Writing from a Prompt

Understanding the Prompt

Start by reading through the prompt slowly and carefully, at least twice. Decide the scope, or rules, that your essay must follow. You can determine almost every essay by three main conditions:

Essay Type

Which kind of essay are you being asked to write?
Is it argumentative, expository, compare/contrast, narrative, or something else?
What is the page length or number of words required?

Evidence

Are you being asked to draw evidence from articles, books, personal experiences, or other sources?
How many sources, or which specific sources, are you required to use?

Purpose

What problems or ideas are you being asked to prove, expand upon, or argue for/against?
Are there any other questions or topics you must address within your essay?

However, if you have not received a clear form or style to follow, decide which of these essay forms will work best for you to achieve your writing goal. Try to write your own prompt based on what you are interested in or curious about, which will help structure your writing process.

Choosing a Topic

Begin with the broadest topic you can think of that addresses the essay type, evidence, and purpose required in the prompt. If a topic does not come to you immediately or is not stated specifically in the prompt, follow a few simple steps to help yourself brainstorm.

For the sake of this essay, the prompt we will work through these steps with is simply “Write an argumentative essay about Book XYZ.”

Read through your sources and other evidence in order to choose a main theme.

For example, if you have noticed that violence is prevalent in Book XYZ, search within that book for all examples of violence. The “topic” you develop is often a description of or argument for why an image, idea, or experience means something to you. This is often depicted through some personal or philosophical change or discovery led to through life experiences. Think of the creative thesis as a New Year’s Resolution, and your friends are asking you “why have you chosen to make this change?” or, more appropriately, “What experiences have led you to this change?” to which you must prove that the change, firstly, actually happened through these personal experiences, and, secondly, why it did change.

Don’t be afraid to gather too much evidence at first. In pre-essay writing, the more information you have about the topic, the better.

Determine the framework, or “common thread,” of the theme you have chosen.

In this stage, actively try to prove to yourself that you are achieving some overall structure based on the textual evidence you have gathered. If you have trouble with this step, find out what other people have to say about the prompt or issue of the essay. Try reading scholarly articles or talk to fellow classmates and teachers. Many times, this is a great starting point for your own ideas.

After you have found the pieces of evidence you may plan on using, ask yourself a few questions:

How is each piece of evidence represented in the text?
How is the evidence similar or dissimilar, and why?

For example, once you have collected all examples of violence in Book XYZ, you may notice that a literary device, such as a metaphor, often depicts violence.

Determine purpose based on framework and theme.

This is often the most overwhelming and frightening stage at the beginning of the writing process. However, if you have established your evidence based on a certain theme, as well as the framework by which this evidence is being used, you must then decide what purpose that evidence has in the story. During our essay brainstorming session about violence in Book XYZ, we have determined the first two of these:

1) Theme Violence

2) Framework Each image of violence depicted through metaphor

You now merely have to decide how these two concepts are related and to what end. You have already proven the theme exists and how it exists but not the overall intent of the relationship between the two.

You should now ask yourself these questions:

Why is the author using this theme in certain passages?
What is this ‘theme’ trying to show, or prove, within the book?
Why is it trying to show this?

In terms of the Book XYZ example, you might discover that the author uses each metaphor to depict the personality of a certain character or how a character reacts to violence in a different way. Therefore, your purpose might read as follows:

3) Purpose To show how each character reacts to violence.

Creating a Thesis

In order to create a thesis, you merely have to piece these three elements of our topic -- theme, framework, and purpose -- together in a logical way. In this case, for Book XYZ, you see that the text reveals the theme, and the theme helps reveal the purpose. An argumentative essay thesis in this format might look something like this:

Thesis
In Book XYZ, the author uses metaphors to show how each character reacts to violence in a different way.

However, remember that specificity is usually the best policy. If you suddenly notice a more specific framework or purpose, you can easily change your thesis. For example, if you discover that the “different ways” the characters react to violence is often based on gender, your thesis may change to something like this:

Second Thesis
In Book XYZ, the author uses metaphors to show how each character react to violence in a different way based on gender.

or, perhaps a little more eloquently put:

Third Thesis
In Book XYZ, the author uses metaphorical language to depict the contrasting ways in which each character’s gender determines how he or she understands and reacts to violence.