While much of the writing you did in high school may have been for an English or literature class, in college, writing is a common form of expression and scholarship in many fields and thus in many courses.

You may have to write essays, reflections, discussion board posts, or research papers in your history, biology, psychology, art history, or computer science classes.

Writing assignments in college vary in length, purpose, and the relationship between the writer (you) and the topic.  Sometimes you may be asked to gather information and write a report on your findings.  Sometimes you may be asked to compare opinions expressed by experts.  You might be asked to answer a question or state your position and defend it with evidence.  Some assignments require a mixture of several of these tasks.

 

When a writing assignment is mentioned in the syllabus of a course, make sure you understand the assignment long before you begin to do it.   The university’s Writing Center recommends that you note the vocabulary used in assignment descriptions and make sure you understand what actions certain words suggest or require.  You should also talk to peers in your class to compare understandings and expectations.

 

The university’s Writing Center consultants will help you with questions about an assignment and how to ask your instructor for more information if necessary. They will help you strengthen your writing, give you feedback on your ideas, and offer suggestions for organizing your content.  They can tell you if you are appropriately using sources.

The Writing Center is not only for students who have questions or are puzzled about assignments.  It offers support to experienced writers, too.  Faculty and graduate students routinely schedule sessions with Writing Center consultants.

Strong, experienced writers enjoy conversation about their writing decisions and find it helpful to have an outside reader for their work. 

 

Conferences with a writing consultant can be face-to-face or online.

If you are uneasy about talking with your instructor, make an appointment at the Writing Center:  https://cstw.osu.edu/writing-center

 

                                                                                                                                                        (From:  Lunsford & Ruszkiewicz, p. 367)

 

Type	Sub-categories
Analysis	Casual Analysis:  Explain why something typically happens or may have happened in the past.
	Comparison Analysis:  Write about someone’s work by comparing it to another work (or works). Discuss the significance of the similarities.
	Comparison/contrast Analysis:  Write about someone’s work by comparing and contrasting it to another work (or works) and discuss the significance of these similarities and differences.
	Critical Analysis:  Write about the argument or reasoning of an author’s work. Evaluate.
	Literary Analysis:  Write about your interpretation of the meaning or significance of  literary  work (novel, play, poem, short story).  In the visual arts, we use the term “critique,” for writing that does this about films, paintings, etc.
	Process Analysis:  Explain the steps involved in producing something.
	Rhetorical analysis:  Write about the strategies an author used to express meaning or achieve certain results.
Annotated Bibliography	Write a summary/evaluation of each source that you used in a project or paper.  Summarize the main point(s) or arguments, and the topics covered.  Next, evaluate (assess) its value to the field or to your topic.
Literature Review (Review of the Literature)	Write about several works that contribute to your topic. Discuss how they contribute by summarizing their main points.  (At the graduate-level, the literature review provides important background information, with a focus on existing publications, for a research topic.)
Reflection	Write about a work studied in class changed your thinking or challenges your assumptions.  This writing is personal, drawing on your reactions, feelings, or experiences, in a way that shows a change or progression in thinking.
Research paper	Write a (usually lengthy) paper in which you answer a question, support a position or argument on an issue, or propose a solution to a problem.  Your writing is based on your own ideas as well as research (opinions, facts, interviews, information) collected from sources).
Response	Write what you think based on your own experience, opinions, and ideas. Refer to specific ideas or information mentioned in whatever you are responding to.
	Critical Response:  Take a position on an author’s work and support your position with evidence from the author’s work as well as some research on what others have said about it.
Synthesis	Find a theme or idea that allows you to group together two or more texts that may be different in opinions, ideas, or influences, and explain what organizes them under this theme.  (Syntheses can be organized around a thesis or an argument.)
Summary	Write a shortened version of something in your own words, focusing only on the main points. Most summaries are written objectively, with no personal opinions from the writer of the summary. There are many different kinds of summaries, depending on the discipline.