How to write an informative essay？If you have been looking at the blank MS Word document for a couple of hours attempting to write something meaningful in your informative essay, you’re in the right place. Today, you will learn the informative essay definition, master this paper with ease, and get the highest grades. Read further to discover how to craft a worthy informative essay.This article provides you with relevant writing informative essay tips, steps and examples for your reference.

一．what is an informative essay

An informative essay is a paper that provides information on a specific topic. In other words, it educates the reader about a particular thing, be it a term, event, natural phenomenon, etc.

An informative essay doesn’t contain the author’s evaluation or analysis. Instead, it aims to describe a subject. What does this essay look like? In essence, most Wikipedia articles are informative essays since they provide you with information on a particular topic.

一篇信息豐富的文章不包含作者的評價或分析。相反，它旨在描述一個主題。這篇文章看起來像什么?本質(zhì)上，維基百科上的大多數(shù)文章都是信息豐富的文章，因為它們?yōu)槟闾峁┝艘粋€特定主題的信息。

Due to this, you might be lucky if you are assigned to write an informative essay since it’s one of the simplest academic writing tasks.

二．how to write an informative essay

1.How to Write an Informative Essay Introduction?

How to start an informative essay? First and foremost, it doesn’t require proving or debunking some beliefs or analyzing something. That’s why popular hooks like provocative rhetorical questions may not be suitable for this paper.

However, you may want to play with the readers’ awareness. Take a look at the introduction hook example on the global deforestation topic: Do you know that people remove 40,000 square miles (the size of Iceland) of forest each year? By wrapping striking facts into rhetorical questions, you can quickly grab your readers’ attention.

然而，你可能想要玩弄讀者的意識?？纯搓P(guān)于全球森林砍伐主題的引子例子:你知道人們每年要砍伐40000平方英里(相當(dāng)于冰島的面積)的森林嗎?通過把引人注目的事實包裝成反問句，你可以迅速抓住讀者的注意力。

2.How to Write an Informative Essay Thesis?

The thesis statement can render the meaning of your paper title. For example, your topic is Amazonian deforestation.

Think of what to write about: when Amazonian deforestation started, what countries remove the most trees, what implications deforestation involves, etc.

In this case, you have to provide a thesis statement that will set a direction for your paper so that you can uncover more and more details in your essay body.

So the thesis statement for this topic might sound like this: Deforestation of the Amazonian rainforest makes an unprecedented impact on the local biodiversity and climate. At this point, you have defined your essay’s direction: you will mention extinct species, changing rain patterns, rainforest loss rates, etc.

因此，這個主題的主題陳述可能聽起來像這樣:亞馬遜雨林的砍伐對當(dāng)?shù)氐纳锒鄻有院蜌夂蛟斐闪饲八从械挠绊?。在這一點上，你已經(jīng)確定了你的文章的方向:你將提到滅絕的物種，變化的降雨模式，雨林損失率，等等。

Note that you should make your thesis statement sound non-controversial. It has to be a fact (like deforestation implications) rather than an opinion/argument.

Remember that informative essays don’t involve debates.

3.How to Write an Informative Essay Body?

The essay body aims to bring more details to your thesis statement. It would be much better if you added headings for each part of your subject. In this way, it will be much easier for you to follow the essay direction. Also, you can use headings from H1 to H4. Take a look at the example on how to do that:

H1 Amazonian Rainforest Deforestation: Causes and Implications.

H2 When Did the Amazonian Deforestation Start?

H2 Main Amazonian Deforestation Drivers

H2 Rainforest Loss Rates

H3 Brazilian Rainforest Loss Rates

H2 Amazonian Rainforest Deforestation Implications

H3 Global Temperature Rise

H3 Global Sea Level Rise

H3 Massive Extinction of Rainforest Species

H2 The Bottom Line.

How to Write an Informative Essay Conclusion?

The essay conclusion should provide a sense of completeness. For this, you should rephrase the thesis statement first. Please note that you need to give your rephrased thesis statement a new meaning based on the provided facts and conclusions.

文章的結(jié)論應(yīng)該提供一種完整的感覺。為此，你應(yīng)該首先改寫主題陳述。請注意，你需要給你的重新措詞的論點陳述一個新的意義，基于所提供的事實和結(jié)論。

After that, summarize your essay body in a couple of sentences. At the end of your conclusion, sum up the whole paper within the final line.

4.How to Choose a Topic for an Informative Essay?

Usually, professors provide their students with essay topics. But if you are free to choose one on your own, you are lucky. Check these tips for choosing informative essay topics:

Check for informative essay ideas on the web. Many websites list hundreds of topics for all academic levels.

Choose narrower topics instead of broad ones if you wish to get a meaningful well-researched essay – it’s impossible to cover a general topic.

如果你想要得到一篇有意義的深入研究的文章，選擇較窄的主題，而不是寬泛的主題，因為不可能涵蓋一個一般性的主題。

Make sure you can find enough information on your subject. For this, do a quick research on a couple of topics before writing an informative essay.

三．example of informative article essay

Prompt:The title of this essay is:New Technologies For Social Learning And Language Practice Platforms.The interaction within a community and a sense of belonging to a community are important to enable web-based informal ESL learning.

As suggested by the researchers, web tools offer potential ground for supporting individual personal learning (Severance et al., 2008; Woo et al., 2011) by empowering their perception and valuable activity exploration (Boruta et al., 2011; Gardner, 2011; Mortimer, 2010; Shihab, 2008). This review of literature provides a context and groundwork for the investigation that attempted to discover the affordances and the learning strategies in Web 2.0-based language learning beyond the walls of formal learning spaces.

Introduction

Today, several hundred Web 2.0 tools are platforms “to process knowledge” (Duke, 2010, p. 170) and have potentials in enabling language learning strategies. Consequently, personal learning is seen to be influenced by the environment and context.

Facebook

One of the most popular social networking tools is Facebook where higher education students are the most frequent users and increasingly spend their time (Carbó & Antoli, 2011; Dillard, 2011; Eberhardt, 2007; Freishtat, 2009; Lenhart & Madden, 2007; Schultz, 2011; Selwyn, 2007) “in various forms of informal and self-directed learning outside of formal classroom settings” (Freishtat, 2009, p. 2). As listed on the facebook.com website, Facebook has established itself rapidly since February 2004 and has 500 million active users in the year 2011 (as cited in Schultz, 2011). The main elements of social networking, especially Facebook is as follows:

i) The profile — each user is stimulated to contribute personal details if possible and it “comprised of identifiers that distinguish one user from another” (Dillard, 2011, p. 2). The profile includes interests, pastimes, e-mail address and preferences in the case of leisure communities (Armstrong & Franklin, 2008; Eberhardt, 2007; Mills, 2011). After a profile has been verified, new members are able to be in touch with existing members worldwide (macro context) by requesting that members join as their individual (micro context) friend. Learner-users could change their privacy settings to choose the individuals that are able to view their Facebook profile in order to protect their privacy (Dillard, 2011; Freishtat, 2009; Greenhow & Robelia, 2009).

ii) The network links or list of friends — all members are signified mainly by their contacts or network links starting from real individuals, inviting them to request others including strangers. In this regard, in a Facebook community, “the joint enterprise was participation, engagement, and mutual accountability in a global simulation context” (Mills, 2011, p. 363). A shared practice was developed as users created online profiles for their characters, interacted with co-participants, and posted their shared updates and wall postings on Facebook.

Furthermore, it is clear that Facebook was an important social tool of “popular culture” (Freishtat, 2009) used by the majority of the members especially to aid their transition to University (Armstrong & Franklin, 2008; Schultz, 2011). Selwyn’s (2007) research on university students’ use of one of Web 2.0 applications namely Facebook in the UK recommends that the educational nature of students’ Facebook use is profoundly casual such as discoveries in corridors, cafeterias and beyond the classroom. Accordingly, due to the convenience and popularity of Facebook usage, users might potentially depend more and more on Facebook, and use it to substitute supplementary forms of interpersonal contact that need extra effort. Thereby, most Facebook members “feel a sense of responsibility to participate on their friends’ walls, while others conversely think that their friends should feel that responsibility as well” (Schultz, 2011, p. 35).

In the same vein, Facebook has grown to embrace users’ social relationships by enabling learners to maintain their continuing connections with old and new friends. The importance of making new online friendships, intimate friendships and for keeping in touch (Dillard, 2011; Freishtat, 2009; Greenhow & Robelia, 2009) with friends (or network links) via Facebook is also noticeable. In fact, a challenging representation is developing whereby many users are not simply shifting offline contacts to an online way, or the other way round, but commonly most of them are engaging both at once (Selwyn, 2008). As these connections frequently tolerate physical separation, retaining social networks could aid students to fine-tune existing strategies (Eberhardt, 2007; Schultz, 2011) for lifelong learning.

Wikis

Wikis, as defined by Murugesan, are “simple yet powerful Web-based collaborative authoring (or content management) systems for creating and editing content” (Murugesan 2007, p. 35). Wikis facilitate collaboration and interaction, offer possibilities for immediate feedback, stimulate social connections and communities, and harness knowledge with no associated costs (Boudreaux, 2010; Jonassen et al., 2008; Tapscott, 2009). A Wiki is actually a modified web page allowing collaborative individual or group users as active volunteers to add, edit or remove online information at any time and from any location (De Wever, Van Keer, Schellens, & Valcke, 2011; Jonassen et al., 2008; Murugesan, 2007; Shihab, 2008; Tapscott, 2009). With basic typing skills, it is easy to create content and share information online by adopting available Wiki websites, which may be available publically or accessible only with permission. Today, a Wiki is a tool that enables the collaborative creation of sets of web pages for learner-users and one of the most famous Wikis in the world is Wikipedia an online encyclopaedia (Wikipedia, 2012).

Wikipedia is a free multilingual encyclopaedia, authored by the public (anyone who has an interest in some topic). This largest of Wiki sites was launched in 2001 and has more than 19 million articles, in more than 270 languages, written collectively by volunteers worldwide (Wikipedia, 2012). An increasing number of Wikipedia articles are well-written and informative materials, for example the ‘Featured Articles’ and ‘Good Articles’. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone but in certain cases, Wikis still can support authentication because only certain members can modify certain pages. On a daily basis, hundreds of thousands of global users collectively contribute tens of thousands of edits and publish thousands of their own first-hand articles (Wikipedia, 2012). Tapscott (2009) asserts, “Well, I say that 10,000 heads are better than two. There are a lot of smart people out there, and we should be using new technology to tap into their talent” (p. 91). For example, the capabilities of wikis to combine, collect and rebuild applications “in intelligent ways to help [learners] make smarter decisions” (Murugesan 2007, p. 37), include Facebook, and Twitter are valuable for language learning. Murugesan (2007) refers a mash up as “a Web page or Website that combines information and services from multiple sources on the Web” (p. 36). Thus, the users learn more by collaboration in a knowledge-building community in which students are able to develop critical and reflective thinking skills.

Literature also indicates that the use of Wikis as writing dynamic Web applications in education improves writing strategies through collaborative group work (Boudreaux, 2010; De Wever et al., 2011; Jonassen et al., 2008). This collective intelligence process of creating a shared object of knowledge where changes of the articles can be tracked to the users directly is noticeably natural in offering great autonomy to the users (Murugesan, 2007). Editors in Wikis communities closely and promptly correct errors when notified. Weinstein et al. (2005) found that the accuracy of Wikis’ content were comparable to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Although not without risks in terms of expertise, coverage, volatility of information, Wikis have become very popular for fast and flexible retrieval of information and as tools for evaluative processing and higher order thinking (Weinstein et al.). Wikis can also be used in class projects to save a lot of time for managing group work and instructors can use wikis to supply writing activities (Boudreaux, 2010; Franklin & Van Harmelen, 2007; Shihab, 2008). It has been suggested that Wikis have educational potentials especially in the language classroom by utilizing aspects of learners’ daily lives and taking advantage of the power of learners guiding other learners (Boudreaux, 2010; De Wever et al., 2011).

文獻(xiàn)還表明，在教育中使用wiki作為編寫動態(tài)Web應(yīng)用程序，通過協(xié)作小組工作改善了寫作策略(Boudreaux, 2010;De Wever等人，2011;Jonassen等人，2008)。創(chuàng)建一個共享的知識對象的集體智能過程，其中文章的變化可以直接跟蹤到用戶，這為用戶提供了極大的自主性，這是非常自然的(Murugesan, 2007)。當(dāng)收到通知時，wiki社區(qū)中的編輯會密切并迅速地糾正錯誤。Weinstein et al.(2005)發(fā)現(xiàn)wiki內(nèi)容的準(zhǔn)確性可以與大英百科全書相媲美。盡管維基在專業(yè)知識、覆蓋范圍、信息波動性方面并非沒有風(fēng)險，但它在快速、靈活地檢索信息以及作為評估處理和更高階思考的工具方面已經(jīng)變得非常流行(Weinstein等人)。wiki也可以用于課堂項目，以節(jié)省大量的時間來管理小組工作和教師可以使用wiki來提供寫作活動(Boudreaux, 2010;Franklin & Van Harmelen, 2007;Shihab, 2008)。有人認(rèn)為，wiki具有教育潛力，特別是在語言課堂中，它利用了學(xué)習(xí)者日常生活的各個方面，并利用了學(xué)習(xí)者引導(dǎo)其他學(xué)習(xí)者的力量(Boudreaux, 2010;De Wever等人，2011)。

Recently, Woo et al. (2011) proposed that Wikis were helpful in facilitating learners to engage in fun learning and collaborative problem-solving. Those authors further argued that Wikis also facilitated scaffolding learners to achieve their critical-thinking and creative reasoning skills. For instance, the learners post peer comments in order to practice new vocabularies and grammar rules, use online dictionaries, extract main learning ideas from the web, analytically assessing appropriate facts and rehearsing to write better by sharing and observing instances from others. The open mechanism accomplished to help collaboration between learners, and the written conversation online assisted the reluctant or weaker learners with English. For example, the learners mentioned the ease of editing their work and posting photos, and noted that peer interactions encouraged prompt knowledge sharing among group members, such as through repetition and regeneration. Overall, Web 2.0 technologies provide resources that motivate learners’ strategies and encourage engagement in collaborative behaviour where “whatever challenges they encountered, they solved creatively in their own ways” (p. 48).

Twitter

Twitter is an important Web 2.0 tool that creates an environment in which users can interact in real and deferred time, thereby accommodating a virtual extension of the physical classroom community (Carbó & Antoli, 2011; Ebner et al., 2009) by providing an opportunity for membership in the L2 community. Consequently, the tool supports informal learning strategies such as enabling immediate feedback, stimulating information awareness from peer learning activities and monitoring own learning progress (Ebner et al., 2009). Consistently, Antenos-Conforti’s study (2009) explored the effects of Twitter on behaviours of 22 university students of second language learners in terms perceive the benefits of the tool for learning language and culture. Antenos-Conforti (2009) confirmed that Twitter affords learners with beneficial social networking for learning because it supports participation, interaction and, authentication. The participants reported that Twitter was necessary for their daily language practice because it facilitated positive and real communication to develop their second language writing in terms of grammar and vocabulary. They also acknowledged that their teacher’s replies to their tweets benefited their learning and contributed to their knowledge of Italian culture. Overall, Antenos-Conforti (2009) recommended the interactive and dynamic nature of this Web 2.0 tool for language teaching and learning.

Conclusion

This article has presented an extensive review of both theoretical literature and empirical research. The review and synthesis of the most recent, most essential literature constructed of web-based learning strategies. The researcher concludes this article with four important findings from the literature:

As upheld by sociocultural perspectives (Arbaugh & Benbunan-Fich, 2007; Dale, 2010; Gee, 2010; Mills, 2011; Van Lier, 2004), the broader social, cultural and historical context presents the robust frame of sociocultural connections in wider range of learning backgrounds. Thus, when learners are inspired to learn, it is possible for them to perceive strategies for their learning beyond the classroom for lifelong.

Unlike other forms of writing, authors do not intend to persuade readers accept certain options. Although writers often have personal biases, they must refrain from displaying them, which makes a question of how to write an informative essay very important. Students must learn how to fairly present all sides without demonstration of their own opinion.

與其他寫作形式不同，作者并不打算說服讀者接受某些選項。盡管作者往往有個人偏見，但他們必須避免表現(xiàn)出來，這使得如何寫一篇信息豐富的文章變得非常重要。學(xué)生必須學(xué)會如何公正地表達(dá)各方面的觀點，而不是表達(dá)自己的觀點。

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