I developed this activity for my Freshman English class at Ferris State University.
In the course, students are assigned essays that are written in various modes: narrative, descriptive, compare/contrast, process, etc.
Constraints:
One thing I struggle with is helping students find topics that 1) work for the assignment and 2) doesn’t bore the student. For some reason, students fail to utilize their creativity when selecting essay topics. It may have something to do with preconceived notions of English class being boring. I’m not sure.
In addition to this concern, I am very interested in making my essay assignments difficult to plagiarize. This means I usually have to tweak my assignments as well as allow time for prewriting and process writing. Whenever possible, I try to have students develop their topic when they first receive the assignment, so they leave knowing what they will write about (and so do I).
I try to do this, however, without dictating what my students write. I still want the actual topic to be open to student interpretation.
