Chapter 7: Writing in College
Introduction to Chapter 7
As a new college student, you may have a lot of anxiety and questions about the writing you will do in college. That word “academic,” especially, may turn your stomach or turn your nose.
However, with this class, you begin one of the few classes in your entire college career where you will focus on learning to write. Given the importance of writing as a communication skill, I urge you to consider this class as a gift and make the most of it. But writing is hard, and writing in college may resemble playing a familiar game by completely new rules (that often are unstated). This chapter is designed to introduce you to what academic writing is like, and hopefully ease your transition as you face these daunting writing challenges.
So here’s the secret. Your success with academic writing depends upon how well you understand what you are doing as you write and then how you approach the writing task.
Early research done on college writers discovered that whether students produced a successful piece of writing depended largely upon their representation of the writing task. The writers’ mental model for picturing their task made a huge difference. Most people as they start college have wildly strange ideas about what they are doing when they write an essay, or they have no clear idea at all. I freely admit my own past as a clueless freshman writer, and it’s out of this sympathy that I hope to provide you with something useful. So grab a cup of coffee, find a comfortable chair with good light, and let’s explore together this activity of academic writing you will be asked to do in college. We will start by clearing up some of those wild misconceptions people often arrive at college possessing. Then we will dig more deeply into the components of the academic writing situation and nature of the writing task.
7.1 Myths about Writing
Though I don’t imagine an episode of MythBusters will be based on the misconceptions about writing we are about to look at, you would still be surprised at some of the things people will believe about writing. You may find lurking within you elements of these myths—all of these lead to problems in writing.
7.2 Why is Writing Important?
Consider this: A recent survey of employers conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities found that 89 percent of employers say that colleges and universities should place more emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing.” It was the single-most favored skill in this survey.
In addition, several of the other valued skills are grounded in written communication:
- “Critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” (81 percent)
- “The ability to analyze and solve complex problems” (75 percent)
- “The ability to locate, organize, and evaluate information from multiple sources” (68 percent).
This emphasis on communication probably reflects the changing reality of work in the professions. Employers also reported that employees will have to “take on more responsibilities,” “use a broader set of skills,” “work harder to coordinate with other departments,” face “more complex” challenges, and mobilize “higher levels of learning and knowledge.”
If you want to be a professional who interacts frequently with others, you have to be someone who can anticipate and solve complex problems and coordinate your work with others, all of which depend on effective communication.
The payoff from improving your writing comes much sooner than graduation. Suppose you complete about 40 classes for a 120-credit bachelor’s degree, and—averaging across writing-intensive and non-writing-intensive courses—you produce about 2,500 words of formal writing per class. Even with that low estimate, you’ll write 100,000 words during your college career. That is roughly equivalent to a 330-page book.
Spending a few hours sharpening your writing skills will make those 100,000 words much easier and more rewarding to write. All of your professors care about good writing.
7.3 Common Types of College Writing Assignments
In your college classes, you may encounter some or all of the following types of writing:
| Assignment Type | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Personal Response Paper | Expresses and explains your response to a reading assignment, a provocative quote, or a specific issue; may be very brief (sometimes a page or less) or more in-depth | For an environmental science course, students watch and write about President Obama’s June 15, 2010, speech about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. |
| Summary | Restates the main points of a longer passage objectively and in your own words | For a psychology course, students write a one-page summary of an article about a man suffering from short-term memory loss. |
| Position Paper | States and defends your position on an issue (often a controversial issue) | For a medical ethics course, students state and support their position on using stem cell research in medicine. |
| Problem-Solution Paper | Presents a problem, explains its causes, and proposes and explains a solution | For a business administration course, a student presents a plan for implementing an office recycling program without increasing operating costs. |
| Literary Analysis | States a thesis about a particular literary work (or works) and develops the thesis with evidence from the work and, sometimes, from additional sources | For a literature course, a student compares two novels by the twentieth-century African American writer Richard Wright. |
| Research Review or Survey | Sums up available research findings on a particular topic | For a course in media studies, a student reviews the past twenty years of research on whether violence in television and movies is correlated with violent behavior. |
| Case Study or Case Analysis | Investigates a particular person, group, or event in depth for the purpose of drawing a larger conclusion from the analysis | For an education course, a student writes a case study of a developmentally disabled child whose academic performance improved because of a behavioral-modification program. |
| Laboratory Report | Presents a laboratory experiment, including the hypothesis, methods of data collection, results, and conclusions | For a psychology course, a group of students presents the results of an experiment in which they explored whether sleep deprivation produced memory deficits in lab rats. |
| Research Journal | Records a student’s ideas and findings during the course of a long-term research project | For an education course, a student maintains a journal throughout a semester-long research project at a local elementary school. |
| Research Paper | Presents a thesis and supports it with original research and/or other researchers’ findings on the topic; can take several different formats depending on the subject area | For examples of typical research projects, see Writing a Research Paper”. |
7.4 What to Do With Essay Assignments
Writing assignments can be as varied as the instructors who assign them. Some assignments are explicit about what exactly you will need to do, in what order, and how it will be graded. Some assignments are very open-ended, leaving you to determine the best path toward answering the project. Most fall somewhere in the middle, containing details about some aspects but leaving other assumptions unstated. It’s important to remember that your first resource for getting clarification about an assignment is your instructor—she or he will be very willing to talk out ideas with you, to be sure you are prepared at each step to do well with the writing.
Most writing in college will be a direct response to class materials—an assigned reading, a discussion in class, an experiment in a lab. Generally speaking, these writing tasks can be divided into three broad categories.
Read through the slides below to learn about the categories.
Next, explore quick start guides to help you get started on these types of assignments.
Licenses and Attributions
CC Licensed Content, Shared Previously:
- What is Academic Writing by L. Lennie Irvin is licensed CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
- Outcome: Writing in College by Lumen Learning is licensed CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
- Writing for Success by the University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing through the eLearning Support Initiative is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- Writing in College: From Competence to Excellence by Amy Guptill, provided by SUNY Open Textbooks is licensed CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
- Writing Strategies by Lumen Learning is licensed CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
- “How to Write a Summary” by WikiHow is licensed CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
- “How to Write” by WikiHow is licensed CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
