Day: September 12, 2011

Today we are going to look at the importance of digging a little deeper with your writing by moving below the surface of a question or prompt. This is related to the idea of setting the limits of a questions (where you define keywords) or formulating a complex contention by stating it using the words ‘yes, but…’ or ‘no, but…’

When writing an expository piece it is equally important to deliver complexity in your response; this can be done by looking carefully at the question and trying to identify ambigious or undefined terms.

For example, for the prompt Social networking sites destroy our ability to communicate the words ‘ability to communicate’ are not clearly defined. Does this refer to our ability to hold a face-to-face conversation? Or does it refer to our ability to express complex ideas? Is this a reference to all forms of communication? Or is this only talking about the written form? Clearly, how YOU decide to interpret the words ‘ability to communicate’ will have a big impact on the direction your response takes.

The structure of your introduction should look something like this:

INTRODUCTION

1. Background – define ‘conflict’ / what types of conflict are there?
2. Hook: not necessarily a statistic, can be an interesting fact
3. Present different responses to conflict
4. Pose question that these different response naturally raise