Academic Support Center FAQ

Starting An Assignment: Breaking Apart A Prompt

• Working together, we can break down the prompt of an assignment into its most important parts and strategize some general approaches for setting up the essay.

Brainstorming

• We can ask questions to help make connections and unlock some new ideas, and because we often have a sense of what the assignment’s asking for, we can help set a up a great starting point for the essay.

Outlining

• We can help organize the ideas of an essay into sections, paragraphs, examples, or even just see what main ideas connect to other main ideas.

Building an Essay

• While students may often get help on brainstorming/outlining and then get feedback on a finished rough draft, we can also work on the gap in between brainstorming and finished draft, where we help to actually figure out and build the parts of an essay.

• We can look to some models for generally setting up a body paragraph (or an introduction, a conclusion, an abstract), then strategize with a student how to use those models as tools for building the essay.

• We especially can help walk through and demystify abstracts and literature reviews (also annotated bibliographies).

Improving Focus: Re-organizing an Essay

• We can work to figure out how closely the essay matches the prompt – and if they’re still far apart, we can offer strategies and come up with a plan to start moving the essay closer to what the instructor’s asking for.

• We can recognize opportunities for reorganizing an essay, and work to reorder, shuffle, combine, and separate paragraphs to improve the essay’s flow and focus.

• We can work alongside students both in setting up and even further developing topic sentences and transitions.

• We can find moments where an essay drifts off topic, where a student is doing more work than they necessarily need to (by over-explaining, re-stating the argument, etc.), or where an intro/thesis statement needs to be further developed to match what the essay actually covers.

Improving Focus: Further Developing a Thesis Statement

• We can talk through the inner workings of setting up a thesis statement, and work closely with a student to help them both in setting up their thesis statement and in further trimming the essay to fit into that thesis statement.

Incorporating Research and Evidence

• We can help to further clarify and define when to quote, how best to quote, when to paraphrase, and how to paraphrase.

• We can help de-mystify the technical details of correctly citing quotes and paraphrases (in APA, MLA, Chicago Style, etc.), and we can also work with a student to start setting up their in-text citations and give them a first foothold in the paper.

• We can help with some of the weirder corners of APA and MLA – such as how to cite one source throughout a paragraph, how to cite someone who’s citing someone else, how to cite a ton of different sources in one paragraph (or even one sentence), and even some of the less weird but not intuitive parts of APA and MLA such as block-quoting.

Reviewing Citation Style

• In addition to checking in and helping to demystify citation styles, we can also help guide students through resources for APA, MLA, etc. that are often initially overwhelming.
• See also our APA/MLA formatting guides.

Polishing a Paper

• We can read through an essay with a student to help them where the grammar gets tricky, the idea difficult to untangle, or even just the word choice is off. We also work with a student to collaboratively find some solutions to iron out the grammar and syntax of an essay.

• We can look to some go-to resources for building transitions (between sentences, within sentences, between paragraphs, etc.) and closely work together to model how to set up some of those transitions.

• We can notice any re-occurring patterns of trouble in the grammar and mechanics of an essay, and then teach to the larger, more in-depth fundamentals, so that students can walk away not just with a more ironed out paper, but also with more tools in their toolbox for building and polishing the next draft.

• We can help with some additional strategies and tricks for self-revision.