POW-TIDE is an acronym that can help you when you are writing a formal essay for class or for the writing assessment. If you use POW-TIDE, you will go through each step of the writing process ensuring that you are including everything you need for a POWerful essay!!

P—Pull apart the prompt. O—Organize my thoughts. W—Write, write, write. T--Topic Introduction. I—Important Evidence. D—Detailed Explanation. E—End. L—Links. L—Language.

P—Pull apart the prompt. What question is the prompt asking? Is the prompt asking for an informative piece or an argumentative piece? In your own words, what are you going to write about based on the prompt? Let’s try it: Example prompt: “The Landlady” by Roald Dahl is a chilling tale that teaches the reader when something looks too good to be true, it probably is. Write an essay that delineates Dahl’s use of foreshadowing and other suspense techniques that drive the reader to discover the theme of this short story.

O—Organize my thoughts. Use the graphic organizer to help you organize what you are going to write before you start writing. (See example pdf.)

W—Write, write, write. Make sure to include evidence from the text to support my writing. (What is evidence?—We can investigate this further in the TIDE part of the acronym!!)

T—Topic introduction. Restate the topic (thesis statement) and respond to the prompt using the graphic organizer. Let’s look at the example again and now restate it in your own words using the information you wrote previously: Example prompt: “The Landlady” by Roald Dahl is a chilling tale that teaches the reader when something looks too good to be true, it probably is. Write an essay that delineates Dahl’s use of foreshadowing and other suspense techniques that drive the reader to discover the theme of this short story.

I—Important evidence. Be sure to use evidence from the text to support your thesis statement. How are you going to decide what is important? How do you decide if it supports your thesis statement? Remember: evidence cited should be clear support, and that is not necessarily what is most interesting to you! Turn to your partner and brainstorm about what could be good supporting evidence for this example topic.

D—Detailed explanation. For each piece of evidence you present, you must have an explanation connecting your evidence back to your thesis statement. This is where you write your thoughts and use transition words to help you connect one idea to the other. Let’s try it: Main idea: The author foreshadows Billy’s death at the hands of the Landlady. Textual evidence: “‘Left?’ she said, arching her brows. ‘But my dear boy, he never left. He’s still here. Mr. Temple is also here. They’re on the fourth floor, both of them together.’” How would you connect these thoughts? Write your connection.

E—End. Restate your thesis statement including bits of evidence that you presented. After you restate your thesis statement, the “bits of evidence” are a kind of summary of the details of your paper. Let’s try restating your thesis statement. You have to say the same thing you did in the beginning of your paper in different words!

Extra details you need to remember when writing: L—Links Extra details you need to remember when writing: L—Links. These are transitions that move the writing smoothly from one idea to another. L—Language. Make sure to use vocabulary words (for example, word wall words) that are appropriate to the prompt. (No slang, abbreviations, text language, etc.!)