Things That Work: Writing Effective Assignments

Five Qualities of a Good Assignment
While no assignment is infallible, effective assignments tend to share the following characteristics:

1. Brevity. An assignment should be no more than five or six sentences. Two-thirds of the page left blank is rhetorical. It anticipates response. If an assignment rambles, engages in excessive summarization or contextualization, is long-winded or undisciplined, it is difficult to fault student papers for responding in kind.

2. Clarity. Students want to know what is being asked of them. While good assignments never have clear answers, they must always have clear questions. Students should not have to decipher assignments. They should understand the assignment after reading it once. Good assignments, therefore, are neither brilliant nor complex. Instead, good assignments elicit brilliant and complex student papers.

3. Specificity. The assignment provides an opportunity for a student to excel by answering a specific question. A good assignment, therefore, will contain only one question. Of course, the question can (and sometimes should) be rephrased or restated for the sake of clarity or emphasis. The question should be in italics, boldface or underlined. Concise and specific assignment questions encourage students to write concise and specific responses.

4. Neutrality. Assignments should avoid therapeutic posturing. Assignments which solicit unconditional "connection-making," or which lack a center, often produce overly general essays which fail to move beyond comparison and contrast. A successful assignment asks a specific question, but the question has numerous possible answers. The assignment might even emphasize that there is no "right" answer to the question. Questions which solicit specific answers and "connections," or which have agendas, are unfair and insidiously conformist. Students sense it and resent it. Assignments can only encourage generosity and open-mindedness by example.

5. Controversy. Assignments which encourage only consensus, or which require students to be autobiographical, shut down productive avenues of analysis. An effective assignment presents the essays students read not as "true," but as inherently controversial and contentious, as interventions in an ongoing debate, in which the student, too, has a right to intervene. Students like to feel that there is something at stake in advancing a particular thesis (besides their grade). When students understand that their own arguments are controversial, that they can be refuted and countered, their writing becomes more subtle and thoughtful, their assumptions less unquestioned.

--Matthew Kaiser

Why I Write Short Essay Assignments
The first essay assignment I ever wrote was a page long (not including another half page of quotations from the text we had read that I interspersed throughout the assignment). As I recall, the assignment was about John Berger, bias and personal perspective, Marxism, and the experience of visiting museums. One of the many questions I posed went something like: "Where do you see Berger's own Marxist bias enter into play in 'Ways of Seeing' and what impact does it have?" I even provided a handy definition of Marxism ("school of thought that concerns itself with money, the unequal distribution of wealth, and class inequality"). This assignment, as you may have guessed, was an utter disaster. The students were confused by Berger's style, and my assignment's apparent insistence that there was a Marxist "hidden meaning" only discouraged them even more. Having been alerted to a Marxist in their midst, half of my class went off on anti-communist tirades with plenty of flag waving but without any direct reference to the reading. The other half of the class just ignored the parts of my assignment they didn't understand or didn't want to deal with and eventually handed in papers that made occasional references to why Berger liked the "mystification" of art because it kept art so mysterious and beautiful, and/or why he hated museum postcards because now everyone could have art at home; these essays reached the almost universal conclusions that "We're all entitled to our own opinion" or that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

At the time, I was most disheartened by the fact that no one had apparently read my assignment, intricate and complete as it was, for if they had, they would have seen just how fiendishly clever I was in providing them with a template for writing their papers:

"What's not to understand? I tell you all the topics I want you to address! Look at the questions I ask you! Build paragraphs around them! I only provided you with those citations on the assignment sheet as something of a starting point; they weren't supposed to be the only quotations you used! Do you want me to write the paper for you? Why is it that I can say more intelligent things in one page than you can in five!?!"

Of course, I never said any of these things in class or to my students, but private rants to friends and colleagues contained variations on all of the above.

Finally, I went to the Writing Program office and talked with the 101 coordinator. His suggestion was simple: keep the essay assignments simple. He suggested keeping the assignments down to five sentences or shorter; ideally, I should be able to print out two copies of the topic on one page and then use the paper cutter. His reason for short assignments was obvious: with my page/page-and-a-half long assignment, I was basically setting my students up for a game of "Guess What I'm Thinking," and, inevitably, most of them wouldn't guess right. My students were, in fact, just answering my questions (or failing to answer them) rather than drafting their own essays through studying the text. A shorter essay assignment, while presenting the danger of overly general essay responses, nevertheless necessitates that students work to narrow their own topics, work to find the best citations from the text for the support and demonstration of their ideas, and work to sort and organize the materials of their responses according to the needs of the paper and the needs of their individual arguments. A shorter essay assignment means stepping back, giving up some control, and letting your students do the work.

--Jason Geiger