How to serialize a class as field

See more:

C#

XML

serialization

Example:

public class MYELEMENT
{
    public string value;
}

The above would produce something like the following:

<MYELEMENT><value>string</value></MYELEMENT>

For my purposes I need the following:

<MYELEMENT>string</MYELEMENT>

I am creating an array of elements that preserves the order of the original elements serialized from an external source.

public class MYROOT
{
    [XmlElement(typeof(MYELEMENT1))]
    [XmlElement(typeof(MYELEMENT2))]
    [XmlElement(typeof(MYELEMENT3))]
    public object[] nodes { get; set; }
}

There may be one or more elements of each type that can appear any order. Therefore, each element is represented as a class object.

The code, as written, works fine except that Deserializing this

<MYELEMENT>1</MYELEMENT>

produces the following when Serializing it out

<MYELEMENT />

Which is correct at the moment, because there is no sub-element.

Is there an XML attribute or other method that can be applied to produce what I need?

Something like this

public class MYELEMENT
{
    [this is the elements value]
    public string value;
}

or this

[this is a wrapper for the real element]
public class Foo
{
    public string MYELEMENT { get; set; }
}

Thanks!