PURPOSE
Besides grading critical thinking and creative thinking skills, you grade students on their ability to write a thesis and develop it throughout an essay. The purpose of an essay should be spelled out in the title or explicitly stated in a thesis statement. “On Being an SIUE Freshman” makes clear the subject of the essay, but not the purpose. “Why Being an SIUE Freshman is Frustrating” indicates a writer’s purpose: she will explain or show how her first-year college experience is frustrating, not just say that the experience is frustrating. The title orients the reader and the novice writer. As titles go, the “Why Being an SIUE Freshman is Frustrating” title is colorless, except for the consonance, but admittedly, it is straightforward. “What Does My English Instructor Want?: Why Being an SIUE Freshman is Frustrating” is more intriguing. As for thesis statements, a student might write: ‘Being an SIUE freshman is frustrating: teachers expect us to know subject material that we never learned in high school.’ A little more descriptive than the title, the thesis, again, orients the reader and writer. What follows in the essay, whether it is 500 or 1,000 words, will be the development of that statement. Topic sentences in body paragraphs that refer to the thesis often keep the writer ‘on topic,’ even when the topic sentence covers more than one paragraph.
Teaching students purpose in the short essays that are written in English 101 is different from teaching students purpose in the longer essay, the report, the researched argument, or the results of an experiment, for instance. The thesis usually must be stated early in the paper, rather than in a third or fourth paragraph. The amount of written material between the introduction and conclusion is limited, so writers must use concise, clear language-every word counts. Body paragraphs in lengths of 100 words more or less mark the shorter essay. Often, one body paragraph, rather than several, is used to develop a topic sentence. Students depend heavily upon their imaginative and critical thinking skills to write the short English 101 essay. Thus, you will want to assign topics and themes that can be managed in a short essay, perhaps a response to a specific idea in an essay or story that a student has read or a response to a specific point raised in a class discussion about a current cultural topic. Novice writers need exercise in inventing a theme, narrowing a topic, and developing it, and the short essay provides a format or medium that is not that intimidating.
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Faculty Composition Manual home
URL: http://www.siue.edu/ENGLISH/Comp_Manual/purpose.html
Published by: Department of English Language and Literature
Last Update: July 13, 2003 by English Web Manager
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