A Guide to Understanding the Essay Prompt

Before you start the research and writing process, the essay prompt should be carefully analyzed and understood. It is not uncommon for students to misconstrue the essay prompt and miss their mark by a long distance. A misdirected essay writer is even worse than a badly written one and while the latter might get you some marks for the effort, the former will be dismissed completely.

You should understand what the essay requires you to do and what’s the central argument is. The essay writing process shouldn’t start before the prompt wording is analyzed and all the doubts are removed.

Initial Checklist

• Note down the word count and the due date for the essay.

• Check the referencing style and the writing format required for the essay.

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• Take note of any learning outcomes provided with the essay prompt. Analyze marking criteria too if available.

• If you are given a choice, do a bit of research into the topics and find the one suited to you.

• Separate the prompt and begin analyzing it.

Types of essay questions

The essay that you are given to write on can be a broad prompt or it can be a narrow one. Broad essay questions tend to have general terms and common nouns while narrow ones have proper nouns

Example of a question with a narrow subject: How did D.H.Lawrence’s books contribute to the discussion of homosexuality in the 20th century?

Here the essay asks the writer to discuss D.H.Lawrence’s writing and his works, narrowing it down to those which contributed to the discussion of homosexuality. The essay requires you to use critical writing skills to analyze various works and form a convincing analysis.

Example of a question with a broader subject: How does building roads and infrastructure affect the culture of an area?

This essay prompt fails to specify any proper nouns. We are left talking about roads and areas in general. The only limiting part of the prompt is the culture part, but even that fails to make the subject narrow. You are to talk about the effects that are either negative or positive.

However, the essay shouldn’t be broad. Despite the broad topic, you should talk about a particular area in the topic or take a particular stand upon it. Also you can take help from essay writer website.

The anatomy of the essay question

In order to understand the essay as you dissect it is important to know the parts of the prompt. Using this knowledge you will minimize your chances for error and will always get the essay prompt right.

The essay prompt has three parts:

• Prompt task word or directive:

The directive tells you how you are going to present your essay and how you are going to deal with the subject of the essay. This is the part where you figure out what the essay style you will have to follow and most importantly, what type of essay you are going to write.

• Descriptive Writing: Define, Discuss, Describe, Explore, Explain, Illustrate, etc.

• Critical Writing: Compare, Contrast, Comment on, Criticise, Evaluate, To what extent.

• The subject matter:

The subject matter tells you what you will write about. If there is more than one subject matter than you will probably have to talk about one subject in relation to another.

• The limiting part:

The focus of the essay is controlled by the limiting part of your essay. Each and every argument will have to orient itself in accordance with this limiting part.

Taking the above example, let’s see how the parts constitute an essay prompt.

‘How did D.H.Lawrence’s books contribute to the discussion of homosexuality in the 20th century?’

• Subject matter: D.H.Lawrence’s books and homosexuality

• Directive: How___contributes to the discussion

• Limiting Part: Homosexuality and 20th century