If you pay close attention to the assignment prompts you receive for your course papers, you’ll notice that they provide many clues about how to write your paper. For example you can basically develop an outline of your writing assignment just by analyzing the prompt carefully. Let’s examine the review of an empirical article assignment prompt as an example, the prompt indicates that you should first provide the purpose of the study and within this section you are asked to state what the author attempts to do, indicate what kind of a study this is, and report the research questions and hypothesis. Here’s what the outline would look like:
I. Purpose of the study
a.What author attempts to do
b.Type of study
c.Research questions/Hypothesis
In the next section of the prompt, you are asked to describe the theoretical foundation and variables and within this section you are asked to briefly describe the underlying theory for this study, then you need to summarize operational definitions and construct validity the author provided for the variables of the study, then you need to either describe the phenomenon being observed or indicate what the independent and dependent variables are depending on the type of the study the researchers conducted: Here’s what the outline looks like with the addition of this section:
I. Purpose of the study
a.What author attempts to do
b.Type of study
c.Research questions/Hypothesis
II. Theoretical Foundation and Variables
a.Underlying theory
b.Operational definition/construct validity
c.Describe phenomenon or provide the IVs and DVs of the study
You would continue to do this for each of the other sections and this way you’ll ensure you covered everything you were asked to talk about in this paper.
And guess what? You can apply this to all other assignment prompts as well. Even assignment prompts, that aren’t structured with bullet points or questions you should answer, have embedded in them what major sections/headings you need to include in your papers. And if you use those as the headings of the major sections, this will ensure that you’ve discussed everything the prompt ask you to cover.
If you have any comments or suggestions you’d like to share about the use of prompts effectively for well written papers, feel free to share them here.
Good Effort!
Note: The image is from Rob Helpychalk's photostream. Thank you Rob Helpychalk!
