Types of Formal Writing Assignments
Whatever the type, all writing assignments should have a clear goal and purpose. A handout explaining each assignment is better than giving oral instructions because: 1) most students respond more effectively to something concrete and specific that they can lay hands on; 2) they can refer to the sheet when they settle down to work at 3 am; 3) it forces you to clarify the assignment for yourself, making it easier to identify potential problems with it.
Thesis-Governed Writing
1. Present a proposition/thesis that students must defend or refute.
Your task as teacher is to develop arguable propositions that engage major concepts in the
course. Advantage: student thinking is channeled into analysis and argumentation from the start. Disadvantage: students are not encouraged to formulate their own theses.
2. Give students a problem or question that can be resolved or answered only by formulating a thesis.
Your task as teacher is to sum up an important problem in a one-sentence question. Then you tell students to formulate a thesis that serves as a one-sentence answer to the question. An example for a Philosophy course:
Choose a question that Plato answers in one way and Aristotle answers in a different way (e.g., how do things change?) Then, in the first part of the paper, explain to your reader the differences in the two theories. In the second part, evaluate the two positions, arguing that one position is stronger than the other. In this section, specifically answer the following question: What situation or thing does one theory explain well that the other cannot explain adequately?
Consideration: a long series of interrelated questions, however well-intentioned, often confuses more than it helps. For instance, in the following example, everything in brackets should simply be cut: "In the graveyard scene of Hamlet, Shakespeare alters his sources by adding the clownish grave diggers. How does the presence of the grave diggers influence your interpretation of the scene? [Do you think they are funny? Absurd? Blasphemous? How does Hamlet’s attitude toward them affect the scene? Do you think it is appropriate to sing while digging a grave? What about their jokes? Do you think Yorick was more like Hamlet or more like the diggers? Is this scene really light-hearted?]
3. Ask students to follow an organizational structure that requires a problem-thesis pattern.
This model guides students toward thesis-driven writing without handing them theses. It may work better after you’ve used #1 above. An example:
Write an essay of x pages on any topic related to this course. Use the introduction of your essay to engage your reader’s interest in a problem or question that you would like to address in the essay. Show your reader what makes the question both significant and problematic. The body of your essay should be your own response to this question made as persuasive as possible through appropriate analysis and argumentation, including effective use of evidence.
This model may work best as a culminating assignment, after you’ve already tried to make clear over the first part of the semester what constitutes a "significant" question, for instance, or "effective use of evidence."
(Formal) Alternatives to Thesis-Governed Writing
Informal alternatives include journal writing and informal exploratory or response pages. What follows are more formal alternatives:
1. Formal exploratory essays
Such an assignment asks students to pose a problem and then to write a narrative of their own thought processes in trying to think through the problem. The essay seeks a thesis more than it supports one. A generic example:
Write a first-person, chronologically organized account of your thinking process as you explore possible solutions to a question or problem related to this course. Begin by describing what the question is and how and why you became interested in it. Then, as you contemplate the problem and do research, narrate the evolving process of your thinking. Your exploratory essay should include both external details (what you read, how you found it, who you talked to) and internal mental details (what you were thinking about, how your ideas were evolving.) For this essay, it doesn’t matter whether you reach a final position or solve the problem; your reader is interested in your process, not your final product. Show us, for example, your frustration when a promising source turned out to be useless. Show us how new ideas continually led you to reformulate your problem through expansion, narrowing, shifting of focus, or whatever. Make your exploratory essay an interesting intellectual detective story.
2. Reflection/Response Essays
These are usually short (1-2 pages) and ask for a more subjective, exploratory, tentative, and personal response than is required in thesis-governed writing. These are good for eliciting student response to complex, difficult, or troubling readings and invite writers to "talk back" from their own experience. Often it is enough simply to select a quotation and ask students to consider it in relation to their own lives or simply to ponder it.
("Creative") Alternatives to Thesis-Governed Writing
When assigning this sort of thing, it is sometimes best to include a critical component. In a literature class, for instance, a scene rewritten from another character’s perspective, or a new stanza added to a poem, would be followed by the writer’s reflective account about their choices as a writer and their own sense of what is most important in the piece. ("Creative"is in quotation marks because of course at some level all writing should be imaginative.)
Examples of various alternative assignments:
1. Psychology: ask students to write a poem from the perspective of a schizophrenic.
2. Religious Studies: ask students to write a dialogue between a believer and an unbeliever in God, in which the main issues of the class are discussed.
3. Political Science: a dialogue between conflicting theorists of one kind or another.
4. Literature: students rewrite the end of a story, insert a new stanza into a poem, retell a story from the perspective of a different narrator.
5. Women’s Studies: have students create myths or parables to express their personal understanding or vision of the feminine.
6. Sociology/Anthropology: students write an ethnographic/sociological study of another culture by selecting a relatively familiar local subculture whose views and language and beliefs differ from their own: athletes, cheerleaders, computer nerds, seniors, etc.
7. Science writing: write an account, complete with dialogue, of a team of engineers discussing their latest invention/project in terms of how the lay public is likely to respond: barriers to understanding, how to clarify its importance to society, etc.
8. Architecture: first assignment of semester: describe an architectural site (list provided to students); last assignment of semester: go back to same place and redescribe using what they learned in the class.
9. Any writing class: a portfolio essay. See www.vanderbilt.edu/cwp/writingportfolio.htm
