"California State Universities Expository Reading and Writing Course Assignment Template "

This text offers input for teachers on getting students to better understand the text they are reading and how to write about the text more critically. Concerning the writing task, a teachers role is to guide the students into taking the text they have read, the ideas and themes, and channeling that into a text of their own ideas about the text, for various audiences. To be most effective, a teachers role is creative a hypothetical audience for the students to write to, usually peer or an academic level. The text states, “A well-designed writing prompt can minimize the sense of pretense and model the basic elements of an actual rhetorical situation.” This means that having students practice writing to a designed audience will help them in the real world to write effectively to any given audience.

The text offers some key strategies to help the students understand the assignment better. It is imperative that students understand the purpose of the writing task and who the audience is, so it is helpful to pose questions that they may answer, such as: What genre is this? What format will it have? And what is your rhetorical purpose? Then it is important to guide students to take a stance in their writing. Too easy can a analysis paper look more like a summary. So a teacher must pose questions about the issues concerning the text they are studying, so the may begin to develop their own views and stances on those issues. Questions may look like the following: What is the gist of your argument in one or two sentences? What is your main claim? What evidence best supports your argument? What evidence might you use in relation to what others say about your argument? These questions, very beneficial in a class discussion, will help the students best identify their stance, its significance, and where to go from there in their writing assignment.