Second of 2 free writing prompts
For high school English language arts

Authentic writing prompts drown from across the English Language Art curriculum can accomplish far more than a prompt on an out-of-class topic.

Even though students' interest in a prompt about an ELA topic may not be high, the authentic prompt lets you address at least one other ELA objective along with student practice in writing. My other page of free writing prompts for high school includes a bulleted list of the virtues of authentic prompts.

Information about how to get a copy of both free writing prompts legally is at the bottom of this page.

Free writing prompt: good questions

This free writing prompt topic addresses a vital but often overlooked skill: asking questions. Besides giving an occasion for writing, this prompt also makes students aware of the importance of phrasing questions well.

This prompt is useful for an instructor because it requires students to use several different kinds of skills that are part of both the ELA curriculum and normal life outside those classes.

Notice that students are asked to write a how-to article instead of a five-paragraph essay. The process students use to develop their how-to articles is the same strategic process used to develop a traditional five-paragraph essay.

To do this assignment, students must be able to:

• Distinguish between good and poor questions.

• Create representative sample questions.

• Analyze and evaluate writing samples without having a list of evaluation criteria.

Upper elementary students could do parts of this assignment without difficulty. Doing the entire assignment, however, requires skills and maturity more often associated with high school students.

Students who can handle this prompt

This prompt is designed for students who are already competent writers, not beginners. You can tell that because the writing prompt:

• Gives students latitude to frame their thesis as they wish.

• Lets students decide the number and types of points to make.

All that freedom makes this a difficult prompt for the inexperienced essayist.

Elements of the writing prompt

The writing prompt tells students that they must use their prep work from part 1 in their answers. The prep work lets students observe the context for themselves. The prompt states students use the questions so they see it is not just another dumb English teacher assignment.

You could have students pair off and work in two-person teams for the prep work. Students may get more value out of discussing the good and bad questions in teams than by working solo. Also, teamwork may help students whose grammatical sense is weak.

Since the writing prompt requires students to write a how-to article for online reading, the second part of their preparation is to identify features that promote easy online reading. Students may do research if they need to or choose to.

Here, too, student may benefit from working in teams to come up with features that make online reading easy.

Although I do not usually give word count targets, I deliberately included one in this prompt.

The length and title requirement in the prompt are typical of authors' guidelines for online articles. That gives any would-be writers an opportunity to do an authentic (and potentially publishable) piece of writing.

Click to see the thesis statement that responds to this writing prompt.

Raise or lower the challenge

If you read this page and the one on middle school writing prompts, you may have have realized that you can raise or lower the grade level of a prompt by changing the assignment details.

For example, to make a writing assignment more challenging, you could require students to:

• Use more types of sources.

• Develop their thesis by inductive analysis of specific information.

• Use skill or knowledge from more than one course component, such as literature and grammar.

Naturally, you can make an assignment easier by a narrower range of requirements.