Last week, my students completed the first step of their big essay project—the proposal and annotated bibliography. In collaboration with my supervising professor, we gave them a degree of freedom in choosing their topics, but we provided the resources that would make up their bibliographies. On the assignment sheet, we had simply written “you must propose a topic and provide a citation in Chicago style as well as a brief summary for each of the sources provided in the kit.” In another location, we had added “for each source you will use, you will state how it will be useful.” When I proofread the assignment, I hadn’t given a second thought to how this was organized. All the information was there, right?
I was shocked when I received their proposals. Some had written just a thesis statement. Others had written a few pages. Most included bibliographic citations, while a few did not. Some spent several pages summarizing sources, with a bibliography at the end, while a few integrated the two. Almost none described how the sources would be useful for their papers. For the twenty proposals I graded, I saw twenty different interpretations of the assignment.
At first, I was frustrated with the class. It was so simple! Wasn’t this just common sense? But as I reflected on my expectations, I realized that my own academic experiences colored what I thought was so simple and obvious. I never actually wrote an annotated bibliography until my first year of graduate school, so most of these undergraduates had probably never seen one before, let alone written one. They had probably never had to use Chicago style before, and although they had a style guide, the conventions were brand new for them. Not only were we asking them to attempt several new skills at once, but we had presented them with limited, disorganized, and even conflicting information about the assigned task.
I discovered a novel concept: giving an assignment is a type of writing, and one that needs to be done very well.
In our WIP orientation at the end of the summer, we dissected an assignment that happened to be for a music class, which is my area. I had never thought about how much information is communicated in a short assignment, and how many different things it is really asking a student to do. I discovered a novel concept: giving an assignment is a type of writing, and one that needs to be done very well. This concept really hit home for me as I waded through twenty different attempts to complete the assignment we had given. I could have prevented most of the students’ confusion, as well as making my own job easier in giving feedback if I had given them clearer instructions with more detail about my expectations. A sample annotated bibliography would have shown them exactly what I wanted them to do, and having all the information in one place would have made it easier to understand what to do.
This experience will help me refine my skills as a writing coach and, in the future, as an instructor. In considering a writing assignment as a piece of writing in itself, I will prioritize clear communication and logical organization, as well as accounting for concepts that might be new to students.