficial in your writing process. For instance, a sequence structure might be represented with a timeline. In contrast, a compare-and-contrast structure could use a graphic organizer or a Venn diagram. For the problem and solution structure, a graphic organizer or a flowchart can help map out the main problem, possible solutions, and their outcomes. Graphic organizers not only assist in understanding text structures but also help students organize their writing.

Practice with Varied Texts

To have students learn and reinforce the concepts:

• Provide students with various texts to practice identifying text structures.
• Use a mix of literature, nonfiction passages, essays, and other written materials, so students can see the different types of text structures in various contexts.
• Encourage students to explain why they think a text is written in a particular structure.

This helps them articulate their understanding and apply it in real-world contexts.

Writing Practice

Give students opportunities to write using different text structures. They could write a short descriptive text about their favorite place, compare two topics they’re interested in, or write an essay explaining a problem in their community and suggesting possible solutions. Writing practice five text structures helps students understand the various structures from the author’s perspective, enhancing their ability to read and comprehend texts written in those structures.

Review and Assessment

Using and familiarizing descriptive texts.

Consistent review and assessment of descriptive texts are essential for students to master text structures. This could be through reading worksheets focusing on identifying text structures, short answer tests, or essay writing assignments where students must use a specific text structure often. Feedback on these assessments can guide further teaching and learning. Understanding and effectively using text structures to describe or create them is a fundamental literacy skill. As students learn to identify text structures in what they read and apply them in their own writing, they build a strong foundation for advanced reading comprehension and effective communication.

Hands-On Examples and Activities

Nonfiction passages and the use of graphic organizers.

Nonfiction passages are ideal for teaching students about various text structures as they explain why they commonly use them. Assign passages that clearly explain and exemplify specific text structures. After a close reading of these passages, students can fill in a graphic organizer corresponding to the text structure used in the passage. This hands-on activity solidifies the students’ understanding of text structures and enhances their reading comprehension skills.

Use of Literature and Other Text Types

Students can also learn text structures from literature. Although some text structures like problem and solution or cause and effect are more common in nonfiction, other text structures, like sequence and description, are widely used in literature. Students can identify how authors use these structures to weave narratives and engage readers by teaching text structures by reading short stories and novels. Other text types, like advertisements, opinion pieces, and biographies, can also provide diverse text structure examples.

Encouraging Students to Write Using Different Text Structures

Providing students with opportunities to use various text structures in their own writing will enhance their understanding and mastery of these structures. Assign writing tasks that require the use of a specific text structure. For instance, students could write a biography or history of a famous person’s life using chronological order or an essay comparing and contrasting two historical events. Teachers can use these techniques to help students grasp the idea of different types and elements of text structures, improving their reading comprehension and writing skills.

Understanding common text structures is crucial for students, enhancing their reading comprehension and nonfiction writing capabilities. Educators can significantly support and boost students’ literacy skills by teaching students to identify common text structures, use graphic organizers for visualization, and apply these structures in their own writing.

What is an example of text structure?

The “compare, describe, and contrast” is an example of a text structure. In paragraphs using this, an author discusses the similarities and differences between two or more things. For instance, an essay comparing two novels, discussing their similar themes but contrasting writing styles, would use this structure.

What are the 5 structures of text?

The five main text structures are:

• Description: The author provides detailed information about a topic.
• Sequence/Chronological Order: The author lists items or events numerically or chronologically.
• Compare and Contrast: The author discusses similarities and differences between two or more things.
• Cause and Effect: The author presents reasons (or causes) for something and the results (or effects).
• Problem and Solution: The author offers a problem and potential solutions.

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Understanding Text Structure: A Comprehensive Guide with 8 Examples

understanding text structure

Text structures are the architectural framework of written communication, shaping how information is organized and presented.

In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the fundamentals of text structures, answering crucial questions:

Text structures are the organizational blueprints that authors employ to arrange their ideas systematically. They are the underlying structure that gives coherence and order to written content.

Understanding and using text structures is vital for effective communication. They transform chaotic content into a comprehensible narrative, making it accessible and engaging for readers.

1. Chronological Text Structure

Chronological text structure arranges information in sequential order, following a timeline. It is like telling a story from start to finish, ensuring that events or ideas unfold in the order they occurred.

First, historical accounts, biographies, and step-by-step guides often use chronological structure. These texts take readers on a journey through time, making it easy to track developments.

Choose this structure when you want to emphasize a clear progression of events or when you need to guide readers through a process in a logical, time-based sequence.

It’s a powerful tool for storytelling and explaining sequences of actions or historical events.

2. Compare and Contrast Text Structure

The compare and contrast text structure involves examining the similarities and differences between two or more subjects, ideas, or concepts.

It is a method of highlighting commonalities and distinctions, providing readers with a comprehensive understanding of the topics being compared.

Texts that compare and contrast often include essays, research papers, and product reviews. They present information side-by-side, allowing readers to discern relationships and disparities easily.

This structure is valuable when systematically analyzing multiple subjects or ideas, fostering a deeper understanding. It’s commonly used in academic, analytical, or evaluative contexts to facilitate informed comparisons.

3. Cause and Effect Text Structure

Cause and effect text structure elucidates the relationship between actions (causes) and their outcomes (effects). It unveils the underlying reasons behind events, helping readers grasp the connections and consequences.

Scientific research papers, historical analyses, and articles on social issues frequently employ this structure. It dissects the causal factors leading to particular outcomes or phenomena.

Choose this structure when you must elucidate the reasons behind specific events, explore the consequences of actions, or examine the ripple effects of decisions.

It is a valuable tool for comprehending and explaining the intricate web of causation in various contexts.

4. Problem-Solution Text Structure

The problem-solution text structure is a framework that identifies a specific problem or issue and then offers viable solutions or strategies to address it.

It presents a clear path from recognizing an obstacle to resolving it effectively.

Problem-solving essays, policy proposals, and self-help guides frequently utilize this structure. They pinpoint challenges and provide actionable solutions, offering readers practical guidance.

This structure is ideal for tackling real-world issues, proposing solutions, or guiding readers in resolving problems.

It is applicable in persuasive and informative writing, addressing diverse topics, from societal dilemmas to personal challenges.

5. Descriptive Text Structure

Descriptive text structure immerses readers in rich, vivid details, painting a clear and evocative picture of a subject, scene, or concept. It appeals to the senses and emotions, making content come alive.

Travelogues, creative narratives, and product reviews frequently employ this structure. They use descriptive language to provide readers with sensory experiences, fostering a deep understanding or appreciation.

Choose this structure to create a sensory and emotional connection with your audience, evoke vivid imagery, or convey a profound sense of place or experience. It’s particularly effective in storytelling, travel writing, and descriptive essays.

6. Sequential Text Structure

Sequential text structure, or chronological or procedural structure, arranges information in a step-by-step order, guiding readers through a series of actions or events logically. It’s akin to providing a roadmap for understanding processes.

Recipes, instructional manuals, and how-to guides often utilize this structure. They break down complex tasks or procedures into manageable, ordered steps, facilitating easy comprehension.

Choose this structure when explaining processes, procedures, or events in a systematic, time-based sequence. It’s invaluable for instructional content, technical documentation, and any context where clear, ordered guidance is essential.

7. Spatial Text Structure

Spatial text structure organizes information based on physical or spatial relationships, providing readers with a clear understanding of how elements are positioned or interconnected in space.

It leverages descriptive language to create mental images of a location or layout.

Travel guides, architectural blueprints, and geographical descriptions frequently employ this structure.

They use spatial cues to convey a sense of place, guiding readers through spaces or landscapes.

Choose this structure to emphasize the physical arrangement or layout of elements within a given space.

It effectively conveys spatial relationships, describes settings, and provides detailed, location-based information.

8. Compare and Contrast (Extended)

Extended compare and contrast delves deeper into the intricate nuances of two or more subjects, analyzing their similarities and differences exhaustively.

It requires a meticulous examination, often uncovering subtleties that standard comparisons might overlook.

Academic research papers, in-depth analyses of complex topics, and comprehensive product evaluations are indispensable for extended compare and contrast. It scrutinizes multifaceted aspects and intricate relationships between subjects.

To excel in extended comparison, employ robust research, consider multiple dimensions, and offer insightful insights. Diving into finer details and exploring various angles will yield a thorough comparative analysis.

How to Use Text Structures in Different Writing Styles

In fiction, authors use text structures to shape narratives through chronological storytelling, flashbacks, or descriptive passages.

These structures help create suspense, reveal character motivations, and engage readers emotionally.

Non-fiction relies on text structures to present factual information logically. Cause and effect, problem-solution, and compare and contrast structures are shared. They enhance clarity and reader comprehension, making complex topics accessible.

Academic writing often uses text structures to present research findings, arguments, and analyses. It demands a clear, organized approach, with structures like deductive reasoning or the scientific method ensuring rigor.

In business and technical writing, clarity is paramount. Sequential structures help explain processes, while descriptive designs can simplify complex concepts. These structures enhance communication in professional contexts, ensuring precision and understanding.

Tips for Mastering Text Structures

Mastering text structures is a valuable skill for writers across various genres. It enhances communication, readability, and the overall impact of your writing.

Here are six essential tips to help you become proficient in using text structures effectively:

Planning Your Writing with Text Structures in Mind

Begin your writing process by considering your content’s most suitable text structure.

Determine whether chronological, cause and effect, problem-solution, or another structure best aligns with your goals. A clear plan at the outset sets the stage for a well-organized piece.

Revision and Editing Techniques

Effective revision and editing are crucial for refining text structures. After completing your initial draft, review it with a critical eye.

Ensure that the chosen structure is consistently applied and smooth transitions between sections.

Eliminate redundancies and fine-tune your writing for clarity and coherence.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Be aware of common pitfalls associated with text structures. These may include veering off-topic, overusing a single structure, or neglecting to provide adequate context or support.

Stay vigilant to maintain a balanced and well-structured piece.

Engage Text Structure Exercises

Practice makes perfect. Engage in text structure exercises to hone your skills. Write short pieces using different structures to become comfortable with their nuances.

Experimentation will help you develop a strong sense of when to use each structure effectively.

Analyze Texts for Their Structures

Analyze texts across various genres to identify their underlying structures.

Please pay attention to how authors employ these structures to convey their messages. This analytical approach will deepen your understanding and enable you to adapt similar techniques to your writing.

Develop Your Text Structuring Skills

Text structuring is a skill that improves with time and effort. Seek feedback from peers or writing professionals to gain insights into your strengths and areas for improvement.

Attend writing workshops or courses focusing on text structures to refine your abilities further.

Real-World Examples

Study published works by renowned authors to observe how they employ text structures.

For instance, analyze how Charles Dickens uses descriptive structures in his novels to evoke vivid imagery or how scientific researchers employ cause-and-effect structures to present their findings precisely.

Read news articles critically, identifying the text structures used to convey information.

Observe how journalists employ chronological structures for reporting events, problem-solution structures when discussing societal issues, or compare and contrast structures when analyzing trends or policies.

Explore case studies that showcase the effective use of text structures in various contexts.

Investigate how businesses utilize problem-solving structures in marketing campaigns or how educators employ sequential structures for instructional materials.

These real-world examples offer valuable insights into the practical application of text structures.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ve embarked on a journey through the intricate world of text structures.

We explored the fundamental structures like chronological, cause and effect, problem-solution, and compare and contrast, each serving as a powerful tool in shaping written content.

Additionally, we ventured into extended comparisons and spatial and sequential structures and delved into using text structures across various writing styles.

Armed with these insights, writers can now confidently navigate the terrain of communication, crafting engaging, organized, and impactful content that captivates readers and conveys messages effectively.

Josh Jasen or JJ as we fondly call him, is a senior academic editor at Grade Bees in charge of the writing department. When not managing complex essays and academic writing tasks, Josh is busy advising students on how to pass assignments. In his spare time, he loves playing football or walking with his dog around the park.

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What is Text Structure — Definition, Examples & Types Explained

• What is Syntax
• What is Passive Voice
• What is Active Voice
• Active vs. Passive Voice
• What is Text Structure
• What is Sentence Structure
• Simple Sentence Structure
• Compound Sentence Structure
• Compound-Complex Sentence Structure
• Complex Sentence Structure

L anguage is the basis of communication. Within communication, specifically written language, writers may have different purposes with their work.  As a reader, it’s beneficial to understand a writer’s goal, and as a writer, it’s important to understand how to use language to work for your own goal. Therefore, understanding text structure is vital for both readers and writers. What is text structure, and why are the types of structures that exist? Let’s dive into it.

What is Text Structure in Writing?

First, let’s define text structure.

There are five primary text structures that exist. Before diving into them, let’s take a look at the general text structure definition.

TEXT STRUCTURE DEFINITION

What is text structure in literature.

Text structure is the way in which a writer organizes language and information within text to serve a specific purpose. Depending on the goal of the writer, text can be structured in various ways to best communicate information to a reader clearly and effectively. The structure of a text’s beginning, middle, and end is directly influenced by the intention and purpose of the writer.  

Types of Text Structure:

Description, cause and effect, compare and contrast, problem and solution, what are all the text structures , types of text structure.

As we mentioned in the text structure definition there are various purposes writers have when writing. Text structure depends entirely on the purpose of a writer. There are five types of text structure that exist for this reason. Here’s a video breakdown of the five types of text structure.

 The 5 Types of Text Structure

To recap, there are 5 types of text structure:

• Description 
• Cause and Effect 
• Compare and Contrast
• Problem and Solution   Let’s take a deep dive into a list of text structures and analyze text structure examples of each. 

Description Text Structure Meaning

Description is a text structure that is designed to create a vivid, detailed description of something. This is achieved by using descriptive language to describe traits, features, and characteristics of the subject. Here's an example:

“Two distinct desert ecosystems, the Mojave and the Colorado, come together in Joshua Tree National Park. A fascinating variety of plants and animals make their homes in a land sculpted by strong winds and occasional torrents of rain. Dark night skies, a rich cultural history, and surreal geologic features add to the wonder of this vast wilderness in southern California”

- National Parks Service

What Does Text Structure Mean

There are two ways that sequence text structure can be used: to communicate a chronological sequence of events or steps in a procedure. 

Sequence text structure for the purpose of chronological events is a common structure used in historical literature or non-fictional literature. Sequence structure for procedural information is common in educational literature from cooking instructions to scientific methods. 

Example 1: “World War I, also known as the Great War, began in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. His murder catapulted into a war across Europe that lasted until 1918.” - World War I ( history.com )

Example 2: “Pulse flour, sugar, and salt in a food processor to combine. Add butter and process until the largest pieces of butter are pea-size. Transfer to a large bowl.” BA’s Best Apple Pie ( bonappetit.com )

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TEXT STRUCTURE MEANING

Cause and effect text structure is primarily used to communicate the causal relationship between an event, action, or idea and what follows. The text is designed to make the causality and correlation between the two clear to the reader. This is also a common structure in both educational and historical literature. For example:

“After inflating, the universe slowed down its expansion rate but continued to grow, as it does still. It also cooled significantly, allowing for the formation of matter — first neutrinos, electrons, quarks, and photons, followed by protons and neutrons.” - How Did the Big Bang Happen? ( astronomy.com )

Text Structure Meaning

Oftentimes, writers need to analyze the similarities and differences between two subjects. A compare and contrast text structure allows them to do just that. These comparisons are typically between people, places, events, ideas, or concepts. 

“Beethoven has a much more fiery personality. Whereas Mozart’s music is clean and precise, Beethoven employs many surprises in his music. Many times he will build up the music as if it’s leading to something only to suddenly get soft – his trademark use of subito piano.”

— Mozart vs. Beethoven ( livingpianos.com )

What is Text Structure Used For?

Lastly, the problem and solution text structure is designed to present a problem and transition into a proposed solution for said problem. The structure is designed to both create reasonable cases for why the problem exists and/or is important and why the proposed solution can be effective.

This text design is common in political literature and speech as well as business and technology. Here's an example:

“Transportation is the second leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. (burning a single gallon of gasoline produces 20 pounds of CO2). But it doesn't have to be that way. One way to dramatically curtail transportation fuel needs is to move closer to work, use mass transit, or switch to walking, cycling or some other mode of transport that does not require anything other than human energy. There is also the option of working from home and telecommuting several days a week.” — 10 Solutions for Climate Change ( scientificamerican.com )

Text structure is valuable for both readers and writers to understand. It allows readers to know the intention of the writer they are reading from the beginning of a text. Writers can utilize structure to support the purpose of their work. Hopefully this article has given you insight on the value of text structure and how it can be used. 

• What is Syntax →
• Active vs Passive Voice →
• What is Sentence Structure →

What are Literary Devices?

Text structure is a great way to design your writing with a purpose in mind. Literary devices are also valuable tools that help writers achieve the goal of their work. In the next article, we break down a full tool kit of literary devices that you have at your disposal as a writer. 

Up Next: Literary Devices →

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8.3: Determining an Effective Essay Structure

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• Tanya Long Bennett
• University of North Georgia via GALILEO Open Learning Materials

One common misconception students entertain when they approach literary analysis essays is the idea that the structure of the essay should follow the structure of the literary work. The events of short stories, novels, and plays are often related chronologically, in linear order from the moment when the first event occurs to the moment of the last. Yet, it can be awkward to write a literary analysis using the story’s chronology as a basic structure for your own essay. Often, this approach leads to an essay that simply summarizes the literary work. Since a literary analysis paper should avoid summary for summary’s sake, the writer should avoid an essay structure that results in that pattern: And then Brett goes to San Sebastian with Robert Cohn, and then she returns in time to meet her fiancé Mike Campbell, and then….

Note that in Bill’s essay on The Sun Also Rises , he decided to focus on two significant metaphors and to dedicate a major section of his paper to each. He does not mention Brett’s trip to San Sebastian at all since it does not pertain directly to the paper’s discussion of the metaphors. How does he determine the paper’s arrangement? Why does he discuss the metaphor of Jake’s wound before that of the tainted bull fights? In the novel, we do learn of Jake’s wound first, and according to Bill, this metaphor helps establish the theme of psychological wounds caused by the war. So, chronology does influence the arrangement of the paper to some extent, but it is not the primary factor in the paper’s structure. Rather than beginning his paper with a description of Jake’s wound and then moving on to relate Brett’s trip to San Sebastian with Robert, the ensuing antics of the group in Paris, their journey to Spain, etc., on through the list of the novel’s plot events, Bill only includes the plot details supportive to his point, first illustrating the irreversible wounds of the group, represented by Jake’s war-wound, and second examining the spoiled bull fights representing the group’s irreparable loss of faith and hope. The arrangement of the paper does not reject chronological order simply for the sake of doing so—Bill relates the events in the sequence of their occurrence when it is reasonable. However, it is his focus on the two metaphors that provides the basic structure for his paper.

Similarly, in Katherine Jones’s essay arguing that Brett Ashley is not a monster but a woman caught between two ideologies, she structures the paper this way:

• Description of Brett’s unconventional ways
• Promiscuity
• Alienation and despair
• Conclusion: Her behavior is understandable given her challenging circumstances

Like Bill, Katherine structures her paper by arranging the major points logically: The description of Brett’s nontraditional behavior comes first in the essay’s body because it helps set up the points that follow, points supporting Katherine’s argument that Brett’s struggles illuminate her very human, and thus understandable, reactions to her challenges.

If chronology is not the primary structural factor in setting up a literary analysis paper, what is? You might consider the following hints in arranging the points of your own essay:

• What are your major points? In Bill’s essay, he explores two important metaphors ; in Katherine’s she examines (a) Brett’s unconventionality and then (b) evidence that her nontraditional behavior is more than simple pleasure-seeking, seen in (i) her alcoholism, (ii) her promiscuity , and (iii) her expressions of despair . In Marion Velis’s essay “Clinging to Love: Theodore Roethke’s ‘My Papa’s Waltz’,” printed in Chapter 2, her major points focus on Roethke’s use of rhythm, the poem’s point of view, and its controlling metaphor. These major points should form the main organizing components of the essay.
• What order will most effectively lead the reader to your perspective on this subject? In each of the essays mentioned above, the first point of discussion helps to set up the paper. These writers work to draw in and orient the reader, first with the introduction and then, further, in the second body paragraph. Conversely, the final point of the paper’s body should be one that helps to “clinch” the paper’s argument or end it “with a bang” just before the conclusion reiterates the overarching argument in the essay’s final lines.
• Paragraph breaks should (a) cue the reader regarding shifts in focus (hence Bill begins a new paragraph when he finishes discussion of Jake’s wound and starts his exploration of the spoiled bull fights) and (b) break down ideas into small enough chunks that the reader does not lose sight of the currently emphasized point (thus Katherine breaks her discussion of Brett’s need to cope into separate paragraphs on alcohol abuse, promiscuity, and expressions of Brett’s despair). On the other hand, in an academic essay, the paragraphs should not seem “choppy.” Rather each should be long enough to develop its point thoroughly before shifting to the next.

The literary analysis paper can be written with examination of only the primary source, or, as we will discuss in the next chapter, you may integrate into your argument the perspectives of other scholars (secondary sources). Regardless, your own findings from your analysis of the primary text should be a priority in your interpretation of the work. Analytical skills are invaluable as you explore any subject, investigating the subject by breaking it down and looking closely at how it functions. Finding patterns in your observations, then, helps you to interpret your analysis and communicate to others how you came to your conclusions about the subject’s meaning and/or effect. As you make your case to the readers, it is crucial that you make it clear how your perspective is relevant to them. Ideally, they will come away from your argument intrigued by the new insights you have revealed about the subject.

What Is Text Structure and How To Teach It Effectively

When students can identify and recognize different structures in text, they’re more likely to increase their comprehension of a text, strengthen their writing skills, and develop even more literacy skills, like finding the main idea of a passage. In this article, we’ll explore what text structure is, why teaching it matters, and give examples of strategies you can use to teach text structure in your classroom:

What is text structure?

Why is teaching text structure important, 5 types of text structures, text types used to teach text structure, teacher tips: strategies to teach text structure to students, teach text structure with newsela.

Text structure is the way an author organizes the information within a text. It’s more than just the basic structure of beginning, middle, and end. The structure of a text serves as an outline or skeleton that helps the writer frame the story they want to tell. The specific type of text structure an author uses lets them share different types of information in a way that helps the reader clearly understand the text’s main idea and key points.

Teaching text structure in the classroom is just one of many literacy skills that help students understand, analyze, and make sense of the world around them. With intentional instruction, teaching text structure can:

Aid students in understanding the author’s meaning for creating and sharing a text.

Help students improve their comprehension of any text they encounter, both fiction and nonfiction across subjects like ELA, science, and social studies.

Boost practice and comprehension of other literacy skills, like predicting outcomes, summarizing information, and identifying key concepts and relationships.

Prepare students to learn to organize and write their own thoughts and ideas.

There are five types of text structures that authors use when creating articles, stories, and other content. They include:

1. Cause and effect

Cause and effect text structure provides explanations or reasons for phenomena in the world. It tells why something happens (the cause) and then what happened (the effect). For example, this text structure often appears in science texts that talk about the steps in an experiment: If you mix baking soda and vinegar (cause), a chemical reaction takes place (effect).

Download your printable: Newsela’s Cause and Effect worksheet  

2. Chronological, process, or sequence

Chronological text structure, also known as process or sequence text structure, presents events and ideas in the order they happen, from start to finish. For example, this text structure may appear in social studies texts to talk about the events that led to a significant point in history: The British government put a series of taxes and tariffs on the colonists, which led to the Boston Tea Party, and then the start of the American Revolution . Another example of this text structure may appear in ELA texts, as many fictional stories happen in chronological order, such as “ Diary of a Wimpy Kid ” by Jeff Kinney.

Download your printables: Newsela’s Flowchart and Timeline worksheets

3. Compare and contrast

Compare and contrast text structure discusses two characters, events, or ideas and shows how they’re similar or different from each other. For example, you may see this text structure in ELA classrooms when reviewing the similarities and differences of two characters in a story. The author may compare their physical features, thoughts, families, or even hobbies.

Download your printables: Newsela’s Venn Diagram and T-Chart worksheets

4. Definition or description

Definition or description text structure describes a topic by listing its features or characteristics. It may also provide examples to illustrate these features. The primary purpose of a description text structure is to give the reader a mental picture of the topic or idea. For example, you may see this text structure in science texts, describing the physical characteristics of animals or their habitats.

Download your printable: Newsela’s Web Chart worksheet

5. Problem/solution

Problem/solution text structure identifies a problem and makes suggestions for how to fix it. For example, this text structure may appear in social studies texts about current events. An author identifies a current problem in government or society and proposes a solution to fix it.

Download your printable: Newsela’s Problem-Solution worksheet

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Text structures don’t exist in a vacuum. Nor do they pair with just one type of text. When teaching your students about text structure, you can use a variety of text types to show them how the different text structures present in different ways. Some of the text types you can use include:

Narrative text uses devices like characters, setting, conflicts, plot, and point of view to tell a story or share the overview of an event. Students are often most familiar with narrative text because they’re used to picture books and oral stories that follow this structure. Most narrative stories include five main plot points:

Exposition: Introduces the character, setting, and conflict of the story.

Rising action: Introduces the challenges the characters face to build to the climax.

Climax: Illustrates the main conflict or turning point of the story.

Falling action: Describes the aftermath of the climax and how the characters deal with its outcomes or consequences.

Resolution: Answers any unresolved questions and brings the story to a close.

Narrative text can include many types of text structure throughout a story, like cause and effect, sequence, or problem/solution. They can appear in texts for any subject, but narratives are most common in ELA fiction and nonfiction texts.

Download your printable: Newsela’s Story Elements plot diagram

Expository text uses facts to share information and ideas about a topic. Most nonfiction texts are expository. They’re the text type students encounter most often in classes like science and social studies. Expository texts are often more difficult for students to understand than narrative texts because they don’t follow the traditional structure or sequence of fictional texts.

Argumentative or persuasive

Argumentative or persuasive text helps an author make or prove a point, or encourage others to take their stance in a debate. This text type can mix multiple text structures, with the most common being compare and contrast, problem/solution, and description. Similar to narrative text, argumentative and persuasive texts also follow a pattern and contain key elements to help make, prove, and strengthen an author’s viewpoint. These elements include:

Claim: The point of the argument and the idea or statement the author wants to prove.

Reasons: Supporting statements the author makes to bolster their claim.

Evidence: Facts, data, statistics, quotes, or other information an author uses to support their reasons.

Counterclaims: Reasons and evidence that oppose the author’s argument, which they address in the text.

Rebuttals: An author’s responses to counterclaims, which are often used to refute opposing views or ideas.

Argumentative and persuasive texts can appear in any classroom. ELA teachers may use them to get students to think critically about the fiction and poetry they read. In social studies, teachers may use this text type to teach debate and discussion of historical events and policies. In science, teachers may use this type to complement experiments and scientific phenomena.

Descriptive

Similar to the definition or description text structure, a descriptive text type creates a multi-sensory picture of the topic for the reader. Writers may use the definition text structure and the compare and contrast structure to create this picture. You can use descriptive texts in any subject, including ELA, science, and social studies.

Procedural or instructional

Procedural or instructional texts use chronology or sequence of events to provide a step-by-step process. This text type can appear in any classroom, but it’s most common in science, math, or other STEAM courses, which rely on procedures to test and replicate results.

Considerate

Considerate texts are user-friendly texts that are easy to read and understand for most readers. This text type, introduced by Bonnie Armbruster and Thomas Anderson in 1988, is especially helpful in classrooms where students span a range of reading levels and abilities, no matter the subject. Because of their easy-to-read nature, they can incorporate any of the five text structures.

Considerate texts use structures that are easy for the reader to identify, which also makes it easier for them to pick out the main ideas and key details. This text type also supports comprehension with features like:

Clear topic sequences

Headings and subheadings

In-context vocabulary definitions

Plain language introductions

Simple tables, charts, and diagrams

Transition words

Students can start learning about the most basic elements of text structure as early as preschool or kindergarten. Plus, teachers can include instruction about text structure at every phase of reading: before, during, and after. Here are a few strategies you can use in your classroom to help your students learn about and identify text structure in the texts they read:

Use a mentor text to show examples of the different types of text structures using both fiction and nonfiction texts.

Use graphic organizers to help students plot the different information or features from a text to visualize the structure.

Teach the text signals and transition words writers use that indicate different types of text structures.

Pose questions students can ask and answer to help them identify if a piece fits a specific text structure.

Examine topic sentences to look for clues and patterns in different text structures.

Model writing a paragraph that uses a specific text structure and have students write their own paragraphs that follow the same structure.

Introduce the skill of text purpose —determining what information the author is trying to share—to help students identify text structures.

Teaching text structure is easy with Newsela’s product suite! With Newsela ELA , you can:

Use interactive graphic organizers for any article. You can edit and customize these graphics organizers with the Formative and Newsela integration by clicking the button in the activities panel on the article.

Use the reading skills search filter and article labels to identify which skills each piece of content covers.

Select which skills to teach and assess with each article. Use the checkboxes in the activities panel to focus on supports and resources for just the skill you’re teaching, even if the article covers more than one skill.

Watch and share explainer videos , like the nonfiction text structure video , to dive deeper into skill development.

Browse the updated ELA Standards and Skills collection for even more resources to help you teach text structure in any lesson, including strong mentor texts for each text structure.

With EverWrite by Newsela , you can:

Use short- and long-form writing assignments to help students practice writing their own content using different text structures!

Not a Newsela customer yet? You can sign up for Newsela Lite for free and get access to content and skill-building scaffolds you need to teach text structure in your classroom.

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16.5 Writing Process: Thinking Critically About Text

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Develop a writing project focused on textual analysis.
• Complete the stages of the writing process, including generating ideas, drafting, reviewing, revising, rewriting, and editing.
• Integrate the writer’s ideas with ideas of others.
• Collaborate in the peer review process.

When analyzing a text, writers usually focus on the content of the text itself and deliberately leave themselves in the background, minimizing personal presence and bias. To write this way, they avoid first-person pronouns and value judgments. In reality, of course, writers do reveal their presence by the choices they make: what they include, what they exclude, and what they emphasize. Although your own subjectivity and situation will likely affect your inferences and judgments, recognizing these potential biases will help you keep the focus on your subject and off yourself.

Summary of Assignment

Write an analytical essay about a short story or another short text of your choice, either fiction or literary nonfiction. If desired, you may choose “The Storm” by Kate Chopin, reprinted above. Consider the author’s form and organization, tone, or stylistic choices, including diction and sensory or figurative language. You might also consider the historical or social context, the theme, the character development, or the relation between setting and plot or characterization. If you are free to choose your own text and topic, consider the following approaches:

• Analyze the literary components mentioned and focus your essay on their significance in the work.
• Like student author Gwyn Garrison, choose one or several components and examine how different authors use them and how they relate to broader contexts.

Convincing textual analysis essays usually include the following information:

• overview of the text, identifying author, title, and genre
• very brief summary
• description of the text’s form and structure
• explanation of the author’s point of view
• summary of the social, historical, or cultural context in which the work was written
• assertion or thesis about what the text means: your main task as an analyst

When writing about a novel or short story, explain how the main elements function:

• narrator (who tells the story)
• plot (what happens in the story)
• one or more characters (who are acting or being acted upon)
• setting (when and where things are happening)
• theme (the meaning of the story)

Keep in mind that the author who writes the story is different from the narrator and invented characters in it. Keep in mind, too, that what happens in the story—the plot—is different from the meaning of the story—the theme. Understanding what happens will help you discover what the text means.

The elements of literary or narrative nonfiction are similar to those of a fictional story except that everything in the text is supposed to have really happened. For this reason, the author and the narrator of the story may be one and the same. Informational nonfiction—essays, reports, and textbook chapters—is also meant to be believed; here, however, ideas and arguments must be strong and well supported to be convincing. When analyzing nonfiction, pay special attention to the author’s thesis or claim and to how it is supported through reasoning and evidence. Also note interesting or unusual tone, style, form, or voice.

Another Lens 1. In writing from a personal or subjective viewpoint, the writer and their beliefs and experiences are necessarily part of your analysis and may need to be expressed and examined. For example, you may write subjectively and compare and contrast your situation with that of the author or a character. You might explain how your personal background causes you to read the text in a particular way that is meaningful to you. If you choose this option, be sure to analyze the text as you would for a more objective analysis before focusing on your personal views.

Another Lens 2. A leading contemporary example of narrative nonfiction writing is Jon Krakauer ’s (b. 1954) Into the Wild , the story of Chris McCandless (1968– c. 1992), a young college graduate who lived at subsistence level in the backwoods of Alaska for 113 days. The text is somewhat similar thematically to Henry David Thoreau ’s (1817–1862) Walden (1854), written more than a century earlier and discussed later in this section. Both are about dropping out of society to create a meaningful life. After reading the excerpt of Into the Wild linked above, you may choose to write a textual analysis of it either on its own or in light of the sample analysis of Thoreau’s writings later in this section. Consider comparing and contrasting McCandless’s situation with Thoreau’s life in Walden and how Krakauer and Thoreau use various literary elements in their writing. Topics for analysis might be setting, character traits, motives, cultural communities, historical context, and attitudes toward life and society.

Quick Launch: Start with Your Thesis

For textual analysis, your thesis should be a clear, concise statement that identifies your analytical stance on which readers will expect you to elaborate.

Develop a working thesis

A working thesis is referred to as such because the thesis is subject to revision. You may have to revisit it later in the writing process, for it is almost impossible to craft a thesis without having analyzed some of the text first. Your thesis, therefore, will come from the element(s) you choose to analyze, such as the following:

• an aspect or several aspects of form and structure and their significance
• social, historical, or cultural context in which the text was written and its significance
• style elements such as diction, imagery, or figurative language and their significance
• aspects of characters, plot, or setting
• overall theme of a single work or more than one work
• comparison or contrast of elements within one or more works
• relation to issues outside the text

To develop a working thesis, use the formula shown in Table 16.1 , basing your answers on one of the bulleted items listed above.

You can also start with an analytical question: For what reason(s) does Chopin use linguistic variety? Your initial answer might yield the thesis above. Or you can ask another analytical question, such as this one: In what ways do the plot and setting of “The Storm” reinforce its theme?

Drafting: Explore Possible Areas of Analysis for Fiction: Approach 1

Analytical essays begin by answering basic questions: What genre is this text—poem, play, story, biography, memoir, essay? What is its title? Who is the author? When was it published?

Identify and Summarize the Text

In addition to the basic questions, analytical essays provide a brief summary of the plot or main idea. Summarize briefly, logically, and objectively to provide a background for what you plan to say about the text. This information may be incorporated into the introduction or may follow it.

Explain the Form and Organization

To analyze the organizational structure of a text, ask: How is it put together? Why does the author start here and end there? Why does the author sequence information in this order? What connects the text from start to finish? For example, by repeating words, ideas, and images, writers call attention to these elements and indicate that they are important to the meaning of the text. No matter what the text, some principle or plan holds it together and gives it structure. Fiction and nonfiction texts that tell stories are often, but not always, organized as a sequence of events in chronological order. Poems may have formal structures or other organizational elements. Other texts may alternate between explanations and examples or between first-person and third-person narrative. You will have to decide which aspects of the text’s form and organization are most important for your analysis.

For example, this student analyzes the point of view of Gwendolyn Brooks ’s poem “ We Real Cool .”.

student sample text Gwendolyn Brooks writes “We Real Cool” (1963) from the point of view of members of a street gang who speak as one voice. The boys have dropped out of school to spend their lives hanging around pool halls—in this case “The Golden Shovel.” These guys speak in slangy lingo, such as “Strike straight,” that reveals their need for a melded identity in their rebellious attitude toward life. The plural speaker in the poem, “We,” celebrates what adults might call adolescent hedonism—but the speaker, feeling powerful in the group identity, makes a conscious choice for a short, intense life over a long, safe, and dull existence. end student sample text

Place the Work in Context

To analyze the context of a text, ask: What circumstances (historical, social, political, biographical) produced this text? How does this text compare or contrast with another by the same author or with a similar work by a different author? No text exists in isolation. Each was created by a particular author in a particular place at a particular time. Describing this context provides readers with important background information and indicates which conditions you think were most influential.

For example, this student analyzes the social context of Gwendolyn Brooks ’s poem “We Real Cool.”

student sample text From society’s viewpoint, the boys are nothing but misfits—refusing to work, leading violent lives, breaking laws, and confronting police. However, these boys live in a society that is dangerous for Black men, who often die at the hands of police even when they are doing the right thing. The boys are hopeless, recognizing no future but death, regardless of their actions, and thus “Die soon.” end student sample text

Explain the Theme of the Text

To analyze the theme of a text, determine the implied theme in fiction, poetry, and narrative nonfiction. One purpose for writing a textual analysis is to point out the theme. Ask yourself: So what? What is this text really about? What do I think the author is trying to say by writing this text? What problems, puzzles, or ideas are most interesting? In what ways do the characters change between the beginning and end of the text? Good ideas for a thesis arise from material in which the meaning is not obviously stated.

For example, this student analyzes one theme of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool.”

student sample text For the “Seven at the Golden Shovel,” companionship is everything. For many teenagers, fitting in or conforming to a group identity is more important than developing an individual identity. Brooks expresses this theme through the poem’s point of view, the plural “We” repeated at the end of each line. end student sample text

Analyze Stylistic Choices

To analyze stylistic choices, examine the details of the text. Ask yourself: Why does the author use this word or phrase instead of a synonym for it? In what ways does this word or phrase relate to other words or phrases? In what ways do the author’s figurative comparisons affect the meaning or tone of the text? In what ways does use of sensory language (imagery) affect the meaning or tone of the text? In what ways does this element represent more than itself? In what ways does the author use sound or rhythm to support meaning?

For example, this student analyzes the diction of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool.”

student sample text Brooks chooses the word cool to open the poem and build the first rhyme. Being cool is the code by which the boys live. However, the word cool also suggests the idiom “to be placed ‘on ice,’” a term that suggests a delay. The boys live in a state of arrested development, anticipating early deaths. In addition, the term to ice someone means “to kill,” another reference to the death imagery at poem’s end. The boys are not suggesting suicide; they expect to be killed by members of society who find them threatening. end student sample text

Support Your Analysis

Analytical interpretations are built around evidence from the text itself. You’ll note the quotations in the examples above. Summarize larger ideas in your own language to conserve space. Paraphrase more specific ideas, also in your own words, and quote directly to feature the author’s diction. See Editing Focus: Paragraphs and Transitions and Writing Process: Integrating Research for more information about summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting directly. If you include outside information for support, comparison, or contrast, document the sources carefully: MLA Documentation and Format .

Use a graphic organizer such as Table 16.2 to gather ideas for drafting.

Drafting: Explore Possible Areas of Analysis for Literary Nonfiction: Approach 2

Although similar to fiction, narrative or literary nonfiction has a basic orientation toward exposition: relating real events in a creative way rather than inventing fictional events and characters. In reading and analyzing expository prose, you also may encounter literary language, narrative structure, characters, setting, theme, and plot development, depending on the type of prose. Therefore, your approach to analyzing nonfiction will call on many of the same strategies you use to analyze fiction. Two basic differences, however, are that literary nonfiction may have less dialogue, depending on the genre, and that the author and narrator may be the same. In other words, no intermediary or artistic filter may exist between the author and the work. The nonfiction author is assumed to be speaking a truth, which may be serious, comic, controversial, or neutral. Fictional characters, on the other hand, are creations of an author’s mind; they think and speak as they were created to do.

Planning the Essay

In writing your essay, you will need to present the same kinds of text evidence as you would when analyzing fiction to give credibility to your claims and to support your thesis. And you’ll need to keep in mind the rhetorical situation—purpose, audience, stance, context, and culture—as well, for it remains the building block of an effective analysis. As in most academic essays, body paragraphs refer to the thesis through topic sentences and move consistently toward supporting it before you finally arrive at a convincing conclusion that has grown out of the analysis. In nonfiction, because you assume you are dealing with a truthful explanation of facts and views, your task should be to give a new view and understanding of something that already may be familiar to readers. In writing your analysis, consider the following plan:

• Begin your analysis of nonfiction with an introductory overview in which you include the work’s genre, title, author, and publication date.
• Identify the literary point of view, if relevant: first person— I or plural we —or third-person— he, she , or they .
• Continue with a brief summary of the work, and place it in context: the work’s social, historical, and cultural background will help readers follow your points about its theme.
• Present your thesis near the end of the introduction. It should be argumentative, in an academic sense, so that you can “prove” your points.
• Support your thesis with well-elaborated body paragraphs, as you do with all thesis-based writing. Include paraphrases, summaries, and quotations from the text (and outside sources, if you do research for the assignment). Body paragraphs support the topic sentences, which in turn support the thesis.
• Conclude by restating your thesis (using different words and an appropriate transition). Add a general statement about the work and its significance or, if applicable, its relation to culture, history, current events, art, or anything else outside it.

Use the applicable suggestions in Table 16.3 in planning your essay :

Literary Nonfiction Model

A frequent theme in literary nonfiction is the examination of alternative ways of living, often solitary and away from society, and finding truth in individualism and self-sufficiency. Although most people live in social groups and willingly accept the identity and security that communities offer, dropping out and going it alone have long been a part of emotional as well as physical life for some.

You have the option to analyze the nonfiction accounts of writers exploring solitary human behavior in American life. If you select Another Lens 2 , you will read an excerpt from the story of Chris McCandless (1968–c. 1992), who chose a brief and uncomfortable solitary existence in Alaska. Or you can read the following section dealing with the works of Henry David Thoreau , the American philosopher and author who dropped out of society temporarily, largely because of his strong opposition to government policies he believed to be morally wrong and because of his refusal to conform to social practices and expectations he found objectionable.

Introduction

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) is best known as a thinker and writer on nature, as reflected in his two famous works, the highly influential Civil Disobedience (1849) and Walden ; or, Life in the Woods (1854). Both works celebrate individual freedoms: the right to protest against what one believes is morally or ethically wrong and the choice to live as one believes. In describing his life over a period of precisely two years, two months, and two days in a 10-by-15-foot cabin he built on Walden Pond, 20 miles northwest of Boston near Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau wrote:

public domain text I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately [carefully, unhurried], to front [confront] only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. end public domain text

Thoreau’s insistence on standing by his principles and on living a simple life by choice are two abiding themes in his work. Even before the physical move to Walden, Thoreau had refused to pay his poll tax (granting him the right to vote) for a number of years because he strongly objected to the government’s use of his money to support enslavement and the war with Mexico. He went peacefully to jail as a result, until he was bailed out (the next day). In “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau advocates for more individual freedom and for individuals to defy unjust laws in nonviolent ways. His writings on “passive resistance” inspired the thoughts and actions of influential figures such as Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), American religious and civil rights leader Martin Luther King , Jr. (1929–1968), and other leaders of nonviolent liberation movements. In Walden , Thoreau describes and advocates for a simple life in which a person breaks with society when they feel the need to express their individualism, often based on ideas others do not share.

These themes are the focus of analysis in the following excerpts from an essay by student Alex Jones for a first-year composition class.

student sample text The Two Freedoms of Henry David Thoreau by Alex Jones end student sample text

student sample text Henry David Thoreau led millions of people throughout the world to think of individual freedom in new ways. During his lifetime he attempted to live free of unjust governmental restraints as well as conventional social expectations. In his 1849 political essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” he makes his strongest case against governmental interference in the lives of citizens. In his 1854 book Walden; or Life in the Woods , he makes the case for actually living free, as he did in his own life, from social conventions and expectations. end student sample text

annotated text The title clearly identifies Thoreau and sets the expectation that two aspects or definitions of freedom will be discussed in two different works. Alex Jones wants readers to know that millions of people worldwide figure in Thoreau’s legacy. He gives the examples of “unjust governmental restraints” and “conventional social expectations” as the parts of social life Thoreau rejected, thus limiting the scope of the analysis and preparing for the body of the essay. end annotated text

annotated text Jones notes the titles and publication dates of both works and immediately moves ahead to analyze the two works, “Civil Disobedience” first. He will show how this political statement leads to the narrative of Walden , the actual story of a man’s life in temporary exile. end annotated text

student sample text Thoreau opens “Civil Disobedience” with his statement “that government is best which governs not at all.” end student sample text

annotated text The analysis moves immediately to the first work to be discussed and features the memorable quotation regarding a government that does not govern. The statement may seem contradictory, but for Thoreau it is a direct statement in that someone who allows himself to be imprisoned will find freedom by distancing himself from all others to prove his point. end annotated text

student sample text He argues that a government should allow its people to be as free as possible while providing for their needs without interfering in daily life. In other words, in daily life a person attends to the business of eating, sleeping, and earning a living and not dealing in any noticeable way with an entity called “a government.” end student sample text

annotated text Jones repeats “in daily life” to give a rhythm to his own prose and to emphasize the importance to Thoreau of daily activities that are simple and meaningful. The word government is repeated for emphasis as the negative subject of this essay—in literary terms, a powerful and constant antagonist that constrains and disempowers. end annotated text

student sample text Because Thoreau did not want his freedom overshadowed by government regulations, he tried to ignore them. However, the American government of 1845 would not let him. He was arrested and put in the Concord jail for failing to pay his poll tax, a tax he believed unjust because it supported the government’s war with Mexico as well as the immoral institution of slavery. Instead of protesting his arrest, he celebrated it and explained its meaning by writing “Civil Disobedience,” one of the most famous English-language essays ever written. In it, he argues persuasively, “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison” (230). Thus, the idea of passive resistance—and accepting unjust arrest to make a point—was formed, a doctrine that advocated protest against the government by nonviolent means: end student sample text

student sample text How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also. (224) end student sample text

annotated text Jones strengthens his own writing by calling the essay one of the most famous works ever written. This is not an ordinary technique in textual analysis, but when done for emphasis, it helps the analysis gain power. Using “instead of protesting” at the start of his sentence is another example of strong contrast and linkage. end annotated text

student sample text For nearly 200 years, Thoreau’s formulation of passive resistance has been a part of the human struggle for freedom. In fact, it changed the world by inspiring the resistance movements led by Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. end student sample text

annotated text The total effect is to make Jones’s analytical essay more important for readers, as Thoreau’s writings have indeed changed the world despite being written humbly as the voice of one man’s conscience and isolation in his own freedom. end annotated text

student sample text Thoreau also wanted to be free from the everyday pressures to conform to society’s expectations. end student sample text

annotated text Jones transitions from the first short work to the different and equally famous nonfiction narrative Walden , moving smoothly from one freedom to the next with the transition “also wanted.” This second analysis of freedom is the second part of the essay’s thesis. end annotated text

student sample text He believed in doing and possessing only the essential things in life. To demonstrate his case, in 1845, he moved to the outskirts of Concord, Massachusetts, and lived by himself for just over two years in a cabin he built at Walden Pond. Thoreau wrote Walden to explain the value of living simply, far removed from the unnecessary complexity of society: “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand” (66). At Walden, he lived as much as possible by this statement, building his own house and furniture, growing his own food, bartering for simple necessities, and attending to his own business rather than seeking employment from others. end student sample text

annotated text Jones uses textual evidence to support his claim. He summarizes Thoreau’s activities at Walden and quotes Thoreau as evidence to reinforce the freedom of mind that simple living allows. end annotated text

student sample text Living at Walden Pond gave Thoreau the chance to formulate many of his ideas about living an unencumbered, economical life. At Walden, he lived simply to “front only the essential facts of life” (66) and to center his thoughts on “living” instead of on unnecessary details of mere livelihood. He developed survival skills that freed him from the constraints of city dwellers whose lives depended upon a web of material things and services provided by others. He preferred to “take rank hold on life and spend my day more as animals do” (117). end student sample text

annotated text Jones uses the poetic language of high rhetoric directly from Thoreau. The body of the essay gives specific evidence of how Thoreau ate, built, read, and provided for his needs, cutting away all but the essential man in the two settings of his life. end annotated text

student sample text While living at Walden Pond, Thoreau was free to occupy his time in any way that pleased him, which for him meant mostly writing and tending his bean patch. The details of his gardening appear frequently, as he concentrated on it during his time there. He wasn’t troubled by a boss hounding him with deadlines or a wife and children who needed his attention. His neighbors accused him of being selfish and did not understand that he sought most of all “to live deliberately” (66), as he felt all people should learn to do. end student sample text

student sample text Then, as now, most people had more responsibilities than Thoreau had and could not just pack up their belongings and go live in the woods—if they could find free woods to live in. Today, people are intrigued to read about Thoreau’s experiences and are inspired by his thoughts, but few people can actually live or do as he suggests. The idea of life without cell phones or Internet seems inconceivable, even if one grows one’s own food and lives mostly off the grid. end student sample text

annotated text The next-to-last paragraph recognizes what could be a counterclaim: not everyone in contemporary times would view living alone for two years as a pleasure. Rather, they might see it as a different kind of prison, perhaps even a dangerous one. Indeed, such deprivation has less appeal these days, and people who do go off by themselves may be seen to have questionable motives. end annotated text

student sample text The theme of exploring how a man lives in or outside governmental control is clear in the choices he must make to define himself as a free person. Nevertheless, practical or not, Thoreau’s writings about freedom from government and society have inspired countless people to reassess how they live their lives. Though unable to live as Thoreau advocated, readers everywhere remain inspired by his ideals and his belief in the two freedoms. end student sample text

annotated text Jones concludes by emphasizing the strength of Thoreau’s ideas—his two freedoms—and the influence they have had in the world. end annotated text

Review the Essay

After reading Alex Jones’s essay, complete the following sentences to review his work:

• He identifies and summarizes the content by ________.
• He describes the form and structure of Thoreau’s works when ________.
• He places Thoreau and his works in context by ________.
• He clearly states his own theme in reading Thoreau, which is ________.
• He indicates Thoreau’s unusual language at times, such as ________.
• He gives supporting evidence for his points, such as ________.
• He includes a visual to ________.
• He concludes with a balanced and convincing viewpoint by ________.

For Reference: excerpt from Walden by Henry David Thoreau from “Where I Lived and What I Lived For”

public domain text When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on Independence Day, or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defense against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough, weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night. The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. To my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited the year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music.… end public domain text

public domain text The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except a boat, was a tent, which I used occasionally when making excursions in the summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret; but the boat, after passing from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. With this more substantial shelter about me, I had made some progress toward settling in the world. This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. It was suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. I did not need to go outdoors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. It was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat, even in the rainiest weather. The Harivansa [important Sanskrit text] says, “An abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning.” Such was not my abode, for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them.… end public domain text

public domain text For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains. end public domain text

public domain text This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a gentle rain storm in August, when, both air and water being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of evening, and the wood-thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the clear portion of the air above it being shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important. From a hill top nearby, where the wood had been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but stream there was none. That way I looked between and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue. Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in the north-west, those true-blue coins from heaven’s own mint, and also of some portion of the village. But in other directions, even from this point, I could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me. It is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth. One value even of the smallest well is, that when you look into it you see that earth is not continent but insular. This is as important as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of interverting water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt was but dry land . end public domain text

public domain text We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done. end public domain text

public domain text I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” end public domain text

public domain text Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes… end public domain text

public domain text Why should we live with such… waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow. end public domain text

Peer Review:

After you have completed your first draft, exchange essays with a partner for peer review. Look at the questions you answered to address the essay about Thoreau. Then, to provide helpful feedback, answer these questions about your peer’s draft.

• Does the introduction include the author, title of the work, publication date, historical context, and a brief summary?
• What is your peer’s main claim, or thesis? Is it clearly stated? If not, how might your peer clarify it?
• Is the thesis effectively supported throughout the essay? How does each paragraph support the thesis? What evidence does each contain? Has the writer included direct quotations, paraphrases, and summary as relevant and convincing support? Is there enough information to sustain the writer’s claims? How might the author improve their support? In working on this section, go through each body paragraph separately for these criteria.
• Does the analysis address counterclaims? If not, how might the writer include them?
• Which sentence or sentences restate the thesis? If a restatement is not there, what might the writer include?

Once you have feedback from a peer, consider their suggestions. Read all comments, and think carefully before making changes.

• Use your discretion . Sometimes writers do not agree with their peers’ suggestions; indeed, authors do not always revise everything suggested by editors. However, it is important to clarify what might have prompted a response from a peer, such as “This seems like more of an unsupported opinion than text-based evidence.” Here you might consider including a source citation either from the text or from an outside resource, or consider further explaining your claim. However, if you think your peer reviewer misinterpreted or read your claim superficially, do not revise it. At all times, though, maintain ownership. It is your paper; you are the ultimate judge of whether the ideas in it represent you and your views. Never include someone else’s idea in your paper if you do not understand it or believe it. Whether or not you decide to revise, be sure to read and consider all suggestions carefully.
• Focus on global suggestions first. Global feedback applies to your entire paper. You may have to revise your topic or thesis so that your paper meets assigned guidelines or does what it should. It is important to revise global feedback first, for these revisions might necessitate changes in content and organization, among other things.
• Complete a close revision. Check your paper to revise for clarity at the sentence level, and double-check citations, if you have them, for accuracy and style.

In Chapter 16, you have learned about the revision process, including how to evaluate suggestions for revision from peer review. In this activity, evaluate each revision suggestion for specificity. A specific suggestion is helpful and easy to implement. A general suggestion is not helpful and should be ignored unless you can go back and ask the reviewer to provide more details. Based on your evaluation, look at each revision suggestion and decide whether to implement or to ignore.

Student Revision Model

Below is a paragraph from the first draft of Gwyn Garrison’s paper. It was reviewed by a peer, who made the suggestions indicated. First, read the draft. Next, read the reviewer’s suggestions and consider whether you would accept or reject each one. Then, read the paragraph as it appears in the final version. After each suggestion, consider why you think Gwyn Garrison accepted or rejected the reviewer’s comment.

Original Draft

student sample text When Calixta acts outside of societal norms, she discovers the freedom of self-expression and passion. Chopin’s diction evokes a spiritual transcendence that allows Calixta to exist momentarily outside social norms that exist only in the physical plane of existence: “when he possessed her, they seemed to swoon at the very borderland of life’s mystery.” The affair becomes a vehicle that allows Calixta to get to a place of true self-expression. The storm, an aspect of nature or the natural world, acts as the catalyst in Calixta’s natural self-realization of womanhood. The storm breaks externally and internally for Calixta. Chopin’s depiction of Calixta’s sexual liberation and fulfillment outside of her marriage is an early step in the fight to bridge the gap between women’s bodies and their sociopolitical lives. By presenting female sexuality in a way that is enlightening rather than degrading, Chopin helps destigmatize labels such as whore, which have been used to shame women for acting outside of traditional gender expectations. end student sample text

Peer Reviewer’s Comments

• A transition would help link this paragraph with the previous one.
• At the beginning of the paragraph, after the first sentence, add a short description or explanation of what is happening in the scene.
• The quotation from the text doesn’t help explain your claim. Anyway, you left out a word.
• Perhaps you could add a quotation about the storm.
• Can you clarify the relationship between the storm and Calixta’s self-realization?

Final Version

student sample text When Calixta acts outside of societal norms, however , she discovers the freedom of self-expression and passion. All of the parts of her womanhood that have no place in the society in which she lives have been repressed until this one moment. In this scene, Chopin takes possession of the term whore and redefines Calixta’s behavior as a transformative awakening. Chopin’s diction evokes a spiritual transcendence that allows Calixta to exist momentarily outside social norms that exist only in the physical plane of existence: “when he possessed her, they seemed to swoon together at the very borderland of life’s mystery.” The affair becomes a vehicle that allows Calixta to get to a place of true self-expression. The storm, an aspect of nature or the natural world, acts as the catalyst in Calixta’s natural self-realization of womanhood. As the storm breaks externally, it also breaks internally for Calixta. Chopin’s depiction of Calixta’s sexual liberation and fulfillment outside of her marriage is an early step in the fight to bridge the gap between women’s bodies and their sociopolitical lives. By presenting female sexuality in a way that is enlightening rather than degrading, Chopin helps destigmatize labels such as whore, which have been used to shame women for acting outside of traditional gender expectations. end student sample text

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Understanding the Basics: A Guide To Teaching Text Structure in Elementary School

• Classroom Activities/Strategies/Guides

Text structure refers to the organizational framework or pattern used to present information in written works. It helps readers understand the flow of information, identify key points, and comprehend the author's intended message more effectively. Common types include chronological order, cause-and-effect, compare-and-contrast, problem-solution, description, sequence, and nonfiction text structure. Understanding text structure is fundamental for effective communication and comprehension skills in literacy education. Educators play a crucial role in guiding students to mastery of understanding text structures, enabling students to become proficient readers and writers.

Understanding text structure is a fundamental skill when it comes to communication and comprehension. For educators seeking to enhance their elementary students' literacy skills, grasping the basics of text structure is crucial. Defined as the way written content is organized, it plays a pivotal role in how information is presented and absorbed. It enables teachers to guide students through the intricacies of written language, helping them comprehend and analyze texts more effectively. In this article, the significance of common text structures in literacy education will be explored and valuable insight to support comprehension instruction will be provided.

Teaching Chronological Text Structure

Chronological text structure refers to the organization of information in a text based on the sequence of time. This structure presents events, actions, or steps in the order in which they occurred, allowing readers to follow a clear timeline of events. 

In teaching chronological text structure, educators should focus on guiding students to understand how events unfold over time within a written work. By immersing students in compelling narratives, educators can effectively demonstrate the inherent structure of a story—the introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. This method not only makes the concept tangible but also taps into the innate human fascination with stories. 

Another effective way to teach this structure is through the use of graphic organizers, such as timelines or sequence charts, which visually represent the chronological order of events. Additionally, educators can engage students in activities that involve identifying signal words or phrases that indicate time progression, such as "first," "next," "then," and "finally." Providing examples from historical narratives, procedural texts, biographies, and timelines can also help students grasp the concept more effectively. 

Teaching Cause-and-Effect Text Structure

Cause-and-effect text structure involves explaining the relationship between events or actions (the cause) and their outcomes or consequences (the effect) within a written work or expository text. This structure helps readers understand how certain sequences of events can lead to specific outcomes or results. 

In teaching cause-and-effect text structure, educators should focus on guiding students to recognize and analyze these relationships. By immersing students in engaging examples and scenarios, they can effectively demonstrate how causes lead to effects and vice versa. This approach not only makes the concept tangible but also taps into students' curiosity about how the world works. 

An effective way to teach this structure is through the use of cause-and-effect diagrams, which visually represent the causal relationships between events. Additionally, educators can engage students in activities that involve identifying key signal words or phrases that indicate cause-and-effect relationships, such as "because," "since," "as a result," and "consequently." 

Teaching Compare-and-Contrast Text Structure

Compare-and-contrast text structure (also known as comparison text structure) is an informational text structure that involves analyzing the similarities and differences between two or more subjects, ideas, or concepts within a written work. This structure allows readers to understand how various elements relate to each other and can help them draw conclusions or make informed decisions. 

In teaching compare-and-contrast text structure, educators should focus on guiding students to identify, analyze, and articulate these similarities and differences. By immersing students in engaging examples and discussions, educators can effectively demonstrate how to compare and contrast different aspects of a text. This approach not only helps students develop critical structure thinking skills but also enhances their ability to synthesize information. 

One effective way to teach this structure is through the use of Venn diagrams or T-charts, which visually represent the similarities and differences between subjects. Additionally, educators can engage students in activities that involve identifying key signal words or phrases that indicate comparisons or contrasts, such as "similarly," "in contrast," "both," and "but." 

Teaching Problem-Solution Text Structure

Problem-solution text structure is a common structure that involves presenting a problem or issue followed by one or more proposed solutions within a written work. This structure aims to address challenges, provide insight into possible remedies, and encourage critical thinking about potential resolutions. 

In teaching problem-solution text structure, educators can focus on guiding students to identify, analyze, and evaluate problems and their corresponding solutions. By immersing students in real-world scenarios and case studies, educators can effectively demonstrate how to recognize problems, brainstorm solutions, and evaluate their effectiveness. This approach not only fosters problem-solving skills but also encourages students to think creatively and critically. 

One effective way to teach this structure is through the use of graphic organizers, such as problem-solution charts or flowcharts, which visually represent the problem-solving process. Additionally, educators can engage students in activities that involve identifying key signal words or phrases that indicate problems and solutions, such as "issue," "challenge," "solution," and "resolve." Providing examples from various texts, including persuasive essays, research reports, and news articles, can help students understand how problem-solving structures are used to address real-world issues.

How to Incorporate Text Structure Instruction

To effectively incorporate text structure into their teaching practices, educators can employ a variety of comprehension instruction methods and provide ample practice opportunities. Through consistent instruction and practice, students can develop the skills necessary to navigate complex texts with confidence and proficiency. Here's how educators can achieve this:

• Explicit Instruction: Begin by explicitly teaching students about different common text structures such as cause-and-effect, chronological order, compare-and-contrast, and problem-solution. Provide examples and show students how to identify these structures. Students will also benefit from understanding basic paragraph structure including how to identify the topic sentence and supporting material.
• Modeling: Modeling is a powerful instructional strategy where educators demonstrate how to analyze text structures. By thinking aloud, educators show students how to identify signal words, transitional phrases, and visual cues that indicate different common text structures. This allows students to observe and internalize effective comprehension strategies.
• Guided Practice: After the introduction of text structures and modeling the analysis process, educators can provide guided practice opportunities for students. This can involve collaborative activities where students work in pairs or small groups to identify text structures in sample passages or expository texts. Educators should offer guidance and feedback as students practice applying their understanding.
• Independent Practice: Once students have gained confidence in identifying text structures with guidance, they can engage in independent practice activities. Educators should provide texts of varying complexity and genres for students to analyze independently. Encouraging students to annotate informational texts, create graphic organizers, or write summaries based on text structures will promote deeper comprehension.
• Formative Assessment: Formative assessment strategies, such as quizzes, discussions, and written responses, allow educators to gauge students' understanding of text structures continuously. By providing timely feedback, educators can address misconceptions and guide students toward further improvement.

Final Thoughts

Enhancing reading comprehension through text structure instruction is a great way to equip students with the skills required to navigate complex texts and become proficient readers and writers. From exploring chronological sequences to analyzing cause-and-effect relationships, educators can guide students through diverse text structures while developing their critical-thinking and comprehension abilities.

Our approach

• Responsibility
• Infrastructure
• Try Meta AI

RECOMMENDED READS

• 5 Steps to Getting Started with Llama 2
• The Llama Ecosystem: Past, Present, and Future
• Introducing Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding
• Meta and Microsoft Introduce the Next Generation of Llama
• Today, we’re introducing Meta Llama 3, the next generation of our state-of-the-art open source large language model.
• Llama 3 models will soon be available on AWS, Databricks, Google Cloud, Hugging Face, Kaggle, IBM WatsonX, Microsoft Azure, NVIDIA NIM, and Snowflake, and with support from hardware platforms offered by AMD, AWS, Dell, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm.
• We’re dedicated to developing Llama 3 in a responsible way, and we’re offering various resources to help others use it responsibly as well. This includes introducing new trust and safety tools with Llama Guard 2, Code Shield, and CyberSec Eval 2.
• In the coming months, we expect to introduce new capabilities, longer context windows, additional model sizes, and enhanced performance, and we’ll share the Llama 3 research paper.
• Meta AI, built with Llama 3 technology, is now one of the world’s leading AI assistants that can boost your intelligence and lighten your load—helping you learn, get things done, create content, and connect to make the most out of every moment. You can try Meta AI here .

Today, we’re excited to share the first two models of the next generation of Llama, Meta Llama 3, available for broad use. This release features pretrained and instruction-fine-tuned language models with 8B and 70B parameters that can support a broad range of use cases. This next generation of Llama demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of industry benchmarks and offers new capabilities, including improved reasoning. We believe these are the best open source models of their class, period. In support of our longstanding open approach, we’re putting Llama 3 in the hands of the community. We want to kickstart the next wave of innovation in AI across the stack—from applications to developer tools to evals to inference optimizations and more. We can’t wait to see what you build and look forward to your feedback.

Our goals for Llama 3

With Llama 3, we set out to build the best open models that are on par with the best proprietary models available today. We wanted to address developer feedback to increase the overall helpfulness of Llama 3 and are doing so while continuing to play a leading role on responsible use and deployment of LLMs. We are embracing the open source ethos of releasing early and often to enable the community to get access to these models while they are still in development. The text-based models we are releasing today are the first in the Llama 3 collection of models. Our goal in the near future is to make Llama 3 multilingual and multimodal, have longer context, and continue to improve overall performance across core LLM capabilities such as reasoning and coding.

State-of-the-art performance

Our new 8B and 70B parameter Llama 3 models are a major leap over Llama 2 and establish a new state-of-the-art for LLM models at those scales. Thanks to improvements in pretraining and post-training, our pretrained and instruction-fine-tuned models are the best models existing today at the 8B and 70B parameter scale. Improvements in our post-training procedures substantially reduced false refusal rates, improved alignment, and increased diversity in model responses. We also saw greatly improved capabilities like reasoning, code generation, and instruction following making Llama 3 more steerable.

*Please see evaluation details for setting and parameters with which these evaluations are calculated.

In the development of Llama 3, we looked at model performance on standard benchmarks and also sought to optimize for performance for real-world scenarios. To this end, we developed a new high-quality human evaluation set. This evaluation set contains 1,800 prompts that cover 12 key use cases: asking for advice, brainstorming, classification, closed question answering, coding, creative writing, extraction, inhabiting a character/persona, open question answering, reasoning, rewriting, and summarization. To prevent accidental overfitting of our models on this evaluation set, even our own modeling teams do not have access to it. The chart below shows aggregated results of our human evaluations across of these categories and prompts against Claude Sonnet, Mistral Medium, and GPT-3.5.

Preference rankings by human annotators based on this evaluation set highlight the strong performance of our 70B instruction-following model compared to competing models of comparable size in real-world scenarios.

Our pretrained model also establishes a new state-of-the-art for LLM models at those scales.

To develop a great language model, we believe it’s important to innovate, scale, and optimize for simplicity. We adopted this design philosophy throughout the Llama 3 project with a focus on four key ingredients: the model architecture, the pretraining data, scaling up pretraining, and instruction fine-tuning.

Model architecture

In line with our design philosophy, we opted for a relatively standard decoder-only transformer architecture in Llama 3. Compared to Llama 2, we made several key improvements. Llama 3 uses a tokenizer with a vocabulary of 128K tokens that encodes language much more efficiently, which leads to substantially improved model performance. To improve the inference efficiency of Llama 3 models, we’ve adopted grouped query attention (GQA) across both the 8B and 70B sizes. We trained the models on sequences of 8,192 tokens, using a mask to ensure self-attention does not cross document boundaries.

Training data

To train the best language model, the curation of a large, high-quality training dataset is paramount. In line with our design principles, we invested heavily in pretraining data. Llama 3 is pretrained on over 15T tokens that were all collected from publicly available sources. Our training dataset is seven times larger than that used for Llama 2, and it includes four times more code. To prepare for upcoming multilingual use cases, over 5% of the Llama 3 pretraining dataset consists of high-quality non-English data that covers over 30 languages. However, we do not expect the same level of performance in these languages as in English.

To ensure Llama 3 is trained on data of the highest quality, we developed a series of data-filtering pipelines. These pipelines include using heuristic filters, NSFW filters, semantic deduplication approaches, and text classifiers to predict data quality. We found that previous generations of Llama are surprisingly good at identifying high-quality data, hence we used Llama 2 to generate the training data for the text-quality classifiers that are powering Llama 3.

We also performed extensive experiments to evaluate the best ways of mixing data from different sources in our final pretraining dataset. These experiments enabled us to select a data mix that ensures that Llama 3 performs well across use cases including trivia questions, STEM, coding, historical knowledge, etc.

Scaling up pretraining

To effectively leverage our pretraining data in Llama 3 models, we put substantial effort into scaling up pretraining. Specifically, we have developed a series of detailed scaling laws for downstream benchmark evaluations. These scaling laws enable us to select an optimal data mix and to make informed decisions on how to best use our training compute. Importantly, scaling laws allow us to predict the performance of our largest models on key tasks (for example, code generation as evaluated on the HumanEval benchmark—see above) before we actually train the models. This helps us ensure strong performance of our final models across a variety of use cases and capabilities.

We made several new observations on scaling behavior during the development of Llama 3. For example, while the Chinchilla-optimal amount of training compute for an 8B parameter model corresponds to ~200B tokens, we found that model performance continues to improve even after the model is trained on two orders of magnitude more data. Both our 8B and 70B parameter models continued to improve log-linearly after we trained them on up to 15T tokens. Larger models can match the performance of these smaller models with less training compute, but smaller models are generally preferred because they are much more efficient during inference.

To train our largest Llama 3 models, we combined three types of parallelization: data parallelization, model parallelization, and pipeline parallelization. Our most efficient implementation achieves a compute utilization of over 400 TFLOPS per GPU when trained on 16K GPUs simultaneously. We performed training runs on two custom-built 24K GPU clusters . To maximize GPU uptime, we developed an advanced new training stack that automates error detection, handling, and maintenance. We also greatly improved our hardware reliability and detection mechanisms for silent data corruption, and we developed new scalable storage systems that reduce overheads of checkpointing and rollback. Those improvements resulted in an overall effective training time of more than 95%. Combined, these improvements increased the efficiency of Llama 3 training by ~three times compared to Llama 2.

Instruction fine-tuning

To fully unlock the potential of our pretrained models in chat use cases, we innovated on our approach to instruction-tuning as well. Our approach to post-training is a combination of supervised fine-tuning (SFT), rejection sampling, proximal policy optimization (PPO), and direct preference optimization (DPO). The quality of the prompts that are used in SFT and the preference rankings that are used in PPO and DPO has an outsized influence on the performance of aligned models. Some of our biggest improvements in model quality came from carefully curating this data and performing multiple rounds of quality assurance on annotations provided by human annotators.

Learning from preference rankings via PPO and DPO also greatly improved the performance of Llama 3 on reasoning and coding tasks. We found that if you ask a model a reasoning question that it struggles to answer, the model will sometimes produce the right reasoning trace: The model knows how to produce the right answer, but it does not know how to select it. Training on preference rankings enables the model to learn how to select it.

Building with Llama 3

Our vision is to enable developers to customize Llama 3 to support relevant use cases and to make it easier to adopt best practices and improve the open ecosystem. With this release, we’re providing new trust and safety tools including updated components with both Llama Guard 2 and Cybersec Eval 2, and the introduction of Code Shield—an inference time guardrail for filtering insecure code produced by LLMs.

We’ve also co-developed Llama 3 with torchtune , the new PyTorch-native library for easily authoring, fine-tuning, and experimenting with LLMs. torchtune provides memory efficient and hackable training recipes written entirely in PyTorch. The library is integrated with popular platforms such as Hugging Face, Weights & Biases, and EleutherAI and even supports Executorch for enabling efficient inference to be run on a wide variety of mobile and edge devices. For everything from prompt engineering to using Llama 3 with LangChain we have a comprehensive getting started guide and takes you from downloading Llama 3 all the way to deployment at scale within your generative AI application.

A system-level approach to responsibility

We have designed Llama 3 models to be maximally helpful while ensuring an industry leading approach to responsibly deploying them. To achieve this, we have adopted a new, system-level approach to the responsible development and deployment of Llama. We envision Llama models as part of a broader system that puts the developer in the driver’s seat. Llama models will serve as a foundational piece of a system that developers design with their unique end goals in mind.

Instruction fine-tuning also plays a major role in ensuring the safety of our models. Our instruction-fine-tuned models have been red-teamed (tested) for safety through internal and external efforts. ​​Our red teaming approach leverages human experts and automation methods to generate adversarial prompts that try to elicit problematic responses. For instance, we apply comprehensive testing to assess risks of misuse related to Chemical, Biological, Cyber Security, and other risk areas. All of these efforts are iterative and used to inform safety fine-tuning of the models being released. You can read more about our efforts in the model card .

Llama Guard models are meant to be a foundation for prompt and response safety and can easily be fine-tuned to create a new taxonomy depending on application needs. As a starting point, the new Llama Guard 2 uses the recently announced MLCommons taxonomy, in an effort to support the emergence of industry standards in this important area. Additionally, CyberSecEval 2 expands on its predecessor by adding measures of an LLM’s propensity to allow for abuse of its code interpreter, offensive cybersecurity capabilities, and susceptibility to prompt injection attacks (learn more in our technical paper ). Finally, we’re introducing Code Shield which adds support for inference-time filtering of insecure code produced by LLMs. This offers mitigation of risks around insecure code suggestions, code interpreter abuse prevention, and secure command execution.

With the speed at which the generative AI space is moving, we believe an open approach is an important way to bring the ecosystem together and mitigate these potential harms. As part of that, we’re updating our Responsible Use Guide (RUG) that provides a comprehensive guide to responsible development with LLMs. As we outlined in the RUG, we recommend that all inputs and outputs be checked and filtered in accordance with content guidelines appropriate to the application. Additionally, many cloud service providers offer content moderation APIs and other tools for responsible deployment, and we encourage developers to also consider using these options.

Deploying Llama 3 at scale

Llama 3 will soon be available on all major platforms including cloud providers, model API providers, and much more. Llama 3 will be everywhere .

Our benchmarks show the tokenizer offers improved token efficiency, yielding up to 15% fewer tokens compared to Llama 2. Also, Group Query Attention (GQA) now has been added to Llama 3 8B as well. As a result, we observed that despite the model having 1B more parameters compared to Llama 2 7B, the improved tokenizer efficiency and GQA contribute to maintaining the inference efficiency on par with Llama 2 7B.

For examples of how to leverage all of these capabilities, check out Llama Recipes which contains all of our open source code that can be leveraged for everything from fine-tuning to deployment to model evaluation.

What’s next for Llama 3?

The Llama 3 8B and 70B models mark the beginning of what we plan to release for Llama 3. And there’s a lot more to come.

Our largest models are over 400B parameters and, while these models are still training, our team is excited about how they’re trending. Over the coming months, we’ll release multiple models with new capabilities including multimodality, the ability to converse in multiple languages, a much longer context window, and stronger overall capabilities. We will also publish a detailed research paper once we are done training Llama 3.

To give you a sneak preview for where these models are today as they continue training, we thought we could share some snapshots of how our largest LLM model is trending. Please note that this data is based on an early checkpoint of Llama 3 that is still training and these capabilities are not supported as part of the models released today.

We’re committed to the continued growth and development of an open AI ecosystem for releasing our models responsibly. We have long believed that openness leads to better, safer products, faster innovation, and a healthier overall market. This is good for Meta, and it is good for society. We’re taking a community-first approach with Llama 3, and starting today, these models are available on the leading cloud, hosting, and hardware platforms with many more to come.

Try Meta Llama 3 today

We’ve integrated our latest models into Meta AI, which we believe is the world’s leading AI assistant. It’s now built with Llama 3 technology and it’s available in more countries across our apps.

You can use Meta AI on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and the web to get things done, learn, create, and connect with the things that matter to you. You can read more about the Meta AI experience here .

Visit the Llama 3 website to download the models and reference the Getting Started Guide for the latest list of all available platforms.

You’ll also soon be able to test multimodal Meta AI on our Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.

As always, we look forward to seeing all the amazing products and experiences you will build with Meta Llama 3.

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