Tackling Your First College Writing Assignment

Written by Anna Whitaker

Picture this: it’s three weeks into the semester and you’re facing down your first college-level writing assignment. Whether this is a research paper, a Think Piece, or a narrative essay, we’ve got some handy tips and tricks to get you started!

1. Get all the details.

Knowing everything you can about the assignment is going to make things a lot easier in the long run. Details and instructions can be found in several places; usually, they are on the assignment itself in Canvas, as well as the syllabus. Don’t be afraid to reach out to your professor, either. They want to see you succeed – they know everything about the assignment (they’re the ones who made it!) and are more than willing to share the nitty gritty details with you. Here are a few things you’re going to want to know about what you’re writing:

• Format: Does your professor want MLA, APA, or something different?
• Genre: Is this an argumentative research paper or a lab report? Are you writing an editorial piece or a lengthy literary analysis? Understanding the assignment genre will help guide your writing.
• Technical Details: What’s the word requirement? How many sources are you supposed to have?

2. Figure out your topic, and outline it.

This is a key component in the writing process, because without it, you’ll have no idea where you’re going or even where to start! First, you’ll want to brainstorm your topic. What are you going to write about? What appeals to you? What topic has plenty of sources available for you to draw on?

Once you’ve decided, create an outline of what you want your paper to look like. It can be as bare as three or four bullet points, or you can go in-depth with topic sentences for each paragraph and jumpstart your research process by including links to sources. Outlining looks different for everybody – the goal is to have some guidance that can (and will) evolve as you develop your paper.

3. Jump into the writing!

You can start with your introduction, or dive straight into the body paragraphs. Writing doesn’t need to be linear, so go with whatever flow works for you. Remember, your first draft isn’t going to be perfect. The first draft exists so that you can get all your thoughts onto the paper – polishing and editing comes later in the process. As you write, keep the assignment guidelines in mind; your arguments, claims, and use of evidence should align with your thesis (a statement, usually in the introduction paragraph, that makes a claim about your topic and outlines how you’re going to back up that claim).

4. Bonus points: head over to the Write Site before you submit your paper to get advice and feedback from top-tier writers and English students.

The Write Site is a free service open to all Texas Woman’s University students (undergraduate and graduate) that assists with all aspects of writing. They help with big-picture issues (such as structure and argument development) to smaller scale items (like grammar and formatting). You can submit your first first or your final draft. The Write Site can work with whatever you’ve got in a face-to-face or online appointment! Whenever you get stuck, the Write Site and its well-trained writing consultants are a great resource to utilize to help get you past any writing block you’re facing.

College writing may seem daunting at first, but you’ve got plenty of resources behind you to help get you were you need to go. Best of luck!

Your Professor is Not Your Audience

Written by Desiree Thorpe

When writing an assignment, it is easy to think that your audience is your professor, but that is not the case. In most assignments given, you will have to choose who your audience is. While it’s always best to check with your professors, it’s really important to understand that audience shapes how you write: it sets up your tone, purpose, and context.

The purpose of your English class is to help you become an agile writer that can write in different situations and contexts, so if you keep imagining your audience as your professor, it might be difficult to transfer that knowledge to new, real-world writing situations. However, it’s hard to not think of your professor as your audience especially since you’re turning in your paper for a grade!

But when you write for your professor, you can either 1) not include enough information for the audience or 2) use too much jargon from your class that your audience may not be familiar with. Choosing an audience might feel weird. It may be something that you never thought of. A couple of theorists who explain ways to address an audience might be the help you need.

Many theorists have different perspectives on the topic—one is Walter Ong who states that the audience is fiction. What he means is that you make up your audience and when you do that, you often create values and needs for an imagined audience.

An example Ong gives is that sometimes when you write a letter—or text message—, you are already imaging the person you are writing to and how they would react to what you say. The point is that imagining an audience can help your writing! However, if you imagine your professor as your audience, you might only be envisioning how they will grade and how you have shown your mastery of the genre—and while that is a reasonable thought, to truly master a genre, you need to have a real audience in mind. 

Another theorist is Peter Elbow! He explains that it is better to not have an audience in mind so that you can express your ideas in your first draft (Clark 111). But, this is only a first step because what tends to happen in a first draft, without an audience, is egocentric writing—writing for yourself.

That is, the first draft might be writer-based prose and not reader-based prose. Writer-based prose usually “omits contextual information or elaboration that an audience would need or includes information that an audience would not be able to understand without further explanation” (Clark 111). The next step after drafting without an audience is to revise and shape your writing to be reader-based prose—meaning, you add more information that the audience needs to know.

The next time you write a paper, try imagining an audience that isn’t your professor! Or, if you like to get your ideas on paper first, you can write for yourself and then imagine an audience as you revise.

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 References

Clark, Irene. Concepts in Composition: Theory and Practice in The Teaching of Writing. 2^nd ed., Routledge, 2012.