College Writing

College Writing Study Guide

©2020 Page 27 of 42 4.3 Unpacking the Prompt – What “They” Want and Who “They” Are Most writing that receives low scores isn’t bad; it just doesn’t �it the prompt. So understanding the prompt is vital to understanding what you have to write and how you need to approach the assignment. The �irst question you should ask yourself is who is the audience. Who is supposed to read what you’re about to write? The �irst answer you might think of is the exam readers or exam graders , but this creates the performative relationship between writer/reader that you want to avoid. Sometimes the exam question will give you the audience directly, but if the exam question leaves out the speci�ic audience, then imagine someone with whom you have a respectful intellectual relationship, someone who is interested in your ideas and willing to be convinced by them. Second, read the prompt to understand what the primary task is. You know that you’ll be required to write, but are you supposed to convince somebody to do something? Are you supposed to advance a particular argument? Finally, often the prompts will ask speci�ic direct questions. When the prompts do this, the question writers are providing you with the organization for your essay. Devote a paragraph to answering each question. Look for keywords like “argue” or “describe.” These are two different kinds of writing, so be sure to respond accordingly. When human exam readers look at your work, they approach it the same way you do: they want good, intelligent, engaging arguments that make them think about the subject and the world in a new way. Always think of your reader as your friend. 4.4 Composing Primarily, composing is about executing the plan you formed during the pre-writing process and re- membering all you know about grammar and structure. If you have done the planning and thinking that you should do in the pre- writing process, you will �ind composin g much easier, but a failure to adequately plan or think through your subject will cause you to delay in order to explore your ideas while you’re writing. Generally, there are two ways writers compose. One is typi�ied by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a professional w riter and satirist, who would spend over �ifteen minutes on a single sentence, ensuring that every word was the most �itting word for his meaning. He would rearrange the sentence’s structure this way and that, playing with word choices and phrasing. Every sentence was a meticulous exercise until he �inished what he was working on. The other way to compose is typi�ied by Jack Kerouac, a professional writer who wrote the �irst draft of On the Road on a scroll. Kerouac and similar writers believed that the �ir st thought was always the Achieve