Many essay writing manuals and guides suggest students should practice essay writing in order to develop writing skills. Additionally, there are times when such practice should go beyond the works given by a teacher. In such cases, the question that might arise is what the students should write about.
When at school, students are given essay writing prompts that guide their topic selection. In other instances, students might turn to the Internet for essay writing prompts. Thus, this article will try to provide essay writing prompts in the form of guidelines that should be considered when selecting a topic to practice writing.
School Essay Writing Prompts
Selecting a topic is a frustrating task for students writing on a free subject. Practicing writing should not resemble keeping a diary, in that matter. Common essay writing prompts, given by teachers, usually focus on, but not limited to the following aspects:
- Writing about students’ recent activities.
- Writing about a hot topic in the media.
- Writing a personal reflection on a topic.
It should be noted that the aforementioned essay writing prompts are not inclusive, and are not concerned with writing within a specific field of study. When a student makes the decision to write on his/her own, the mentioned essay writing prompts might be limited in value, and thus, the student might become frustrated, looking for new topics to write about.
Creating Essay Writing Prompts
A few essay writing prompts that might be helpful can be derived from the following suggestions:
- If there is something that attracted your attention recently, try to persuade an audience that it is significant.
- Something that caused a particular emotion, reflect on it.
- Select a debatable topic, choose a position and defend it. Switch to another position and do the same.
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