Years ago I was part of a team from BSU and Capital High who were conducting a summer workshop for teachers of writing. We had worked out a sequence of writing assignments for them that we thought would be excellent. The assignments would prompt the teachers to reflect on various aspects of their own writing and teaching. But to our dismay, the essays they wrote for the first assignment were dreadful: stilted, lifeless, boring to read. The ideas weren't even very good.

What went wrong? These were English teachers who were all good writers. They had been chosen for the workshop partly on the strength of the writing samples they had submitted. How could they have written so badly? The more we read, the more we realized the problem was with the assignment. So when we handed back the papers, we told them abjectly that the papers "were dogs. And the mama dog was the assignment." We were greeted with sympathetic laughter. The teachers knew what we meant, because they had designed some dogs of assignments, too.

In a way, student papers are the children of the assignments that prompt them. If the vast majority of the papers that come from an assignment are dogs, that could be a strong indication of the quality of the assignment. Even the most experienced of us will produce a dog of an assignment now and then. It happens particularly when we try something new and attempt to give directions for something we've never asked our students to do before. We probably don't produce anything as egregious as the "assignments from hell" described in WW #45. In fact, our hearts may be completely in the right place. We may believe that we are asking students to do something we can very reasonably expect of them. The problem is, we might not have anticipated ways in which the assignment might be misunderstood, or we just don't realize that something in the assignment is not clear to them, though it is clear to us.

Put another way, it helps to think of a writing assignment as a collaboration between teacher and students. All members of a collaborating team have to do their share for a successful product. The teacher sets off the collaboration by designing a well-thought-out assignment. Students do their share by paying close attention to the assignment and asking questions when they don't understand something.

Essentials of assignment design

Here are the basic elements required to make most writing assignments work.

1. Decide on the purpose. The purpose of the assignment should have a clear connection with the goals of the course. To assign writing for the general purpose of improving student writing, or of helping students prepare to write in their future occupations, is laudable, but it's not enough. One should also ask: How does the assignment contribute toward the goals of this particular course? How does it prompt students to apply the ideas or skills they should be learning? How does it relate to the other assignments? It is a good idea to include a statement of purpose with any assignment whose purpose isn't obvious.

2. Give out the assignment in writing. This can't be stressed enough. An assignment given out orally is vulnerable to all sorts of problems. Some students will inevitably write it down incorrectly, incompletely, or not at all. The resulting papers will reflect the confusion.

3. Specify the writing task. The actual task, in so many words, should appear prominently on the assignment sheet. It should consist of at least two elements:

Genre. What are you asking students to produce: a study, a letter, a formal report, an essay, an article that might be published in a periodical?

One or more directive words, expressed in the imperative. The choice of terms is crucial: do you want students to explain, evaluate, describe, compare, argue for or against? Be careful to use the term you really want and stick to it, so as not to give conflicting signals about what you want them to do.

4. Specify the audience. At least, make sure the audience is clearly implied. Is it made up of lay people, experts, some group with a particular interest in the subject, or some composite of different individuals or groups? Who would be interested in reading the document? Who would be in a position to read it?

Unfortunately, for most assignments the audience has to be somewhat artificial, because the document will usually not go to the actual audience. But students still benefit from having an audience to consider. Audience helps them think about what to include or leave out, how to present themselves (ethos), and what kind of reporting or persuading they will need to do. (See WW #76 and 77 on audience)

5. Specify the form of documentation you want, if the paper is to be documented. Require whatever form is widely used in your field (MLA, APA, Chicago B, numbered reference). Do not leave the choice of documentation form up to the students. Often they won't know what to choose and will produce an unrecognizable mishmash. Also, you'll have a harder time checking on the mix of documentation styles when you receive the finished papers.

Besides, students should learn to be flexibile and use different forms of documentation. So it doesn't hurt to ask them to use a system they're not yet familiar with. (See WW #38)

Make sure students have access to style manuals or models for the documentation form you assign. Students might be referred to the particular style manual used for professional writing in your discipline. Or they might be referred to a certain professional journal and asked to follow the style used by that journal.

6. Provide clear grading criteria. Criteria should not be over-detailed or elaborate, because too much elaboration makes the criteria difficult to apply. A statement of how much weight you will place on various aspects of the papers (e.g., adherence to assignment, reasoning, evidence, organization, style, mechanics) is often sufficient. Another form is to write a series of short paragraphs describing the typical traits of A, B, C, D, and F papers.

Additional suggestions

In addition to the six essentials that lead to a well- designed assignment, authorities on writing in the disciplines offer serveral suggestions for supporting students in their endeavors.

Keep the assignment as simple as possible. To explain why this is important, I'll quote something Bruce Ballenger, a member of the Word Works editorial team, wrote when reviewing a draft of this article. He wrote that assignments of his that turn out to be dogs

have always been far too complicated -- too many steps, instructions, etc. Overly complicated assignments are not only set-ups for disappointment; they invite confusion, or grow out of very specific expectations that will rarely be met. They also can encourage resistance. Students don't feel the freedom to make the assignment their own. That resistance is what makes some assignments feel, to students at least, like what James Moffet calls "dummy runs."

Provide a sample successful student-written paper. Most writers find it easier to start a writing task if they know what the finished document should look like. If you'd prefer not to hand out a sample document because of concerns about plagiarism or using too much paper, show a sample on the overhead. If the assignment might be done more than one way, show a couple of samples that illustrate different approaches.

If you share a sample document with the class, you'll need to spend some time describing what makes it successful. Call attention to any salient features of content, organization, style, etc., that students should try to emulate.

If possible, assign two or three shorter papers spread out through the semester rather than a single term project. The shorter projects give students an extra chance to learn and to improve. They also give you a chance to identify writers who are having trouble (either problems with writing or difficulty understanding the subject matter) and steer them to seek help.

If it's important to have a single long-term assignment, provide support along the way. Break the assignment up into stages with a series of deadlines when successive parts of the project are due. For example, students might first submit a review of the literature, then a statement of the research question and design, then the findings, then the discussion. Respond to each part separately. At the end of the project students submit the revised whole, which will be much better and easier to grade than it would be if you saw the whole document only once, at project's end.

Build in ways for students to help each other. Students are good at keeping each other on track and suggesting improvements. Peer groups can meet either during class or outside of class to read each other's drafts and respond to them.

Peer critiquing of drafts, however, is just the most obvious way in which students can help each other. Students can collaborate at several stages of the process, from the time they first receive the assignment. They can help each other define their research problems, design their studies, and invent ideas for their discussions and conclusions.

When trying out a new assignment, be flexible and supportive. Ask students for early feedback on problems they are having in completing the task. If necessary, don't hesitate to clarify the assignment in midstream or even revise it if there are serious bugs in it. Be sure to make notes on what works and what doesn't work about the assignment, and write down changes you plan to make the next time you use the assignment. Otherwise, a semester or a year later, you won't remember how you were going to change it.

Take advantage of the resources of the Writing Center. (You knew we'd come to this one.) The Writing Center can help with almost all of the items suggested above. Members of the staff are experienced at helping with assignment design, tutoring students individually on their work in progress, facilitating peer-group sessions, and responding to drafts in writing.

Consider the timing of the assignment. Are students ready for it? I'm referring not just to knowledge, but to psychological timing. One possible explanation for why that assignment for the teachers' workshop was a dog could have been bad timing. We asked the teachers to write about their own pedagogy, but it was the first assignment of the workshop, it was June, and they were probably still weary from finishing the school year. We should have given them an assignment that would have taken them away from thinking about their own teaching. If we'd saved the assignment for later in the workshop, when they were ready to begin applying what they were learning, it might have gone better.

You can't always hear the sound of distant barking

I want to wind this up as I began, with an anecdote. Recently at a conference, I was talking with a friend who co-authored a textbook I have used twice. It is an excellent book, but it contains one assignment which -- even though I like it a lot -- never seems to work. Even though the authors provide ample demonstrations of how to write the paper, the students have had a hard time with it, and the papers that result have never been really satisfactory. I mentioned this to my friend, hoping for a word of advice, but he replied, "Yes, I've always had trouble with that assignment, too. I don't know why it doesn't work."

Some of our assignments will fail, even ones that look great on paper. Either students have inordinate difficulty with them, or the papers turn out lifeless, boring. And we can't always figure out why. Sometimes we can fix the assignment by revising it, but sometimes we have to just abandon it and design a different assignment.

I won't presume to give advice on how to make assignments interesting for students to work on, or make sure the papers are interesting to read. It is of course the students' obligation to find approaches that interest them. If the course is in their major, they should be interested anyway. They can also help each other dig out the interesting, unusual angles on their subjects. Having a clear audience to write to always helps. So does having a chance to persuade someone or to work out an interesting intellectual or ethical problem in writing.

Most of the ideas in this Word Works issue have been gleaned from two books, The Bedford Guide to Teaching Writing in the Disciplines by Howard and Jamieson, and Improving Student Writing by Moss and Holder. Both are available free of charge from the Writing Program office. If you'd like copies, please call Sherry Gropp at x4209. Both books have excellent advice on how to design formal assignments, essay exams, and other kinds of writing tasks; how to integrate reading and writing in the disciplines; and how to evaluate and grade student writing. The Bedford Guide has good sections on research in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and how to assign and grade collaborative writing. Improving Student Writing provides examples of "assignments that work" in American Studies, biology, chemistry, counseling, accounting, and criminal justice. See also Word Works #46, 59, 60, 72 for further thoughts on designing assignments.

RL