What Do They Want?
When you face a challenging or high-stakes writing assignment, your first question is likely to be, What do they want? Your instructor or your work supervisor may—or may not—provide explicit directions about your task. Either way, your first step is to gather information about the assignment.
ASSIGNMENT CHECKLIST
Do you have a written assignment distributed in class, posted online, provided in your syllabus, or included in your job description?
Have you taken notes on verbal advice or directions? Have you thoughtfully read advice posted online by your instructor?
Does your assignment identify or imply a purpose and an audience?
Does it specify the approach, activity, method, or product?
Does it require a standard format, perhaps based on a style guide, a sample lab report, headings in a journal article, an evaluation form, past annual reports at work, or some other model?
Does it use key words that you recognize from your writing class or other situations? For instance, does it ask you to explain effects, evaluate, or summarize, drawing on skills you have used recently?
What criteria will be used to assess the success of your writing task?
Analyzing Expectations
When a challenging writing assignment comes from the instructor in a class where you need to succeed, or from the boss you have to satisfy, shift your attention from yourself to your audience. Whether you feel confident, puzzled, or anxious, focus on what is expected. Apply your experience decoding past assignments to analyzing current ones. Do the same with your experience identifying a writing purpose and audience. Try writing notes on or about your assignment to help you tease out all the available clues about how to succeed.
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Connecting Expectations and Assessments
Expectations may be most clearly expressed in assessment criteria. What are the standards for performance or outcomes in your course or workplace? How will your paper or project be judged? If you will be graded or assigned points based on the presence, absence, or quality of specific features or components, these are also part of “what they want.”
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Try turning your requirements or assessment criteria into a checklist or self-assessment questions for yourself. For example, you might convert the criteria in the previous example to these four questions:
Do I have a clear and compelling introduction to my proposal?
Have I included a well-researched review of relevant literature?
Do I clearly explain my theoretical framework for examining the problem?
Do I clearly describe and justify the methods for my study?
If you worry about forgetting or skipping over the assessment details, try breaking out each expectation as a separate question:
Do I have an introduction? Is it clear? Is it compelling?