Assignments are the core part of the internal evaluation process that keeps their immense value as an alternative learning medium. Colleges can provide different kinds of assignments based on literature reviews, essays, reflective journals, case studies, annotated bibliographies, and critical reviews depending upon the matter they want assignment on. Writing the assignments may seem difficult for you and make you feel under pressure, and one has to prepare a lot to take up the entire questions effectively. Moreover, the academic expectation carries something unique with it than what you may have experienced in high school.
You need to engage with fresh ideas by reflecting, analyzing, critiquing the write-ups and then, making connections, drawing conclusions, or finding several different ways of thinking about a given subject.
Let us first get through what is expected in college assignments as compared to high school.
| High School | College |
| The assignments are not that long, and teachers set the time beyond the lecture time and make the review later on. | The reading assignments are literally very long. You are made to attend the class on the submission day of the assignments to present the material’s basic understanding. |
| Teachers provide long study guides and many other helpful resources to prepare for the assignments. | From taking notes to research about the assignments, everything would be your responsibility. |
| Here, the grade is dogged with the performance over various assessments, which indulges in minor and major assignments. In school, the valuations are not only writing based. | The grade would totally depend on few significant assessments, and most of them are purely writing based.
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| Writing assignments generally indulge in personal and creative writing with elucidative writing. | Beyond creative writing courses, most of the writing assignments are of elucidative.
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| The whole structure and the writing assignment format is consistent over all the years in high school. | Here, on the basis of the course you pick up, you will be asked for the fresh new forms of writing and then follow those standards within a specific professional field.
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| You will get extreme help from the teachers whenever you feel difficulty in writing the assignments. | Here, teachers want their students to succeed, but they may not draw where they are struggling. They want the students to be proactive by themselves and take the necessary steps in completing their assignments. |
Doing a college assignment is certainly not a linear process. You might choose for backtrack, different directions, or boomerang. Initially, it is required to read the task in a detailed manner to understand the parts well. There are many different ways of doing this, but you need to pick the one that stays fit for your work. It might be great if you revise your plan after a lot more blowing your head in reading and thinking. You may repeatedly be doing it before the final draft, but you need not get frustrated. When you read and learn more, some stances might look different from what you have assumed initially.
You must be clear on the fact of what kind of assignment you are heading towards. So, the task instructions can better explain the structure of the assignment, formatting, and further its types.
If you do everything in a planned way, starting with planning, researching, writing, and revising your assignment, you won’t have to rush to meet deadlines.
Let me take you through the steps below to help your assignments to turn it into more engaging, exciting, and enjoyable.
Step 1: Plan
When you start planning your assignment, it will make you focused on your subject.
- First of all, you need to track what percentage of final marks it carries and the worth of the assignments. With this, you can quickly come to the conclusion of how much time it will take.
- You need to sort out the marking schedule as what the assignment checker would be looking for when they give you marks on the specific assignment. You can cross-check this by the information available with the assignment questions.
- Now, you need to take your force upon completing the requirements, for instance, research, writing drafts, reference checking, reviewing, and editing. You are required to break these into the list of the tasks.
- Give every task a deadline
Step 2: Interpret the questions
Before just start writing the answer to the questions of assignment, you need to know what it clearly means. First, start reading it slowly and very carefully, and then understanding what is being expected.
You need to ask yourself:
- What is the topic?
- What is the question about?
- What does it actually mean?
- What do I need to do to explain the answer well?
To grab the essence of the question in a better way, try to rewrite in your own words.
So, when you are analyzing the question, you need to:
- Look for the instructional word that makes you define the structure of your assignment. For example, it can go with words such as analyze, compare, and contrast.
- Know the meaning of the words in detail.
- Check out the topic words, on which you would like to proceed with.
- Do check the restricting terms too that confines the topic and make it more detailed.
You can get to see the extra generated information related to the assignment and your expectations in the course materials or on your course page or forums.
Therefore, whenever you find something related to the assignment, whether over a course page or on a forum page, make sure to save a copy of it. It would be helpful if you collect all the information that you gather related to the assignment in a single file, you can then get the entire information in a single place when you start writing.
Step 3: Preparing outline
When you prepare the outline, it will provide you a structure to follow when it is about writing an assignment. The assignment type will offer you a more comprehensive structure, but you must sidewise check the question and marking schedule. In this way, you get the details on a structured topic that is expected by the lecturer. It will let you know which sections are worth to detail out as per the marks.
After all, you will be able to create the outline as you want with the help of the headings and the gaps for the matter that you need to fill in.
Your assignments can be in the form of an essay or other report, but there are several other assignment types which you need to do in the college time. The types of assignments include essays, reports, case studies, abstracts, annotated bibliographies, and reviews. All these generally follow the same basic structure as follows:
- Introduction: It covers up 10% of the assignment. Here, you will be introducing the topic and its main points. You need to explain the purpose of the assignment and the outcomes you came up with. It will be an excellent idea if you write the introduction at the very last as you will get the whole idea what to include in the text.
- Discussion: It covers up mostly 80% of the assignment. This section is split into a number of paragraphs. You need to decide the points which you want to discuss in your assignment with including new paragraph for every main point. While proceeding towards making paragraphs, it starts with a topic sentence that explains the main idea. It can be best followed by supporting evidence and examples. In the outline, you must try and indulge in the draft topic sentences.
- Conclusion: It gets a space of 10% in the assignment. You can restate the main argument in the conclusions. You can go by evaluating the ideas and then sum up the outcomes. Make sure you don’t introduce any new information within the end.
Step 4: Searching the information
You must research your topic thoroughly and find the information that is much more relevant to your question. You can get help from the course materials and the recommended readings. Beyond this, you can try taking help from the local public library, online resources, and by taking advice from the experts. Once you have attained the information, you need to evaluate whether the available information is right for your assignment or not.
You can evaluate the information with the following steps:
- You should not accept the information as it is because you need to evaluate the reading you have done to be valid, correct, or applicable. Rather than this, you need to analyze all the aspects both objectively and rationally. This will help you in reaching a conclusion with an open mind.
- You need to look at the information you gathered very finitely with the questions:
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- What key points are included?
- What are the arguments been involved?
- Are these proof or just assumptions?
Secondly, if there is an issue, you need to write it down and break it into the parts and then choose one to proceed with.
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- What are your perceptions about the issue?
- Why do you want to imply the way you want to do?
- Now, when you keep the analytical approach, you need to focus on the stuff such as:
- Causes and effects, steps within a process, and the sequence of events.
- Similarities, Differences, and trends
- Associations and relationships between the things
- Complexity in the systems
- Instances of what is happening
- While analyzing the information, you need to ask questions such as:
- Who is the creator of the theory?
- From where does the information come from?
- When did the research happen?
- What happened before and after the particular incident?
- How do pieces of bits fit together and get related to each other?
- What are the similarities and differences in the ideas?
- What if it had happened in a different manner?
- Why does a particular incident matter a lot?
Step 5: Write
Once you have gathered the information, now it becomes necessary to carry it altogether and write down into the assignment.
You might have a question in your mind about how to form the first draft?
- For this, you need to make use of the outline and fill specific gaps. This can be done by writing the main points for every made up section.
- It is best to write freely, not that much stressing on the wording being 100% right.
- Writing with the conclusion might direct your heading in the best possible way.
- The introduction is a hard part, and you can leave it to the last.
- You must not allow much time to create a draft ideally, as it would change.
Making it fine-tuned:
- For this, you can start by revising your first draft and check the sense of the content.
- Now, it is necessary to fine-tune the wording and make it flow well.
- Save the different copies of the drafts as you might feel a need to go back to them at a certain point.
- Now, leave the writing for a day and then read it again and then fine-tune it yet.
- Accumulate the bibliography and the references list.
Step 6: Editing and Proofreading
Once you are done with the assignment, you can reform it by editing and proofreading. Infact, if you take a short break, it will help you to get relief from the work and further, make you capable of scrutinizing your assignment with a fresh mind.
Viewing a big picture:
- Cross-check whether all questions are done or check the assignments against the marking schedule well.
- Check the proper structure.
- View whether you have included the related parts such as title page, introduction, conclusion, and reference lists.
- Check whether the content is logically arranged.
- What is the readability score of your assignment?
- Check the originality of the words you have used in the assignments and acknowledged those words.
- Well-presentation of the assignment.
The best way to check is to read the assignments aloud.
For the details, you can check out:
- Check whether you have used the native or academic English if required.
- Check the source reference.
- Make sure you have given numbers to the pages.
- Do check whether you have mentioned your name, student ID, the details of the assignment, and date on every page.
There is a small tip if any possibility is made up, you must ask any of your friends or family member to proofread your assignment as it is sometimes tricky o see your own mistakes.
Make sure that before you submit your assignment, take a print of that and check it one more last time. It is such an easy method to spot the errors in the print as compared to the screen.
