[MUSIC PLAYING] IZZY: Hello, everyone. My name is Izzy, and I'm a writing tutor from Valencia College, Poinciana Campus. This video is the first in a series that will discuss the process of writing a college-level paper. In college writing, you're likely to be assigned a prompt, so this video will give you tips and strategies on how to understand a prompt, which is crucial before you even begin writing. 

First things first, what is a writing prompt? Well, your professor designs a writing prompt to provide you with direction on your paper and its topic. The prompt also provides a set of instructions and requirements that your professor expects your paper to fulfill. I recommend thinking about the prompt as a question that your paper must answer. Sometimes the question is directly asked, sometimes implied. Either way, your essay is written in direct response to the prompt, with the essay providing an answer. 

Here are three basic steps that we can take when analyzing a prompt. Read the prompt. Take notes on the prompt. And prioritize tasks from the prompt. 

Naturally, step 1 is to read the prompt. This may seem like an obvious first step, but it's important that we read the prompt completely and understand it before we move on to steps 2 and 3. I recommend reading the prompt in its entirety before you try reacting to it. It's always a good idea to reread the prompt throughout the writing process and not just at the very beginning. 

Step 2 is to take notes on the prompt. You can use whatever is most comfortable to take notes with, whether it's a pen, your phone, or your computer, or directly on the prompt itself. In the prompt, professors will ask you to conduct specific tasks. 

We can find what specific tasks we need to do by examining the action words in the prompt. Words like compare, analyze, identify, summarize, argue, et cetera are all examples of action words you should take note of. The action words reveal what tasks that your professor has set you off to accomplish. 

By taking note of these words, you can make sure if you're arguing, comparing, summarizing, or fulfilling the task requested of you. Additionally, you'll want to take note of the requirements for the paper. You can take notes on the word count or page limit, its due date, the topic, and other requirements. You may use these questions on the screen to help you keep track of the important requirements. 

Step three, the final step is to prioritize the tasks assigned in the prompt. Sometimes it can be difficult to prioritize writing tasks because everything feels important. However, there are certain tasks that must be done first. For instance, if your professor explains in the prompt that you must write a paper about an assigned reading, you should read that article first or reread it before you even begin to brainstorm. 

It will be difficult to write a successful paper about an assigned reading that you have not read. Likewise, if you're writing a research paper, you must conduct some research first before you can begin writing. Research and reading will help you to comprehend your topic before you begin to communicate ideas about it. 

Remember, we write to communicate an idea. We must know what we need to communicate before we write, so that is why we must review the writing prompt in detail before moving on to the next steps. From there, we can determine the best ways to communicate that idea. Now, with that in mind, let's move on to reviewing an example writing prompt. 

Here's our example prompt. Before you read it, you can skim the contents. One way to skim is to look at the headings. This prompt has three headings-- the writing prompt, documentation requirement, and format. 

The last two headings tell me that these sections are primarily about the style and format of the essay. But at the very beginning of the writing process, we want to look at the content before form. So we can tell just by the headings that the first section is going to discuss the topic and direction of the paper. Now I'm going to start a demonstration of how to analyze the prompt through note taking and prioritizing tasks, but I feel that you should read your prompt once in its entirety before following the recommendations I'm going to make. 

So let's just take it piece by piece. Already we can take note of the word count. It's at the very beginning. So I'm going to highlight that because this is important for us to know. 

And now we can just get into reading. For this assignment, you will write an argumentative essay about one of the United States National parks. In this first sentence, I feel that there's two crucial details that we need to take note of, so I'm going to do that now. 

First of all, we know it's going to be an argumentative essay. So that means that, at the very core of this paper, you're arguing. So that's something I'm going to take note of. The other thing is that the prompt specifies that we're going to write about one of the United States National parks. So this tells me not to focus on more than one of the National parks, and it also tells me it's of my choosing. 

OK, let's keep going. Your essay will develop a response to the following question, should a park receive more or less protection from the US Federal Government? Any questions that are in the prompt are important. So I'm just going to highlight this real quickly. 

All the questions that you find in the prompt are there to help guide our response. Keep in mind you do not need to have an answer to the prompt's questions at this time. We're just identifying them in the prompt. Try to find surprising and unexpected reasons to back up your response. 

Next paragraph. When preparing your paper, consider the health of the ecosystems within the national park and its surrounding areas. Now we know that the prompt wants us to focus on the health and ecosystem, so I'm going to take note of that. 

So this tells me, as I'm trying to determine which national park I'm going to write about, I want to find one where I'm interested in the health and its ecosystem. What species, including plants, animals, even humans, rely on these ecosystems and environments? Again, this is another question, so I want to highlight that so I can use it later to help me brainstorm ideas about my topic. 

Below are some more questions that we get started. You do not have to address all the questions below. These are just meant to help you start thinking about your topic. 

So these questions, they are designed to get us thinking about the topic. We may not know at this time what national park we're going to write about, but we can start to do some basic research to get us started. First thing I would do probably is just look up the national parks and find one that interests me. And then once I found the one that interests me, I can start looking up the answers to these questions here and the one up here. So I would say that these are actually the brainstorming questions. 

And as we do more research, we start to develop a more informed opinion. And once we have an informed opinion, we can better answer this question here, should the park receive more or less protection from the US Federal Government? Now, this question is helping you to stake your claim on the topic. 

One way you can tell is that it wants you to take a stance. Should this happen? Or should it not happen? These questions down here are designed to help you just gather information so that you can have that informed opinion and make your claim, so that's why we take note of all the questions in the document. 

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