Resources

Strategies for Starting

Look at your weekly schedule and identify the times available for working on your major assignments and essays. If there are no times remaining for these, you will have to consider whether you are overcommitted and need to limit the time associated with some of your activities, or possibly withdraw from one or two altogether.

sparkRoll your cursor over this common question.

Should I start with complete sentences or bullet points?


You can begin by writing in a general way about very simple things such as what you already know about the topic of the assignment, or why you love it, or hate it, or what you don’t understand and think you need to learn more about.

There are many useful starting techniques; for example, some find it useful to write sentences to complete phrases such as the following:

  • I think I’m going to argue that…
  • The thing I find most interesting about this topic is…
  • The most surprising discovery in my library research was…
  • The thing I find hard to believe about what I’ve read is…

 For more such phrases and other starting techniques, see Starting Techniques under Resources.

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Module Objectives

This module on understanding assignments provides strategies for:

  • understanding the general requirements of an academic assignment
  • determining the purpose of an assignment in order to guide the writing process
  • discovering types of assignments and their corresponding signal words
  • noting various disciplinary approaches
  • defining the audience and considering its role in the assignment