Introducing The Excel High School Writing Lab

Excel Education Systems is proud to announce the launch of The Writing Lab, a resource for students to use as they navigate their writing assignments. Taking you through all the steps of the Writing Process and covering all the basic forms of writing you will need to be successful, The Writing Lab will help you grow as a writer and prepare you for both college and career.  We are dedicated to the success of our students, and this new resource is evidence of our continuous desire to grow and serve your needs.

The Writing Process

When you navigate to the main Writing Lab page, you’ll find a helpful overview of the site that takes the guesswork out of finding the help you need.  Starting with The Writing Process, students will find an overview of the steps they need for the beginning, middle, and end of creating a high-quality essay.  You’ll find a video explaining the rubric that we use to score your writing, so you’ll have a clearer idea of what our instructors expect before beginning your first essay.

Once you understand how you will be scored on your essays, you will next find examples of the different types of Brainstorming needed to get started with your essays.  With helpful videos to guide you through the first step of writing, you can move forward to the next step with confidence. We help students understand how to brainstorm using a web, a t-chart, or a Venn diagram, skills they can apply to planning throughout their lives.

Once you’ve got your ideas down, it’s time to start Organizing them.  Here, we have plenty of instructional resources for you to use to understand this second step of writing.  You can use our practice activities if you’re struggling to understand how to organize your writing, and then check your thinking with the explanations and keys that follow.  We help you understand everything from the basics to the details of creating the outline you will use to produce a high-quality piece of writing.

In Step 3 of the process, you will use the outline you created to Draft your essay.  With a video example of exactly how to do this, you have everything you need to move from the web of ideas you started with to a full-fledged essay.  When you use The Writing Process, no step is a waste of time.  Viewing the example of drafting that we’ve provided, you will see how simple it is to turn the groundwork you’ve done into your draft.  

Once you’re done with drafting, you can move forward to Revising your work. Revision includes making sure your writing is fluent, so we work hard to give you practice activities that show you how to combine your sentences, add transitions to your writing, and move it from a draft to a finished product.  

After revision, we take you to Editing where you will find helpful tools to put the finishing touches on your essays.  With instructional resources to help you improve your grammar, usage, and mechanics, we’ve got you covered regardless of how confident you felt at the start of the editing process.  We teach you tricks for finding the common errors that we see students making, and we’ve put together these resources for you to use to build your confidence and move forward as a writer.

Introductions and Conclusions

Many students struggle writing introductions and conclusions, but we have created a simple formula for our students to use to help them understand the intent and structure of both.  With practice, our students don’t have to wonder how they will start or end their essays.  Our goal was to take the guesswork out of this part of the essay writing process.  When students finish their writing practice, we know they will be able to use this formula in successful writing here with their online studies and after they graduate from our program.

Literary Analysis

Students enrolled in English classes know they will have to master many forms of Literary Analysis.  This part of the Writing Lab will help students understand a lot of important concepts that they will encounter in their courses.  We not only take them through the basic steps of literary analysis, but we give students specific guidance for all the different types of analysis they will have to do through their writing.

We know students struggle to analyze Poetry, so we have given them important steps that they can take to eliminate the fear many feel when they’re reading poems. But literary analysis isn’t just about poetry, and we know that our students will need help with analyzing the mood, tone, symbolism, point of view, and theme.

Analyzing a character is an essential skill in English classes, and the skills students will need to have for writing a good Character Analysis are all covered in our Writing Lab. We give you sample character analysis essays to help you understand what our instructors are looking for, and we take you through the Writing Process to help guide you along the way.

Expository Writing

The ability to write a clear expository essay with appropriate evidence and citations is a huge undertaking that students are expected to do beginning in middle school and onward through graduate school.  With our guidance, our students can navigate a full spectrum of Expository Writing for all of their courses.  The skills we cover will be essential for a student not only in their online courses with us, but as they move on to pursue their post-secondary dreams.  We give them the tools they need to not only understand the types of evidence they can use in their writing, but to use that evidence and cite it appropriately in their essays.  

We help our students understand the important skills of Summarizing and Paraphrasing to be sure they fully understand the texts that they are reading throughout their education.  You will be expected to have those skills throughout your classes, and you’ll be grateful for the training we provide as they move through middle school, high school, and beyond.  With helpful tricks and resources for learning how to respond to short answer questions, you will be able to respond to these academic questions with confidence and style.  

Forming a clear and concise argument is a skill that travels far beyond academics, and our Writing Lab helps you understand not only the parts of a piece of persuasive writing, but how to organize your writing to convey your thoughts and beliefs as well.  That’s a skill that will serve you well throughout your life.  

Our instruction about Cause and Effect writing helps you understand the thinking required to identify both the causes and effects of any topic you’re assigned, and we give you help from the start to the finish of writing this type of essay.  We provide video instruction and examples of the type of thought process, brainstorming, and organizing you need to craft an expert essay.

The ability to Compare and Contrast is essential in all areas of life. From shopping to looking for a career, you have to know how to compare and contrast.  For essays, planning your essay and knowing the best structure to use to communicate your ideas is important.  In our writing lab, we give you the tools you need to brainstorm, organize, and draft a great compare and contrast piece of writing.

Our section about Informative Writing helps you develop your ideas, structure your evidence, and explain the information you’re sharing in a clear manner.  Our goal for you is to keep the guesswork out of your writing, help you develop the skills you need to communicate effectively, and take those skills with you as a graduate.

We are proud of our graduates and want to see you succeed both in our courses and as you pursue your dreams.  Our Writing Lab is there for you to use, night or day, to guide you along your educational journey and beyond.

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