"Understanding Writing Assignments: Tips and Techniques" - Dan Melzer

             Dan Melzer of “Understanding Writing Assignments: Tips and Techniques” claims that there are seven tips and techniques for understanding writing assignments better for college students. The writer stresses that the significance for understanding writing assignments is that it makes the students be able to write their various kinds of essay assignments effectively. The most important point in this reading claimed by Melzer is to ask questions to a professor. Melzer reiterates this point in tip #1, tip #4, tip #6, and in the conclusion. Melzer believes that the reason why students feel difficult to start the writing assignment is that they do not clarify the unsure parts of the assignment. This seems important because if the student just remains ignorant of certain things by not asking professor for whatever reasons, it would make he/she harder and harder to grasp the basic idea of the assignment and finally would lead one to do plagiarism which is the last choice of a student who does not understand what to and how to write it.

             What Melzer claims are all important but some quotes that stuck out specifically to me are “key verbs, such as argue, define, summarize, and evaluate, [that can] help you understand what kind of thinking and writing skills the instructor wants you to demonstrate,” and “key verbs have different meaning in different classes and different subjects” (140). The reason why they especially stuck out to me is that I often tend to think the key verbs are trifling and not put great importance on them. Considering them trivial often made me difficult to understand what my professor wants me to demonstrate on the assignment. As the writer emphasizes that it is important to ask teachers to describe what the key verbs mean, I believe that figuring out what genre or type of essay a student’s been assigned is also crucial. Since the meaning of the key verbs are diverse according to types of essay, it would be easier and helpful to understand the key verbs when one knows what kind of essay he or she needs to write is. Besides, I thought that it is significant to “take advantage of” looking at examples that give the student an idea of how to write a certain essay like journals because, as Melzer puts in, “learning from examples can help you be a more effective writer”. These two quotations both generally are important to practice when writing because many students do not put great importance on the definition of the key verbs and taking advantage of examples of certain writing. After all, what Melzer claims to be significant are those most people know to some extent but they just do not really practice or use them to be effective writers. In other words, handling these tips and techniques are the matter of whether an individual really follow them or not to become an effective writer. If you ask anyone whether he or she has heard of those from tip #1 to tip #6, probably all college students will answer as “yes,” because obviously, they would have already learned some of or all about them from their high school teachers. Thus, it seems to me that knowing about what Melzer claims here is important but also, for the students, practicing those techniques and making them as useful writing tools are the most crucial things to do from the reading.

I sort of argued that what matters here is that we all know how to be a better and more effective writers but it is just some people do not follow the ways for being effective in doing writing assignments. I thought that one reason for people not following the techniques would be either being lazy or being little bit haughty to do that. What else do you reckon that people do not practice these tips even though they know how to follow the techniques?