Authentic writing prompts drawn 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.
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:
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, students 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.
