Where To Go From Here: Redefining Your Writing Prompt
In our appointments in the Writing Center, we typically talk
about the writing process as something defined by the writing assignments you
get from your instructors. Let’s say you’re asked to write a 3-5 page paper
responding to a prompt about a topic you’ve been studying. You might use a process like the one we describe on our website, in which you complete
subsequent steps to achieve a particular writing goal. We often use the word iterative
to describe this process, which means that you’ll rarely go through these steps
just once for any given writing task—typically, you’ll go through them a few
times, making progress in each cycle until the paper is as complete as you can
make it.
This is an excellent way to approach many projects,
especially relatively short course papers. In my perspective as an instructor, I also think it
helps writers develop a strong writing practice. You might question, though,
whether this process is ideal for other kinds of projects—should you take these
same steps when writing something long, like a master’s thesis. Conversely,
what if you only need to revise a portion of a paper—a section or even just a
paragraph?
When you’re in a situation like this, I argue that you
can—and should—use the process described above, but you should add an important
step at the beginning. Rather than taking your assignment instructions as your
prompt, your first task now should be to redefine your prompt based on what you
need to accomplish. Often, this involves breaking a large project into a set
of smaller projects in order to establish a set of criteria (or set a goal) for the project by asking yourself questions about what your
finished product should look like.
Let’s go through a hypothetical example to illustrate how this
new redefined writing process might work. Let’s say you’ve written a paper and had it reviewed by an instructor in the Writing Center. For the most part, it
looks good: it’s clear on the sentence level, your body paragraphs are clearly
organized, and you draw several key conclusions about your overall topic. The
instructor noted, however, that it’s missing a thesis statement, and they recommend that you provide one early in the paper to
give your reader a good sense of what you’re arguing.
Here’s a process you
might use for this task:
Redefine your prompt: “I need to add a thesis statement in
the introduction of my paper. It should include just 1-2 sentences, and it
needs to be specific, concise, and arguable.”
Read critically: Gather ideas you could use or refer to in
your thesis. This might involve rereading your paper and noting the conclusions
you’ve drawn about your evidence. How do these conclusions fit together? What
bigger argument do they contribute to? What overall claim are you making?
Organize: Make a plan for your thesis statement. You could
even write a short outline to make sure you’re covering everything you need to. (This
might also be a good time to read through the Writing Center’s thesis-statement web page or watch our Writing Strong Thesis Statements webinar to get more information on what your
thesis should include.)
Write your rough draft: Write your thesis statement.
Revise: Take a look at your draft and compare it to the redefined prompt you set. Is anything missing? Is anything included that shouldn’t be?
Write your final draft: Make one more pass through your
thesis for clarity and style, then insert it into your overall paper.
Reflect: Think about how this went and any changes you could
make for the future. You might, for example, remind yourself to include a thesis
during the planning step when you write your next paper.
Of course, the details of each step in the process will vary
depending on the task at hand. For a section of a literature review, your
prompt might be something like “write a 1-2 page synthesis of the articles I
read that address technological barriers to EHR adoption in rural clinics,” and
for a major assessment project it might be “in 1-2 paragraphs, identify the
problem of high teacher attrition rates and the gap in the literature regarding this topic.”
You may not need to take all of these steps for every
writing task you face—in some situations they may not all be strictly necessary
(e.g., you may not need to revise or reflect when fixing a minor word-choice
issue), and you may take some of them subconsciously. I encourage you, though,
to practice setting your own criteria for your writing tasks. It can help you
manage your projects, use your time judiciously, and become a more
self-sufficient writer.
Matt Sharkey-Smith is a senior writing instructor in the Walden Writing Center. He also serves as contributing faculty in the Walden Academic Skills Center. Matt joined the Writing Center in 2010 with a BA in English from Saint John's University in Minnesota. He earned an MFA in Writing from Hamline University in St. Paul in 2011 and has worked outside of Walden as a technical writer, fact-checker, copy editor, tutor, and writing instructor.
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