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As long as I’ve been teaching—thirty-one years now—I’ve been witness to a phenomenon that strikes me as a quintessentially human. Whenever I assign an essay, a significant percentage of my students ignore what is in the prompt in favor of what they wish were there. For the most part, it’s not that the students willfully disregard the assignment; instead, they seem to be subconsciously remaking it into something more conducive to their own interests.
The problem, of course, is that an instructor’s grading rubric is designed to respond to the prompt that’s actually there, and if the students and teacher aren’t, literally, on the same page, grades suffer and frustration is general. Moreover, I can’t help thinking that in a world where we too often look past anything we don’t want to see, carefully following an essay prompt is an excellent way to return students’ attention to the almost lost art of close and honest reading.
Consequently, I make a big deal out of scrutinizing essay prompts. In Hello, Writer (forthcoming from Bedford/St. Martins, September 2021) I ask students to read the prompt carefully, not just once or twice, but three times. On that third read-through, I encourage them to approach the prompt as they would any other assigned reading. Annotate it thoroughly: write questions in the margins for the professor, look for keywords, underline unclear vocabulary words, and make connections between different parts of the text.
I then ask students to return to the prompt yet again, this time with a specific set of goals in mind:
Granted, I can easily imagine a colleague thinking, So much about prompts! With all the other elements involved in the creation of an academic essay, is spending this much time and energy on them really necessary?
I think it is.
To thoroughly explore, question, and understand the prompt before a single word of the essay is written ensures that the prompt is central to the composition process. The prompt becomes the “still point of the turning world” of the assignment, the center to which students return whenever they feel lost or uncertain how to proceed.
To learn more about Hello, Writer, and opportunities to pilot in the fall, please contact Michelle.Clark@macmillan.com or something similar.
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