Writing Effective Essay Prompts

Purpose of Writing Prompts

I'd like to begin by making two important points about what the purpose of an essay prompt is. First, the ultimate goal of academic writing is for students to be able to identify their own topics and research questions. Since they probably can't do this to begin with, we provide them with writing prompts. This means that essay prompts are essentially scaffolding. That is, they ideally provide support for students to accomplish something they cannot currently do while also building the framework for skills they'll be able to use independently in the future. 

In addition, prompts in a writing class should have a different function than in a content class. In a content class, like say biology or history, an essay topic is often assigned to a student so that they can demonstrate knowledge of what they have learned. If the class just finished a unit on World War II, for instance, an appropriate prompt might be for them to write on the effects of the war on the German economy. In a writing class, however, the content is writing itself. So unless we want to assign some sort of bizarre meta-writing assignments (e.g., "What is the correct way to organize the essay you're currently writing?"), we need to consider some other options.

Besides demonstrating knowledge essays can also be written to create original knowledge. That is, instead of simply regurgitating what they learned from the unit, they can create a unique and original work based on their own ideas. What both of these points bring me to is critical thinking. When writing an essay prompt, I'm trying to prepare the students to be able to identify issues and create their own research questions. In addition, I want them to be able to write using new ideas instead of just repeating ones they've already learned.

Negotiable Curriculum

To accomplish this, I start with what is termed a negotiable curriculum (Mirembe, 2002). The original article where I read this from is about how a teacher in Uganda who had to to teach a sex education class, but instead of using the standard curriculum, elicited ideas from the students and built the syllabus around that. I figure if it's good enough for sex education, then it's good enough for my writing class. About a week before beginning an essay, I have an informal discussion with the students where we try to generate ideas for topics together. For instance, we recently worked on argumentative essays, and before that I gave the students the following task. I wrote on the board:

For each of the following categories, write which improvements you'd like to make.

• Personal
• Community
• University
• Country

Students would then have 5-10 minutes to write their answers (anonymously, of course) and then submit them to me. After class, I would go through all of the students' responses and see which ones had a high frequency. For instance, my students frequently talk about how they wish they had better time management skills under the personal category, or how they'd like to improve traffic in their community. Based on the high frequency interests that the class shares, I would then create prompts for the students to write on. In this way, I'm providing scaffolding for students by putting them on the path to identifying issues, but not yet having them create the actual research questions themselves.

A Few Rules

For creating the actual questions, I have a few rules that I try and follow. First, it should generally be a topic I know something about. This is simply because I have to make comments on the content of the essays and don't have time to look information up. A few semesters back I made the mistake of giving students the topic of "Which smartphone is better for students: iPhone or Blackberry." The problem is that I have never used a Blackberry, so whenever students said something about it, I had absolutely no idea if it was accurate or not.

Similar to this idea, my next rule is that it should be a topic the students already know something about. The first-year writing course I teach is not a research course, but even if it were I'd want to follow this rule. One reason for this is time since it would take the students more time than we have to research a completely new topic and then write about it. The other reason is that I again want them to create something original based on their own ideas, and if they have no previous knowledge of the topic, then this will be unlikely.

My next rule for topics is that it has to be something I actually want to read. Part of this is because there are certain topics that I've already read hundreds of times and don't want to read again. My university is gender-segregated with separate campuses for men and women. As such, students always want to write about having mixed gender classes, but I really don't feel like reading about it again. The other reason is that if I want them to write something unique and original, it should be about something where I actually want to know their opinions. Students frequently get asked to write about global warming, but to be honest, I really don't care what a 20-year old Qatari girl's opinion about global warming is. I recognize that it is important for my students to learn about and form responsible opinions about environmental issues, but if I didn't have to mark their assignments, I wouldn't have any interest in reading their opinion. There are, on the other hand, plenty of topics about my students' lives that I would like to know more about, since I otherwise only get to see small glimpses of their lives and culture. 

 Forcing Them to Think Critically

That isn't to say that I wouldn't use global warming as a topic. I try to write the questions in a way that usually involves some sort of synthesis in order to force them to think critically and make connections. So I would never give them something as simple as "What are the effects of global warming?", but I might give them "In what ways does global warming affect families in Qatar?"

Sometimes I come up with how to make a topic more specific based on follow-up questions I might have. For instance, a common topic that seems to float around our program is "Why is fast food popular?" which I don't find terribly interesting. Students usually respond with something about how inexpensive it is, which I think is kind of a ridiculous answer in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. So one semester I came up with this:

Inexpensive fast food is generally popular among the lower-class, yet it is extremely popular in Qatar, which is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Address this paradox by writing about the causes of the popularity of fast food restaurants in Qatar.

While they could answer the prompt, "Why is fast food popular?" without having to give it much thought, it is basically impossible to answer this second prompt without some level of critical thinking.

Similar to this, I try to write prompts that don't involve a lot of extremes. For instance, my students are very used to answering prompts where they have to argue for or against banning something, like cellphones in the classroom, or fast food on campus. In these essays, their arguments end up being that the topic being discussed is either completely good (so it should be kept) or completely terrible (so it should be banned). I try to use language that doesn't force them to one extreme or the other, like asking whether something should be limited or restricted, but not outright banned. This again forces them to think critically and in degrees instead of simply arguing that something is entirely good or entirely bad.
 
I think that sums up my thoughts pretty well. Oh, and I'll even cite the source I used here.

Mirembe, R. (2002). AIDS and democratic education in Uganda. Comparative Education, 38(3), 291-302. doi:10.1080/0305006022000014151