Writing Prompt about Water Intake

Water is a liquid that we drink every day. Humans need to drink at least 8 glasses of water everyday. How many glasses do you drink every day? Explain why you drink that.

Linda responds:

Your submission appears to be a writing prompt for some subject other than English language arts, perhaps a science or health class. The prompt can be answered entirely from the writer's personal experience in no more than two sentences; it does not require any consideration of your class content. Thus in late middle school or above, the prompt is suitable only for informal writing.

Since you did not provide any context for interpreting this submission to the teacher's writing prompt forum, I do not know what you hope to accomplish with your prompt. Maybe all you are doing is satisfying some administrator who wants you to use writing. It would do that.

However, if you are trying to assess student behavior, activate knowledge, or identify problems students are having understanding the class material, this prompt is not going to work.

Your writing prompt attempts to establish a context for the writing; that is usually a good tactic. In this case, since your context states a rule, you are telling respondents what they ought to say in an approved response. That means the written responses are likely to be slanted toward what students think you want to hear—which provides you with no information on which to estimate students' water intake.

The writing prompt also is unlikely to produce genuine reasons for less than optimal water intake. Drinking water is not an act that most people do and track deliberately.

If you are going to use informal writing in your classes, why not use writing prompts that actually help you do a better job of teaching your subject?

Suppose you revamped your question to this:

Humans need to drink at least 8 glasses of water everyday. On Tuesday, Ted had three 12-oz cups of coffee, an 8-oz glass of milk, a 6-ounce glass of orange juice, and a16-ounce bottle of diet soda. Did Ted meet his water target for the day? Explain your reasoning in 3-5 sentences.

That revamped writing prompt forces students to think about some essential issues such as the definition of water, the meaning of glass in the rule, and how to compute water intake.

I suggest you take a look at the page on which I give informal writing prompts on grammar topics. Even if you are not a grammarian, I think you can see how the prompts are used to advance the class learning program.