The assignment should ask students to write about specific, immediate situations rather than abstract or theoretical ones . Discuss the problems of sexism on today's college campuses. If the assignment asks student to support an argument, it should give them a single major question that they can answer in a thesis statement. An overly long or detailed assignment will confuse students or constrain their inventiveness. Based on information found in Robert Connors and Cheryl Glenn, The St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing , 3rd ed.
Writing is a means to discovery.
Summarize the theories of . . . . Outline the basic tenets of . Consider two schools of thought that we have studied and discuss the ways in which their basic tenets parallel and what ways in which they differ. For fifty minutes these students are behaving like scholars and truly learning. With longer assignments, the benefits are obviously even greater.