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Home : Writing prompts : 2 expository prompts

Two expository writing prompts
Compare a good one with a poor one

All expository writing prompts give students a reason to write. However, a prompt that does not contain enough information so students can respond appropriately is worth than worthless. A poor prompt

  • Creates frustration for students.

  • Damages your credibility as a writing teacher.

  • Makes additional work for you as students keep interrupting you to get more information about the assignment.

Who needs that grief?

A good prompt

After each National Assessment of Educational Progress (better known as Nation’s Report Card), the federal government posts questions from the test on its website. I’ll reproduce one here with my annotations so you can see that the questions follow the guidelines for a good writing prompt.

This one is a medium difficulty expository writing prompt for eight graders.

Writing prompt from US Dept. of Education.

What is good about this expository writing prompt?

  • It provides context.

  • The topic is stated clearly.

  • The range of acceptable responses is specified.

  • The prompt says who the audience is.

  • The directions are clear.

  • Take a look at the other sample expository writing prompts from the Nation’s Report Card tests. There are prompts for use at eight grade and twelfth grade. You can use the questions as models or actually use them in your classes as long as you include the source copyright information. You’d want to do that even if it were not required because it makes the assignment look more serious.

    A badly-written prompt

    A student posting on Yahoo Answers asked for help deciphering a writing assignment. I’m guessing the assignment was for a college class. I can’t imagine any high school teacher mangling a prompt so badly.

    Every person who responded to the student’s plea for help had the same reaction: the assignment was not clearly written. Here's what the prompt said:

    Poorly worded prompt

    What’s wrong with this as an expository writing prompt?

    • There’s no context indicated.

    • The topic is vague.

    • Multiple assertions about the topic are required making formulation of a thesis extremely difficult.

    • The point of the assignment is not indicated.

    • No audience is specified.

    • The format for the final paper is vaguely described.

    Besides all that, the prompt is written as a single 90-word sentence. Grammar-checking would have pointed out that the sentence was too long to be understandable.

    Give the instructor the benefit of the doubt: the typo might have been created by the student.

    The student who asked for help said she’d tried chopping the assignment apart and had checked the resources the teacher listed, but still did not’t know what to do. That’s the nub of the problem. The prompt does not give students help getting started.


    SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 1998 Writing Assessment.

     

     

     

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    Additional resources

    If you found this information helpful, you may also want writing prompts you can download and with your students in English language arts classes. For discussions and pdf downloads, click

    Thesis statements associated with those prompts will also be available.

    created 23-Apr-2008; updated: 11-Sep-2008

     

    No directions are so clear that some students will not misunderstand them.
    ~Linda Aragoni

     

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