Fun Writing Assignments for College Students Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

Some students make very smooth transitions from writing in high school to writing in college, and we heartily wish all of you an easy passage. But other students are puzzled and frustrated by their experiences in writing for college classes. Only months earlier your writing was winning praise now your instructors are dissatisfied, saying that the writing isn't quite there yet, saying that the writing is lacking something. You haven't changed your writing is still mechanically sound, your descriptions are accurate, you're saying smart things. Some of the criticism is easy to understand: it's easy to predict that standards at college are going to be higher than in high school. But it is not just a matter of higher standards: often, what your instructors are asking of you is not just something better. If that's the case, then you won't succeed merely by being more intelligent or more skillful at doing what you did in high school.

We should note here that a college is a big place and that you'll be asked to use writing to fulfill different tasks. You'll find occasions where you'll succeed by summarizing a reading accurately and showing that you understand it. There may be times when you're invited to use writing to react to a reading, speculate about it. Far more often like every other week you will be asked to analyze the reading, to make a worthwhile claim about it that is not obvious state a thesis means almost the same thing , to support your claim with good reasons, all in four or five pages that are organized to present an argument. In college, an argument is something less contentious and more systematic: it is a set of statements coherently arranged to offer three things that experienced readers expect in essays that they judge to be thoughtful: they expect to see a claim that would encourage them to say, that's interesting. They expect to see evidence, reasons for your claim, evidence that would encourage them to agree with your claim, or at least to think it plausible. They expect to see that you've thought about limits and objections to your claim.

Almost by definition, an interesting claim is one that can be reasonably challenged. This kind of argument is less like disagreeable wrangling, more like an amiable and lively conversation with someone whom you respect and who respects you someone who is interested in what you have to say, but will not agree with your claims just because you state them someone who wants to hear your reasons for believing your claims and also wants to hear answers to their questions. At this point, some students ask why they should be required to convince anyone of anything. After all, they say, we are all entitled to our opinions, so all we should have to do is express them clearly. This point of view both misunderstands the nature of argument and ignores its greatest value. It is true that we are all entitled to our opinions and that we have no duty to defend them. But universities hold as their highest value not just the pursuit of new knowledge and better understanding, but the sharing of that knowledge.

We write not only to state what we have think but also to show why others might agree with it and why it matters. So we write in a way that allows others to test our reasoning: we present our best thinking as a series of claims, reasons, and responses to imagined challenges, so that readers can see not only what we think, but whether they ought to agree. And that's all an argument is not wrangling, but a serious and focused conversation among people who are intensely interested in getting to the bottom of things cooperatively. For four years, you are asked to read, do research, gather data, analyze it, think about it, and then communicate it to readers in a form in which enables them to asses it and use it.

You are asked to do this not because we expect you all to become professional scholars, but because in just about any profession you pursue, you will do research, think about what you find, make decisions about complex matters, and then explain those decisions usually in writing to others who have a stake in your decisions being sound ones. In an age of information, what most professionals do is research, think, and make arguments. And part of the value of doing your own thinking and writing is that it makes you much better at evaluating the thinking and writing of others. In the next few pages, we're going to walk you through a process of creating an argument in a humanities or social science paper. We're certainly not describing the way everyone must go about writing an argument. Further, we can't cover everything, and some of your teachers will expect something other than what we describe here. There are even some differences between how you write papers in humanities and in the social sciences.

How to Start a Literature Research Paper

But within all these limits, we can lay some groundwork for writing college papers. We begin with the assignment that gets you started then we discuss some ways to plan your paper so that you don't waste too much time on false starts. We conclude with some strategies for drafting and revising, especially revising, because the most productive work on a paper begins after you have gotten your ideas out of the warm and cozy incubator of your own mind and into the cold light of day. Not all of your instructors will be equally clear about what they expect of your paper. Some will tell you in detail what to read, how to think about it, and how to organize your paper, but others will ask a general question just to see what you can do with it.

Some instructors will expect you to stay close to the assignment, penalizing you if you depart from it others will encourage you to strike out on your own. Some few instructors may want you to demonstrate only that you have read and understood a reading, but most will want you to use your understanding of the reading as a jumping off point for an analysis and an argument. So your first step in writing an assigned paper occurs well before you begin writing: you must know what your instructor expects. Start by assuming that, unless you see the words summarize or paraphrase what x says about. Beyond this point, however, you have to become a kind of anthropologist, reading the culture of your particular class to understand what is said, what is not, and what is intended. If it is phrased in any of these ways, one crucial part of your task has been done for you: agree or disagree: 'freud misunderstood the feminine mind when he wrote. Discuss whether socrates adequately answered the charge that he corrupted the youth of athens.

For questions like these, you start but it's only a start by considering two opposing claims: freud understood the feminine mind or did not. Lear was or was not justified, socrates did or did not answer the charges against him. For reasons we will discuss below, you will not want the claim of your paper to be merely yes or no, he did or he didn't. But an assignment like this can make it easier to get started because you can immediately begin to find and assess data from your readings. You can look at passages from the reading and consider how they would support one of the claims.

Literary Analysis Argument Essay

You do not want to end up with a claim that says nothing more than freud did or did not understand the feminine mind. Lear was or was not justified in castigating cordelia socrates did or did not adequately answer the charge. Instead, they'll give you a reasonably specific sense of subject matter and a reasonably specific sense of your task: illustrate, explain, analyze, evaluate, compare and contrast, discuss the role that the honor plays in the odyssey. show how moli re exploits comic patterns in a scene from tartuffe.

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