Exposing Some of the Misery of College Writing Classes

Exposing Some of the Misery of College Writing ClassesOne of the biggest complaints that students have with their college writing classes is that they feel as though there are not enough examples of descriptive essay topics to choose from. There is a good reason for this, though: too many students are giving the same assignments day after day, and too many of them are finding that it is hard to come up with topic ideas that are different from one another.The problem with writing a descriptive essay is that the topic will end up looking predictable, because you have all the important things covered. A topic like 'what makes a friendship last' is already pretty generic and boring, so the only difference that a student can make is to change up their creative juices by coming up with examples of this topic and taking them in new directions.Students who do this will tend to go on to become truly great writers in college, and can become successful writers later on in life. That is the kind of write they should be writing - how to come up with ways to expand their vocabulary by providing new and interesting examples of the things that they are studying, not merely repeating things over.I have two reasons for suggesting this approach to writing: first, it makes sense to me that students ought to have long term goals when they are beginning their college career, and second, it makes sense to me that students should know what exactly they want to do once they get out of college. I strongly recommend that students do each of these things when they have written an essay, or at least long enough that they can start thinking about what they really want to do.My first example of descriptive essay topics has to do with the big three (which I discuss in my book) and how to write a well-structured paper on a topic that the student has already studied before. Suppose that you wanted to study 'how to increase a student's self-confidence' - how would you go about writing a generic and predictable topic?Students always do this, in my experience. They will sit down to write a paper, look at the first sentence of the topic, and simply say, 'well...that would be the article'. If the topic is long enough, they will say it once more and then, when the topic is already long enough, they will copy it verbatim.On the other hand, if you want to write a unique and different example of descriptive essay topics, you will have to do something else. Instead of sitting down to write a topic with a specific definition or example of the topic, you must take a fresh look at it from every angle that you can think of. Maybe you can do an examination of the article with lots of research on psychology methods, or maybe you can take a real life example and analyze the method and results in the piece.It is hard to put in words what is needed in writing your own College Writing Classes, but it is easy to recognize these tips. Use them as a springboard to be able to come up with unique and interesting examples of your topic that you can use to help you come up with an exciting topic idea.