A student in a first-year American history course had fifty-five minutes to answer two of three essay questions and three of five short-answer questions. She chose to answer the following question first.
Between 1870 and 1920, African Americans and women both struggled to establish certain rights. What did each group want? Briefly analyze the strategies each group used, and indicate how successful they were.
This student began her exam with this question because she knew the most about this topic. With another essay and three short answers to write, she decided to devote no more than twenty minutes to this essay.
First, she analyzed what the question asked her to do, noting the strategy terms. She decided that the first sentence of the question strongly implied comparison and contrast of the two struggles. The second sentence asked for an explanation of the goals of each group, and in the third sentence, she took analyze and indicate to mean “explain what each group did and how well it succeeded.” (As it turned out, this was a very shrewd reading of the question; the instructor later remarked that those who had included a comparison and contrast produced better answers than those who did not.) Note that, in this instance, the strategy the instructor expected is not stated explicitly in the question. Instead, class members were expected to read between the lines to infer the strategy.
The student identified content terms around which to develop her answer: the groups—African Americans and women—and their actions, goals, strategies, and degrees of success. Using these terms, she spent about three minutes producing the following informal outline:
Introduction
goals, strategies, degree of success
African Americans
want equality
two opposing strategies: DuBois and Washington
even with vote, great opposition
Women
many goals (economic, political, educational), but focus on vote
use men’s arguments against them
use vote to achieve other goals
Conclusion
educational and economic differences between groups
From this outline, the student crafted the following thesis: In the years between 1870 and 1920, African Americans and women were both fighting for equal rights but in significantly different ways. She then wrote a brief answer that compared the strategies and successes of each group’s struggle.