Building Better Writers: Text Structures That Really Work
Mitchell Pack
Spartanburg Writing Project
Summer Institute 2010
“In order to select texts effectively for your teaching of writing, you need to be able to envision what that text
offers your students as writers.”
K. W. Ray
“When we speak about structure, we mean the various ways in which writing is organized to give shape to an
entire piece or portion of the text.”
J. Davis & S. Hill
Common Text Structures:
1. Circular Texts – have beginnings and endings that match.
The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant
Miz Berlin Walks by Jane Yolen
2. Narrative Poem Texts – are structured as a series of separate poems that can be read individually, but when
they are read together they have narrative or expository elements that tie them together.
Mississippi Mud: Three Prairie Journals by Ann Turner
3. Alphabet Texts – books used to teach the alphabet, sometimes structured to write nonfiction, fiction, poetry,
description, memoir, etc.
Chicka, Chicka, Boom, Boom by Bill Martin Jr.
Alphabet City by Stephen Johnson
4. Photo Narrative Texts – are fashioned to sound like someone is showing the reader a photo album and
narrating the story of each picture.
Snapshots from the Wedding by Gary Soto
5. Repeated, Wraparound Paragraph Structured Texts – have long series of paragraphs (sometimes the
whole text) is structured repeatedly in the exact same way.
If You’re Not From the Prairie by David Bouchard
6. Texts with Repeating Lines or Phrases – uses a repeating line or phrase throughout the text.
It Looked Like Spilt Milk by Charles G. Shaw
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr.
7. Conversation Texts – the entire text is fashioned as a conversation.
Yo! Yes? by: Chris Raschka
The Pigeon Finds a Hotdog by Mo Willems
8. Journal or Diary Texts – are structured around diary or journal entries, usually dated and sometimes titled
or sectioned off as well.
Diary of a Worm by: Doreen Coronin
Moon Over Tennessee: A Boy’s Civil War Journal by: Craig Crist-Evans
9. Letter Texts – consist of a single letter, or a series of letters either back and forth among two or more
characters or over time from only one character.
I Wanna Iguana by Karen Kaufman Orloff
The Jolly Postman by Allan Ahlberg
Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type by: Doreen Cronin
10. Time Period Texts – a text that moves clearly through a time period – a day, a week, months, seasons.
Cookie’s Week by Cindy Ward
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
Works Cited
Ray, K. W. (1999). Wondrous words: Writers and writing in the elementary classroom. Urbana, Illinois. NCTE.