English Department

A Student's Guide to Reading Essay Assignments in English 130

Initial Observations and Reading Strategies
Applying the “7 Questions” to an Assignment
Conclusion

“Just tell us what you want!”

This demand is usually heard from students just after a teacher introduces a new writing assignment. It’s no wonder students can feel confused after receiving an assignment sheet. University-level assignment descriptions can be lengthy—sometimes a page single-spaced or more. What the teacher wants is embedded throughout the assignment, where qualifiers, specific requirements, and conditions for achieving the goal are also explained. It is these details that make reading a new assignment a daunting, nerve-wracking, and sometimes confusing experience. When writing teachers hear “Just tell us what you want!” they assume that students mean a number of things:

“Make the writing task as clear as possible.”

“Make the writing task relevant to what we’ve been reading and writing in class.”

“Help me achieve the goals you’ve set out in the assignment description.”

This is exactly what the faculty in the writing program at Chico State is working hard to do.

This “Students’ Guide to Reading Essay Assignments” is meant to help you decode university-level writing assignments. In other words, this guide helps you read assignments to uncover their key requirements and goals. It also helps you learn what questions to ask your teacher if the answers you need to successfully complete the assignment remain unclear.

In a nutshell this guide advises that, when reading a new writing assignment, you ask the following 7 questions:

What does the teacher want me to learn by writing this essay?
What knowledge base am I expected to have in order to write this essay?
What is the purpose for writing this assignment and what methods do I need to complete it?
Who is my audience?
What form should the essay take and what writing conventions should I follow?
Where will the information for this essay come from: personal experience? Primary or secondary source research? Assigned reading? Other sources?
How will my final essay be evaluated?

While knowing these questions might be helpful enough, it may also help to apply them to an actual English 130 essay assignment. The assignment description titled “Paper Two (PDF),” is typical of essays assigned in Chico State’s writing program.

Skip now to “Paper Two,” imagine that you are a member of this section of English 130, and read the assignment once, all the way through. In your estimation, what are the important aspects of the assignment to focus on? What questions emerge as you try to make sense of it?

Initial Observations and Reading Strategies

The first reading of any assignment sheet is likely to disorient rather than clarify the task at hand. Students repeatedly explain this occurrence this way: you read the assignment and immediately the buzz of your busy lives and your fears about writing to seep onto the assignment sheet.

For example, you see the essay’s due date and think, “Oh no, this paper’s due the same week as my poly sci midterm—I’m going to be buried in work!” You see the research requirement and think, “What does she mean by ‘database search’—I’ve only ever analyzed novels and plays—how will I do this?” Your initial reading of the assignment might be less stressful if you use some of the following strategies to help you quell the voices of anxiety and open yourself to the interesting challenge of the inquiry that lies before you.

For example, begin by looking at the layout of the assignment itself. You probably noticed that this assignment contains some interesting features. First, it is lengthy, over a page single-spaced. Second, it is broken into subheadings like “Audience and Purpose” and “Assessment.” Since the teacher writes that “this is your major research project for the term,” a good guess would be that the teacher wrote a lengthy, detailed assignment description because the essay involves multiple issues and stages of work, and that complexity can’t be overly simplified without losing crucial information. So you don’t get lost within the text, the teacher provides subheadings in order to signal the important issues to be covered. Subheadings often provide a roadmap through dense thickets of information by summing up the main idea or focus of the information being covered. Subheadings are meant to counter the confusion of a detailed assignment sheet. Instead of subheadings, some teachers often put emphasis on certain words or phrases (through bold or italics, for example) to help guide your reading process.

If you receive this kind of detailed assignment sheet, after you read it once, consider re-reading it with a pen or a highlighter and marking key words—words that seem to repeat themselves and indicate the overall aims of the assignment. This may help you discover the main aim of the assignment. For example, in “Paper Two,” the word “research” appears often, as does the phrase “write about a controversial issue/event/ conflict.” The name Jane “Tompkins” reappears throughout the assignment sheet, as do the phrases “multiple texts” from “different time periods” seen “in a variety of ways.” In tracking the above key words, we have already pieced together the major task of the assignment: using Tompkins as a model, research a controversial issue or event or conflict in history that interests you, incorporating different kinds of texts from different time periods, drawing your own conclusions about the event in the process.

Now that we’re starting to get oriented, let’s use the “7 Questions” to make detailed sense of the writing task described in “Paper Two (PDF).”

Applying the “7 Questions” to an Assignment

Question #1: What does the teacher want me to learn by writing this essay?

Looking at the features of the assignment description has helped you understand the main task the assignment asks us to engage in. But, to put it bluntly, so what? Why does the teacher want you to embark on this larger undertaking? How will it benefit you as a writer and thinker in this class? Will it benefit you throughout your time at Chico State?

Under the heading “Content and Course Objectives,” we may have found some answers. The teacher writes, “by entering into this endeavor, you will learn to do the kinds of reading and writing that university scholars value.” This is a big claim! A writing class is completely unlike a geography class, for example. How on earth could such diverse fields value the same kinds of writing?

Judging from the larger assignment description, especially the description the teacher provides under the subheading “Genre,” it seems that university scholars do value certain practices and beliefs about writing. For example, scholars value reading published writing in their field to understand what experts have to say. They also value seeking out multiple perspectives on a given issue to make sure they are getting the whole picture. It also seems they value using those perspectives not so much to agree or disagree with them, but to help them figure out exactly where they stand on the issue. Scholars also value sharing and developing methods for analyzing the material they work with, whether it is a novel by Willa Cather or a strata of sedimented soil running through a boulder in Bidwell Park.

It seems that the teacher who wrote “Paper Two” is on the lookout for the practices that university scholars have in common, and is trying to develop those practices through this assignment. This is an aim that Academic Writing instructors share, and it is the aim of all General Education courses at Chico State: to balance the specifics of the discipline (in our case, writing) with the practices that discipline shares with other fields of knowledge.

We have a sense of the skills the teacher is trying to develop through this assignment, but what assumptions is she making about the knowledge and abilities you bring to the task at hand?

Question #2: What knowledge base am I expected to have in order to write this essay?

Immediately upon reading assignment “Paper Two,” the doubter in us may start a nagging monologue:

What right do I have to assess whose view of a given issue or conflict was right? I’m not an expert on this topic, and I’m not a researcher, so how will I know where to find the information I need? How will I make sense of it once I do find it? Let’s say I do find the information I need and I have some ideas about how to analyze it, how will I write it up? How will I organize my information and manage to include my own conclusions as well? How will I get it all to flow?

Rarely do teachers expect you to perform a writing task without giving you the research and analytical tools you need to be successful at that task, as well as the time and collaborative support from peers you need to get feedback. If they do, you have the right to ask that those blind spots be addressed.

“Paper Two” clearly states the kind of knowledge it expects you have in order to complete this task. In this regard, it seems a lot hinges on the student having read someone named Tompkins. In the section “Genre,” the teacher refers to Tompkins’ essay as “a model for the kind of paper you will write.” This is a crucial sentence, one that shows us that Tompkins is a base of knowledge to draw from. A “model” can mean many things; in this case, Tompkins is a model for:

The kind of investigation she is doing (examining how different texts from different perspectives and time periods represent the same issue or event).
The form the essay takes.
The way she incorporates her own opinions into the essay.

Indeed, the teacher writes, “This paper requires you be the same kind of researcher and be similarly introspective about the meanings of texts you encounter and the responses that you have to those texts.” That the teacher italicized this information makes it even clearer that she wants the reader to take note of it.

Another knowledge base the assignment assumes the writer will draw from is the library. In the section titled “Sources of Information,” the teacher writes, “we will work on developing research strategies for this paper using the computer lab.” Here, as is often the case in English 130, the teacher does not expect you to rely solely on the research skills you gleaned from other high school and college courses, but takes time in class to help you develop the skills you need as a writer in the university.

In essence, every course you take at Chico State is working toward building a knowledge base that will comprise your educational experience here. Each individual assignment is like a bridge that connects the knowledge you have with the new methods and information that will enhance that knowledge.

Question #3: What is the purpose for writing the assignment and what analytical methods do I need to complete it?

In our analysis of “Paper Two,” we now have a sense of the task at hand, the knowledge base the writer is expected to draw from to complete the task, and how this inquiry will develop the writing and thinking skills of the student.

But what writers are always looking for in an assignment—the lifeboat that keeps you afloat when you are trudging through the words, words, words of assignment sheets—is the statement on the rhetorical purpose of the task: why are we writing? To explore? Entertain? Inform? Persuade?

Conveniently, an answer appears in the heading “Audience and Purpose:” “Your purpose is both to become a more sophisticated scholar and to involve readers in puzzling through the texts you encountered just as you puzzled your way through them.” Notice that the word “puzzle” comes up twice here; it is the only sentence in the whole assignment sheet in which this word appears. The purpose of the assignment is to puzzle, or to think through a problem until you come to a solution or a resolution. This key word is one we missed in our earlier scan of the essay, but it is crucial because it can be related to the method needed to fulfill the assignment:

Your paper will provide information about the issue or event, it will include several accounts of this subject written by people with differing perspectives, and it will present possible reasons for differing perspectives you find. You will come to a conclusion about the meaning of your research.

From pairing these descriptions we learn that the purpose of this essay is three-fold:

It will inform readers about the issue.
It will analyze competing versions of the event.
It will express the opinions of the writer as she made sense of the information she found.

This essay is asking the writer to set up a puzzle, and to describe how and to what extent they solved it, using Tompkins as a model of the ideal puzzle master at work.

Question #4: Who is my audience?

A lot of the writing you have done in high school, and for other classes in the university, has had one audience: the teacher. Notice that in “Paper Two,” the teacher alters the tradition of writing essays in private and for the teacher’s eyes only. The shift might seem too subtle to even care about when she asks the students to write, not for her, but for “an audience of interested readers.”

But a more thorough description is given in “Assessment,” where she writes, “address an audience of readers that has not read what you have read and favors a broadly believed and simplistic view of an important event.” This description nicely amplifies the earlier one. We learn that, although the audience is “interested” in the writer’s choice of issue/event/conflict, they are not as informed as you are, and for the most part believe mainstream, overly simplistic views of the event. In a sense, the teacher is asking you to take on the role of teacher for your readers.

By examining how the teacher characterizes audience in this assignment, we end up seeing how closely an essay’s audience and its purpose are linked. The writer’s task is to inform her audience and even persuade them to move beyond their simplistic understandings of the issue. The writer does this by revealing her thought process as she engaged in the research. A good lesson is learned here: always be clear on who your audience is for any text you write: it will influence the writing’s tone, structure, and message—in other words, its purpose.

Question #5: What form should the essay take and what writing conventions should I follow?

Another word for an essay’s form is “genre.” You are probably familiar with literary genres like drama, short stories, or poems. In terms of writing in the university, the forms include those listed above, but stretch to comprise lab reports, field notes, expository essays, and grant applications, among others.

Forms reflect the values and knowledge that certain disciplines and fields work within, and following the writing conventions of a given discipline helps you to be recognized and taken seriously in that community. In short, appropriate form gives you credibility.

In the section “Genre,” the teacher offers students a kind of outline of the essay’s form when she writes, in the second paragraph,

Your paper will provide information... [.] It will include several accounts of the subject written by people with differing perspectives, and it will present possible reasons for the differing perspectives you find. You will come to a conclusion about the meaning of your research...

Coming upon such sentences in assignment descriptions is akin to coming upon a $10 bill on your way to class: it is an unexpected boon. Here’s why:

Hints about the introduction. The teacher suggests that your essay opens by providing some background information to readers. After all, she tells you elsewhere that the audience is interested but much less informed than you.
Hints about how to organize the research and analysis. The next sentence indicates the method that Tompkins uses, in that the teacher wants your essay to shift into directly presenting and evaluating research and the perspectives on the issue each source offers. It seems this form—having a kind of dialogue with published sources—will comprise the main form of the essay.
Hints about the conclusion. Often we think of conclusions as places to repeat everything we’ve already said in the essay. Clearly, the teacher does not want this kind of approach. Instead, she seems to be asking: so what? What’s the meaning of the research you’ve read and the conclusions you’ve come to about the event? In this way, the conclusion takes the paper in a new and provocative direction.

The assignment sheet is also clear about another aspect of “form,” one that is more related to format, or how an essay should appear on the page and how sources should be handled. Your English 130 instructors will talk with you about MLA format—a system used in the Arts and Humanities (foreign language, History, English, for example) to help you ethically include other scholars’ ideas into your own sentences, and to fully disclose where those sources can be found, should your reader’s interest be piqued enough to want to read more. Your instructor will require you to purchase a handbook that will help you with grammar and citing source material. Both the University Writing Center and the Merriam Library also have excellent handouts that guide you through citing sources accurately.

Question #6: Where will the information for this essay come from: personal experience? Primary or secondary source research? Assigned reading? Other sources?

The source of information for an essay varies widely with each course you take. In biology, your writing may rely on the data that comes from your lab experiments. If you’re writing a short story, though, your source of information might be a personal experience. Since the goal of English 130 is to develop the writing skills and practices you need to succeed in the university, our assignments often build toward the analysis of research on a given topic, one chosen by the teacher, by the class, or by yourself.

We see this clearly in “Paper Two,” which relies on primary source research. The essay asks the writer to find a variety of perspectives on the same issue or event, and so the writer will have to search the library bookshelves, the on-line databases the library subscribes to, and even the internet to find the needed information.

But another source of information is required for this essay: the responses of the writer to the information they find. The writer is asked not just to have an opinion about all she reads, but then to draw conclusions from the aggregate of the research experience. University-level research might be likened to the work of brick-layers: foundations of knowledge are built on those who came before. As students, you read that work, but then you start to add your own bricks to the edifice of information on a given topic. The mortar between the bricks is the conversation that takes place between the existing, established ideas, and the new ones laid upon them. To succeed in the university is to build your self into that knowledge structure.

Question #7: How will my final essay be evaluated?

When students say to teachers, “just tell us what you want,” often they mean, “just tell us what we have to do to get an A on this essay.” A strong academic record is imperative so that, when you graduate, you have as many choices as possible for career paths and for personal growth. Teachers of English 130 understand this and are working to be as clear about their expectations as possible.

In the “Assessment” section of “Paper Two,” the teacher not only states how she will evaluate the essay once it is completed, but she correlates the fulfillment of requirements to specific letter grades! This may be the most transparent way for you to know “what a teacher wants.” If the assignment descriptions you receive don’t include this kind of information, and you think you’d benefit from it, consider asking your teacher for more information.

A more pro-active approach might be to create a checklist for yourself of the main requirements of the assignment. Do this by re-reading the assignment and making a list of its main requirements. When you have completed a full draft of your essay, read it with your checklist by your side, making sure that you have addressed all the components of the task.

Conclusion

Teachers can work hard to write assignments that are clear yet challenging, students can learn techniques to better read and understand those assignments, and confusion can still set in. This is the tricky nature of the communication process.

Sometimes it isn’t until the student jumps into the deep end of the research and writing pool that a real understanding of the task sets in. For this reason, writing in the university setting requires a patient negotiation among the student, their peers, and their teacher throughout the entire process: from reading the assignment sheet, to developing skills and methods, to brainstorming ideas, drafting, revising, and polishing.

By the end of this process we in the writing program hope that you’ve grown as a critical thinker, communicator, and writer. We hope that, when in doubt, you ask questions of your teacher and your peers. We also hope you consider paying a visit to our University Writing Center, located in Taylor Hall, where student assistants are available to help you with everything from decoding an assignment to revising a draft. We hope that, if you don’t already, you might even call yourself a writer by the end of your time in English 130.

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Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. "

—Sharon O'Brien