Creating assignments can be as simple as writing a paragraph about the requirements for an informal response or as detailed as a several-page explanation of all the facets of a major writing project. Short or long, in order for assignments to support sequenced learning, it’s important that they be written with a clear and connected purpose in mind. Especially if you are teaching English 100 for the first time, feel free to use our sample major assignments as written. If you choose to customize assignments, we hope the advice here will guide your design choices.

Helpful Questions for Designing an Assignment

Adapted from Lindemann, Erika. A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers. 4th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.

Writing assignments must take into account the abilities of students and the progression of your course, and thus need to be constantly adapted and changed. Ask yourself the following questions before you write your assignment (especially the major assignment for each of the three sequences):

What do I want students to do? Is it worth doing? Why? How will the assignment provide an opportunity for practicing what students are learning? How does it fit my objectives at this point in the course? How will the assignment demonstrate what students can do or what they know? Will either take precedence (doing or knowing)? Am I relating their work only to my class or am I considering wider academic settings and/or the wider world? Does the assignment require specialized knowledge? Does it appeal to the interests and experiences of my students?

How do I want them to do the assignment? Are students working alone, together, both? In what ways will they practice prewriting, writing, and rewriting? Are writing, reading, speaking, and listening set up to reinforce one another? Have I given students enough information to help them make effective choices about the subject, purpose, form, and mode? What will they use for sources – memory, experience, specific texts, wider research?

For whom are students writing? Who is the audience? Do students have a choice about the audience? How will audience play a role? Do students have enough information to assume a role with respect to the audience? Is the role meaningful? How can I align assignment guidelines and requirements with audience?

When will students do the assignment? How does the assignment relate to what comes before and after it in the course? How much time in and outside of class will students need for prewriting, writing, and rewriting? To what extent will I guide the students’ work? What kinds of help can students constructively offer one another? What deadlines do I want to set for collecting the students’ papers (or various stages of the project)?

What will I do with the assignment? How will I respond to the work? How will I evaluate it? What constitutes a successful response to the assignment? Will other students or the writer have a say in evaluating the paper? What problems did I encounter when I wrote my response to this assignment? How can I improve the assignment?

What Students Need to Know to Do an Assignment Well

No matter how well you plan your assignment, students will struggle if they don’t understand the rhetorical task they are engaging in or what they should be learning from it.

After designing your assignment then, keep in mind that students typically need to know or have opportunities to discover all of the following:

• Timeline: Due dates for drafts, what kind of feedback they will receive and when
• How the assignment connects to the rest of the course
• What you hope they will learn from the project
• The audience
• The genre (or some possible options for genre or genre-mixing)
• The kinds of purposes that might motivate this writing (persuade, inform, entertain, discover, etc.)
• The kind of intellectual work they are being asked to do
• Conventions that are likely to matter to their audience
• General characteristics of more and less effective responses to the assignment

These elements need not all explicitly appear in the prompt for your assignment. In fact, if you provide too much information in the assignment, students might be overwhelmed. However, in order to perform thoughtful, high-quality work that meets the assignment’s learning goals, students will need you to help them become aware of all of these elements, especially in the major assignment for each sequence.

If you don’t include all this information in the assignment prompt, make sure that you know when and how students will discover each of these aspects early in their project’s process.