Essaypop is a template-based writing platform designed for students from elementary school through adulthood. It guides learners in crafting well-structured academic paragraphs, essays, and narratives using a consistent, repeatable system of color-coded writing frames. Research suggests that when students master discrete writing structures, they retain these skills and can build upon them as their writing becomes more sophisticated. We believe that writing proficiency, like many other forms of learning, develops gradually and incrementally over time.

With this in mind, it makes sense to introduce young and emerging writers to simple, easy-to-master templates before gradually transitioning them to more complex structures as their skills grow. Our early elementary-level templates contain just a few writing frames, while our secondary-level templates incorporate multiple frames to support more sophisticated compositions. As students progress through these templates, they add new elements along the way and soon learn to modify, or “flex”, these structures to suit the specific type of writing they are producing.

Once students have mastered several templates, it’s common to see them move fluidly between simple and complex structures, depending on the task at hand. This flexibility comes from having internalized these frameworks; they truly know them. It’s like having a writer’s toolbox, and they understand exactly how and when to use each tool to achieve their desired effect.

What follows are descriptions of our most-used templates, arranged from the simplest to the most complex. We refer to these as our global templates. While these templates address most types of writing students will encounter, they are fully customizable -- schools, districts, and teachers can adapt them as needed, and entirely new templates can be built from scratch. Students can also modify any template in real time, adding, arranging, and rearranging writing frames as they compose.

It’s important to note that when our content authors design writing lessons and activities, they begin by selecting the template that best aligns with the purpose of the writing, the students’ age and skill level, and the specific genre being taught. Choosing the right template is just as crucial as assigning an appropriate learning target or rubric; it must fit both the lesson objectives and the needs of the student audience.

Regardless of which template is being used, each one is supported by robust scaffolding tools, including easily accessible models, clear explanations, and sentence stems to help students choose the best way to begin each section of their paragraph. While working within any template, students can also collaborate in the interactive Hive environment, where they receive real-time feedback from both teachers and peers.

We start with the most basic template: the free-form, or quickwrite, template. This structure contains a single writing frame in which students compose freely, without focusing on specific paragraph elements such as thesis or claim, evidence, or analysis.

As with all essaypop templates, this simple frame can be expanded by adding elements as needed. Many teachers use it as a starting point, gradually building paragraphs or full essays from scratch, making it an excellent way to teach the fundamentals of paragraphing.

Whether students remain within the single frame or add others, they can collaborate in the Hive environment, commenting on each other’s work, and access essaypop’s full suite of scaffolding tools.

For assessment purposes, users will generally select one or more of our holistic rubrics to score the writing.

Here are the criteria and accompanying holistic rubrics for the quickwrite template.

The simple paragraph template introduces students to the core components of an academic paragraph: a thesis or claim, supporting evidence, and analysis. This structure, widely used in elementary and middle school programs nationwide, is also known as CER, an acronym for claim, evidence, and reasoning. It’s a foundational framework, providing the essential building blocks for developing more complex paragraphs and full essays. In our program, nearly every advanced template is built upon this critical triad of paragraph elements.

Keep in mind that students are never locked into a template. They can expand this simple structure by adding more evidence, deeper analysis, counterarguments, rebuttals, and other elements. Writing frames can be arranged and rearranged as needed, giving students complete flexibility to shape their work for the task at hand.

Here are the criteria and accompanying rubrics for the simple paragraph template.

With the basic paragraph structure, we introduce an important new component: the closer. While not a dramatic shift from the simple paragraph, the closer adds depth by prompting students to thoughtfully wrap up their writing. This might include a reflective statement, a brief call to action, or a concluding insight. The closer encourages students to elaborate, synthesize their ideas, and develop a more complete, polished paragraph, while also naturally increasing their word count.

As incrementalists, we’ve designed these templates to support gradual skill development. By gradually building in additional components like the closer, students move step-by-step toward crafting more complex and sophisticated paragraphs and essays. This scaffolded approach allows students to develop confidence and proficiency as their writing evolves.

Here are the criteria and accompanying rubrics for the basic paragraph template.

Conversion to an MLA-formatted Document

As students compose within the writing frames, everything they write is automatically converted into an MLA-formatted document. This document can then be exported as a PDF, Google Doc, or any other format the teacher prefers.

With the basic paragraph, we introduced the closer to enhance the foundational triad of claim, evidence, and analysis. The short response structure builds on this by retaining the closer and adding another key element: the hook.

The hook is designed to engage the reader from the start, providing essential background, setting the tone, and inviting a natural connection before presenting the thesis or claim. This element enables students to bring their own voice into the writing, making their responses more engaging and authentic.

By adding the hook to the existing structure, the paragraph starts to resemble a short essay, both in content and length. That’s why we refer to this format as the short response. Our approach is intentionally incremental—each new template introduces an additional element to help students develop complexity in their writing step by step. As with all Essaypop templates, students always have the option to add more writing frames, further personalizing and expanding their work.

Here are the criteria and accompanying rubrics for the short response template.

The transition from the short response to the power paragraph is a pivotal step for emerging writers. In the power paragraph, students are asked to incorporate two pieces of evidence and two corresponding analyses or reasoning. This increase in complexity compels students to think more critically and communicate their ideas with greater depth, requiring them to delve into the topic and elaborate on their thinking.

The power paragraph serves as an important bridge between single-paragraph writing and full, multi-paragraph essays. While it is not yet the type of comprehensive essay students will master in high school, it provides essential preparation for taking that next step. Many students using this structure begin to introduce paragraph breaks naturally, often with teacher guidance. The power paragraph is an effective template for the kinds of writing late elementary and middle school students encounter, particularly on end-of-year state writing assessments.

Here are the criteria and accompanying rubrics for the short response and power paragraph template.

Multiple-paragraph compositions differ fundamentally from the paragraph and short essay structures described earlier. These essays follow a more sequential organization, featuring a dedicated introduction, a specified number of body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Because of their complexity, multiple-paragraph essays require a distinct template layout.

As illustrated below, each paragraph is displayed horizontally along the header, allowing students to focus on one section at a time and easily move left or right to work on other parts of the essay. You can think of a longer essay as a series of interconnected smaller templates. In keeping with our incremental approach, we recommend that students first master the foundational paragraph and short response structures, since the skills developed there directly support success with multiple-paragraph essays.

Let’s take a closer look at the components of a multiple-paragraph essay—

The introduction of the paper starts with an engaging hook and transitions smoothly into the thesis statement or main claim. This is followed by a series of sub-theses that preview the main points of the upcoming body paragraphs, and then concludes with one or two closing sentences. This classic structure for the introductory paragraph will be familiar to any teacher experienced with traditional formats like the five-paragraph essay.

Each body paragraph follows a template similar to the basic paragraph structure introduced earlier. Students begin with a topic sentence, add supporting evidence or concrete details, continue with analysis, explanation, or reasoning, and finish with a closing or concluding statement.

The number of body paragraphs should correspond to the sub-theses outlined in the introduction.

As with all our templates, students start with this foundational body paragraph structure and expand it as needed, adding additional evidence, analysis, counterarguments, or other elements. For instance, in the example provided, the student chose to include extra evidence, further analysis, and a transitional bridge to strengthen their response.

The conclusion is also strategically structured using a template. Students begin by bringing the essay full circle with an element called the echo, which revisits the hook from the introduction. Next, they restate the thesis and sub-theses, and then wrap up with a reflective outro that provides closure to the essay.

Here are the criteria and accompanying rubric for the multiple-paragraph essay.

The Basic Narrative/Storytelling Structure

Narrative and story structures differ significantly from essays and require a distinct approach. While we still use templates for narrative writing, the components are organized differently. Our basic storytelling template includes the essential elements of plot: exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution.

When students are tasked with writing a personal narrative or a fictional story, they start by developing these core components. As with all Essaypop templates, students have the flexibility to add, arrange, and rearrange writing frames to suit their creative needs, ensuring they maintain complete control over their storytelling process.

For more extensive fictional writing, we offer an advanced storytelling template designed for longer narratives. This template incorporates elements such as characterization, dialogue, and detailed settings, alongside common narrative actions and plot development tools.

These options allow students to develop subplots, explore relationships between characters, develop rich settings, focus on lively dialogue, etc. By incorporating these more advanced features, the template enables young writers to craft richer, more immersive stories while learning key narrative craft techniques.

Adapting the global templates for science classes is easily done and provides an effective framework for guiding students through observational writing, process papers, and basic lab reports. For instance, in the example below, the claim is reimagined as a hypothesis, the evidence sections are used to record the steps and observations from the lab experiment, and the reasoning serves as the conclusion or final analysis drawn from the completed lab.

Here is another adaptation for another science writing activity.

Our poetry and lyric writing template organizes poems using a basic stanza structure. While not all forms of poetry are stanza-based, this flexible design suits a variety of approaches to writing verse. In this example, students begin with four color-coded stanza frames, which can be added to and rearranged as needed to suit their creative vision.

This ability to experiment with stanza order encourages students to explore different poetic styles and structures. The color-coded frames also make it easy for peers and teachers to provide targeted feedback within the interactive Hive environment, as participants can quickly focus on specific stanzas or sections of a poem.

Sometimes writers simply need a versatile, open space to work, one that’s organized into sectioned, color-coded frames, and that’s where an all-purpose template excels. Unlike the quickwrite template, the all-purpose version provides a predetermined number of color-coded writing frames that writers can arrange, rearrange, and expand as needed. This structure is ideal for longer free-form writing and offers a flexible foundation for building customized writing formats.

While our global templates cover most of the writing structures students need to succeed, the range of writing formats is truly limitless. We encourage you and your students to adapt our templates and create your own unique structures; it’s a rewarding and enjoyable process. Ultimately, all writing, no matter how simple or complex, exists within a structure. Writing is, at its core, structured thinking, and templates serve to clarify and define that structure.