When you come to college, you join a new community. It consists of a group of people who share knowledge, beliefs, and values and operate according to a set of agreed norms. The type of writing done in this community is well established, and it follows certain expectations and conventions. In some ways, it is like high-school writing. But in other ways, college writing is different.
College writing assignments often have a greater degree of specificity than high-school assignments.
Another important difference is that they require you to engage other writers' texts. When you use textual sources, you are expected to do more than simply report to your audience the set of facts or body of material that you have read. You are expected to alter the reading material so that it fits your own writing purpose. For example, a high-school writing assignment might ask you to write an essay on the causes of the growth of poverty in the United States, whereas a comparable college assignment might ask you to evaluate the views of Lester C. Thurow and Barbara Ehrenreich on the feminization of poverty. The college assignment focuses on a particular feature of poverty and requires you to read, analyze, and perhaps compare the texts of two authors and evaluate their positions.