‘Tis the season! While many of us anticipate the upcoming holidays and start to plan the myriad of celebrations, not everyone is occupied with visions of sugarplums. High school and college students face end-of-semester term papers and final exam essays for classes that are not IEW writing classes. Even experienced IEW writing students can be stymied by unfamiliar language in a writing assignment or by a paper with what seems like excessive length requirements. When your panicking students reach out, reassure them that they have learned all they need to know about tackling the assignment and you will walk alongside them to show them how.
The first step is to discuss the prompt with your student. A prompt simply states the assignment, what the instructor expects the student to write about. Sometimes the professor will use clear language. Other times, students need to decipher what type of essay they will write. You can help your students see how their particular prompt fits into their IEW instruction. Nearly always, a student can find clues tucked into the prompt.
- Write about a place that is important to you. Include a detailed description as well as the significance of that place. This essay is a description essay and will use Unit 7: Inventive Writing.
- Tell about a challenge you have faced and how it impacted your life. This could be accomplished with a narrative essay or a basic essay that follows the Unit 7 model.
Both of these essays are looking for a personal response from the student. Students should use first person pronouns, but not second person pronouns, as they write. Asking questions beyond the basic six (who, what, when, where, why, how), students will write with deeper content, revealing more of their character to the reader.
- Consider the reasons for discontinuing production of the penny and speculate what the results of this decision will be. This essay asks the student to determine the cause and effect of a government ruling.
- Reflect on the two essays read in class. How do the authors’ viewpoints agree and where do they diverge? This essay requires students to compare and contrast.
- Build a case for stronger regulation in social media. Consider precedence and potential unforeseen consequences of such control. This argumentative essay allows students to stand on their soapbox and shout their opinion, providing evidence from experts to support their viewpoints.
- Convince me (the professor) why you should be allowed to skip this final term paper. This is our old friend, the persuasive essay. Subtly drawing the instructor over to their side of the argument is key.
All four of these prompts will use the formal essay models presented in Unit 8. Except for the final prompt, these are research-based essays where students provide evidence from experts to support their analysis.
Determining what the prompt asks for tells students what process to follow. Starting with the Structure and Style® for Students video courses and continued in the new Hillsdale Writing Across the Curriculum courses, IEW sets a clear process for writing:
- Determine the subject.
- Make a list of possible topics.
- Choose topics.
- # topics = # paragraphs
- Write a key word outline.
- Write paragraphs (body, conclusion, introduction).
- Submit to an editor.
- Polish the final draft.
Once students know the model to use, they need to determine how long the paper needs to be. Without a doubt, the least compassionate instructors will tell students ALAINTBTDTJ (as long as it needs to be to do the job). This worthless instruction falls into Andrew Pudewa’s four deadly errors of teaching writing: unclear expectations. Students will have to wing it and cross their fingers that their essay does the job. Most professors, though, specify a page length or word count. This leaves IEW students, who are used to assignments with a paragraph requirement, wondering how many paragraphs they need for a two- to three-page essay.
In a number of the high school courses, such as Structure and Style for Students: Year 1 Level C and University-Ready Writing, Andrew Pudewa explains how to move from the number of words or number of pages required to how many paragraphs are needed. Once a student has determined this conversion rate, it becomes a valuable resource for all writing assignments.
Using two to four essays, determine the average paragraph length by number of words or how much of the page the paragraph fills. For example, Sue’s paragraphs average 125 words, which cover about half a page.
A two-page assignment will require about four paragraphs: two body paragraphs plus an introduction and a conclusion.
A one-thousand-word essay will require about eight paragraphs. This could be accomplished with an expanded essay with six topics or with a super-essay composed of two four-paragraph area essays.
As always, the key is to not skip the editing step. All strong writers use an editor. For your students, this could be a parent, a roommate, a former instructor, or the writing center on campus. The instructor responsible for the assignment might even be willing to provide feedback on a draft. The first draft should never be the final draft. Taking the time to vary sentence structure and use engaging vocabulary, students will craft a more polished essay to fill the requirements of the course.
Consider giving your college-bound students a copy of Portable Walls™ for Academic Writing to take the essay models with them. This resource not only reminds students of the basic five-paragraph essay model, but also it includes models for expanded essays (6–7 paragraphs), expanded topics (8–11 paragraphs), super-essays (12–16 paragraphs), and the longer term paper.
Don’t leave your students to panic with the unfamiliar wording in a prompt. Instead, show them how the prompt fits the IEW language they have learned and mastered. Talk them through the planning process, then set them free to do what they are well equipped to do: write an organized essay with engaging language that leaves their instructors asking, “Who taught you to write this well?” Over time, your students will gain confidence to independently analyze prompts by translating them into IEW language that is familiar to them.
by Marci Harris
