EssayMaps evolved from the realization that many students struggled to write English academic essays, even if they had a complete mastery of the language. After teaching ESL writing for years, I noted how the formats of academic essays made them remarkably simple. They key is starting with the right "seed," a basic short paragraph, and then expanding it.
EssayMaps includes a number of tutorials on various concepts, but the key is starting with the right paragaph type (the seeds). There's a bar with essay paragraph types listed. You click on that. You have the option of reviewing the tutorial, or answering a few basic questions. EssayMaps fills in your answers, provides dropdown boxes of the appropriate transitions and can even print out your work in Microsoft Word.
The premise of EssayMaps is that it is essential to teach the basic structure of a paragraph or an essay at the very beginning. If you master that, expanding it is simple. Here are the various paragraph types, or seeds.
With EssayMaps, any change you make will carry forward automatically and be included in the final essay. You can hit the back arrow until you get to the appropriate sentence, and make the change.
It's so much easier than getting back a paper with a lot of red ink that requires you to write the entire essay again!!!
Absolutely not. EssayMaps is a tool. The astonishing thing about EssayMaps is that students internalize the techniques so that can write without using EssayMaps. Their performance on timed writing tests improves markedly.
There are a lot of good spelling and grammar tools available online. Among the best is Grammarly.com. If you add it to your browsers, it will make corrections as you're writing in EssayMaps.
Definitely. The essay forms used in western universities are very different from those used on nations such as Japan, China and Korea. As such, somebody who writes well in a Japanese university may be unfamiliar with the forms. In addition, in the United States only top preparatory schools teach these essays to their children, so those who fail to attend wealthy, private schools may have no exposure to the basic forms of academic paragraph and essays.
Yes. Whatever you save on your phone, tablet or home computer is stored in EssayMaps. The information can be called up and changed.
Yes. If you have signed up for EssayMaps as part of my course, you can continue to use it in your other classes without paying anything.
Definitely. However, there are a few key elements to master as you're teaching. EssayMaps provides teacher training sessions online or at your institution. Click on the page to get more information.
If you have other questions, you can send them to EssayMaps Support.
