Additional Writing Assignments

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Instructor's Notes

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  1. Write an essay about a noticeable, lasting change that has taken place in your lifetime, exploring its causes, effects, or both to help you and your audience understand that change better. The change might have affected only you, such as a move or a decision, or it might have affected your community, region, or society at large (such as new industries or medical breakthroughs).

  2. Identify a major event, person, circumstance, habit, or other factor that shaped you as a person. In your journal, write informally about this cause and its effects on you. Use this entry to develop a cause-and-effect essay that will enlighten readers about how you came to be the person that you are now.

  3. Write a formal letter addressed to someone who could make a change that you advocate. Support this change by explaining causes, effects, or both. For example, address a college official to support a change in a campus policy, the principal to advocate for a change at your child’s school, or your work supervisor to encourage a change in procedures.

  4. Source Assignment. Read a news or magazine article that probes the causes of a current problem: the shortage of certain types of jobs, for instance, or tuition increases in your state. Write an essay in which you argue that the author has or has not done a good job of explaining the causes of this problem. Be sure to credit the article correctly.

  5. Visual Assignment. Write an essay explaining the causes, effects, or both captured or implied in the visuals below. Establish the purpose of your explanation, effectively identify and organize the causes or effects, and support your points with details that you observe in the images.

    image
    This graph shows a decrease in the percentage of households with landline phones and an increase in the number of households that own only cell phones over a ten-year period.

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    A lineman repairs storm-damaged telephone lines in McNeill, Mississippi. Landline infrastructure is aging and repairs are expensive, which has led some phone companies to advocate for the relaxation of repair requirements and for the transition of certain areas to wireless-only service.
    AP Images/Rogelio V. Solis.
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    In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, some residents in New York City struggled to find cell phone service.
    Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images.