Broad topic: You will always be given a broad topic on which to focus for your essay writing.
Prewriting: Prewriting helps you to narrow a broad topic as well as generate ideas on your focused topic.
Narrow (Focused) topic: This topic should be narrow enough for an essay of 4-5 pages in length.
Thesis Statement: This is the most important sentence of your essay. It contains your focused topic and your opinion on it.
Outline: Writing an extended outline maps out your ideas before you begin the drafting process.
Special Note: Nowhere in an outline should you use the first or second person (any form of “I” or “you”). Also, please avoid the use of contractions.
Choose three of these five topics: health, entertainment, family, technology, and education
Do one form of prewriting for each of the three topics you choose. I would suggest doing a different type of prewriting for each broad topic just to give yourself practice in the various techniques. Click this link for prewriting techniques. (Links to an external site.) At this point, ONLY focus on brainstorming, clustering, and free-writing.
Our goal here is to come up with a topic limited or narrowed enough to write an essay on. For example, if my broad topic were “animals,” “dogs” would not be sufficiently narrowed in focus. If I wanted to write about “the importance of service-dogs for emotional trauma,” that topic would be sufficiently narrowed in focus. I would like for you to come up with a narrowed topic from each of the three broad topics you chose.
Now it’s time to write a thesis statement. Click this link for a handout called Guidelines for Writing Great Thesis StatementsPreview the document. Choose the ONE narrow topic you like best and write a thesis statement for it.
After you have a strong, opinionated thesis, you’ll need to support it. Forming an outline at this stage of the process will be like making a map of your ideas. You’ll have topic sentences (represented by Roman numerals) for topic sentences, and then supporting points (represented by a, b, c, etc.) to support topic sentences.
To sum it all up, when you submit this assignment, you’ll need to show which broad topics you chose, the three narrow topics you came up with after prewriting, and an outline. You will not have to show your prewriting, but make sure you do it.
