by Jan Youga

When students are taking one of my writing classes, they often come to me asking for advice about writing assignments from other courses in which they are enrolled. They often ask very good questions:

"My paper has to be on a topic selected from this list. The problem is I don't know anything about these topics. If all my information comes from sources, isn't that plagiarism?"

"My instructor told me not to put my opinion in this, but said that it's okay if I use "I." If I use first person, won't what I say seem like my opinion?"

"Is it okay to use personal observations in a formal analysis paper?"

When I hear questions like these, I am always delighted that students have learned enough about writing to know that issues about sources and voice are important, and I am more than happy to help them. However, my first attempt to be of service to them is often thwarted immediately when I ask the student, "Where's the assignment?" Almost invariably, they will tell me that the assignment was given orally in class, or they will show me a brief three line explanation on a syllabus about a "paper," an explanation which does not begin to address their questions.

When I was an undergraduate, I was often instructed to write a "paper" or an "essay." These terms were universally understood and varied in definition only according to length and use of sources. Now, I have only to glance at our own Keene State College Guide to Writing to know how much times have changed. I was never expected to write journals, reflection papers, reviews, or case studies. I wrote essays, all of which had basically the same structure (an increasingly sophisticated version of the basic 5 paragraph theme), the same style (formal, academic, no "I"), the same audience (the teacher), and the same purpose (to prove my understanding of the class material). The topics changed as I moved from course to course, but the paper remained virtually the same whether I wrote about Shakespeare, photosynthesis, the Civil War, political systems, or even Roman numerals (a paper I actually wrote to pass my one required mathematics course).

Fortunately for our students, the writing assignments we give are not so monolithic. We tailor our assignments to reflect the thought processes and formats of our disciplines. We challenge students to imagine or actually to write to audiences they will need to address in their future professions. We demand that they be reflective about their own learning instead of relying on us for all their critical feedback.

Unfortunately for our students, this variety also means that we do not define the words "paper" and "essay" in the same way, and so our students are not certain about our expectations around these assignments. Even when they look to the KSC Guide to Writing for help, they are faced with the challenge of understanding concepts such as discourse communities and multiple purposes.

Therefore, if we want good writing from our students and we want to receive papers that actually meet our expectations, we need to take on the responsibility of explaining our assignments to our students. The best way to do this is through written, detailed assignment sheets. The assignment sheets are helpful for three reasons:

1) They prove to the students that we ourselves can and do write when we want to communicate information; we become models for the skills we are trying to foster in them;

2) They force us to be as clear as possible about our expectations, our requirements, and our purpose for the assignment; we cannot change our mind midstream or criticize them for not completing some essential part of the paper that we never told them about. The written assignment acts like a contract between the student and teacher-students cannot pretend that they did not understand or know what was required, and the teacher cannot hold them accountable for criteria not specified; and

3) Reviewing an assignment sheet as part of the class makes the assignment itself an opportunity for learning; students have a chance to ask questions and to review key elements of the paper. The ensuing dialogue around the assignment can become part of the learning of the course; and the fact that class time is devoted to the explanation itself emphasizes the value of good writing.

As the results of the exercise in grading reported in this Newsletter show, not only do we not agree on the overall quality of a paper, we cannot even agree on how we define what ought to be merely technical matters, such as whether a paper has or does not have mechanical errors. The clearer we can be in our instructions and expectations, the less our students will feel that producing an "A" paper is a shot in the dark. The use of an assignment sheet makes the writing and evaluation enterprise in which we are engaged more honest and clear-two aspects of good writing we should all be willing to practice as well as preach.

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