CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.8

By Anonymous (not verified), 12 March, 2026

Warm-Up for College-Entrance Writing

Warm-Up for College-Entrance Writing

Heading from high school to an even higher education can be a daunting prospect. You'll go from being the oldest and most experienced student to the youngest and least experienced. You'll also need to find the right school to help you achieve your goals. Finding that school—and making sure that school finds you—is a process.

One key part of the process is the college application. You'll provide all kinds of information about yourself, including your high school transcripts, standardized test scores, letters of recommendation, and intended field of study. On most applications, you'll be asked to write one or more essays focusing on some aspect of your life or education and how it relates to your goals. Providing an on-target response begins with understanding the college-entrance prompt.

What Is a College-Entrance Prompt?

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Writing Literary Analysis
© Thoughtful Learning 2018

A college-entrance prompt is a brief set of instructions telling you what to write about on a college application. To analyze a prompt, you can use the PAST questions:

  • Purpose: Why am I writing? (to explain, to define, to narrate, to show?)
  • Audience: Who will read this? (admissions officers, fellow freshmen, college community?)
  • Subject: What am I writing about? (leadership, community service, education, vision?)
  • Type: What form should my writing take? (personal essay, biographical essay, reflection?)

In this unit, you'll learn to use the PAST mnemonic to analyze any college-entrance prompt or any other writing assignment you receive. First, though, you should warm up your thinking by reflecting on your goals after high school.

Thinking About the Past and Future

Before you start applying to schools, you should think about your past and future. A reflection chart can help you track how you are changing over time.

By Anonymous (not verified), 12 March, 2026

Revising Argument Essays

Revising Argument Essays

During a verbal argument, you have to respond in the moment, so you often have regrets afterward: "I wish I had said ________. I wish I hadn't said ________. " In an argument essay, you don't need regrets because you can add whatever you left out and remove whatever you shouldn't have said. That's revising. You can also eliminate any faulty logic and make sure your voice is persuasive. The following activities will help.

Revising to Avoid Logical Fallacies

From the first Greek philosophers to today, thinkers have been on the lookout for specific flaws in reasoning—logical fallacies. These errors crop up constantly in advertising, political debates, and lunchroom discussions. You should learn to recognize the following forms of fuzzy logic in the thinking of others and eliminate them from your own thinking.

Logical Fallacies

Ad Hominem Attack

"Ad hominem" is Latin for "to the person." An ad hominem attack goes after the person making the argument instead of the argument itself. Keep personalities out of the issue and instead focus on the controversial topic.

Fallacy: It's not surprising Jake from Jake's Roadhouse opposes food trucks since Jake is a selfish crook.

Better: It's not surprising restaurant owners oppose food trucks, but they should not be allowed to prevent fair competition.

Appeal to Ignorance

An appeal to ignorance cites a lack of evidence as if it were evidence. Support your argument with actual facts, statistics, examples, and so on.

Fallacy: No one has any idea whether food trucks would cause a problem in Waterford, so we can't outlaw them.

Better: Upper Forks, a city about the size of Waterford, passed a balanced food-truck ordinance, and five years later, their brick-and-mortar restaurants are thriving due to the new foodie culture.

Bandwagon

Long ago, people promoting a specific cause would put a band on a wagon and march through town with it, handing out pamphlets urging people to join the cause. The modern bandwagon fallacy is telling people they should do or believe something because everyone else is. Remember, a mob is often wrong. Instead, use careful logic and truthful examples to show why your position is strong.

Fallacy: All of our neighbor cities allow food trucks, so we should also.

Better: We can study the food truck ordinances and operations in our neighbor cities to learn what works and what doesn't before we create our own law.

Broad Generalization

A broad generalization occurs when one limited case is taken to represent all cases everywhere. Instead, present a complete picture of the situation.

Fallacy: Every student at my lunch table would rather eat from a food truck than have another cafeteria meal, so all of Waterford is crying out for this change.

Better: A recent survey by the Waterford Examiner showed that 73 percent of citizens polled indicated a desire to have food trucks available within the city.

By Anonymous (not verified), 12 March, 2026

Revising Definition Essays

Revising Definition Essays

Congratulations! You have an essay: You no longer have to worry about the blank page. Instead, you have words, sentences, ideas—all your best initial thinking about the topic. But a great first draft can still be a lackluster final draft. Revising lets you work with those ideas, adding new details, deleting unnecessary stuff, rewriting thoughts that didn't come out just right, and reorganizing material into the best order. The following activities can guide you.

Revising for Order of Details

When you wrote your first draft, you may have been tempted to write one paragraph about denotations, a second about connotations, a third about synonyms and antonyms, and so on. The result might feel a bit formulaic, marching doggedly through the list of details that you found. An effective essay is more than a list of details. It organizes the details with the reader's questions in mind.

In the first sample essay, "Right to the Heart," the first middle paragraph begins with the dictionary definition and then combines quotations and logical arguments to unpack the meaning of the definition. This organization works because readers know the word courage but need to analyze what it means and doesn't mean.

Dictionary Definition Merriam-Webster defines courage as the "mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty," Quotations or, in the words of Ernest Hemingway, "courage is grace under pressure." Logical Arguments Danger, fear, difficulty, pressure—these make courage not only necessary but possible. Courage cannot exist without opposition. One must feel fear before one can courageously persevere in the face of it. As Mark Twain puts it, "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear." The famous World War II general George S. Patton makes the connection even clearer: "Courage is fear holding on a minute longer." So, courage does not remove fear but rather persists in the face of it.

By Anonymous (not verified), 12 March, 2026

Writing a Definition Essay

Writing a Definition Essay

You've selected a term or two, gathered denotations and connotations and other details, and created a working thesis statement. You're ready to draft your definition essay. The following activities will help you build a strong beginning, develop middle paragraphs, and create an ending that effectively wraps up your definition.

By Anonymous (not verified), 12 March, 2026

Prewriting for Definition Essays

Prewriting for Definition Essays

The word define comes from a Latin word that means "find the edges of something," or "mark out the boundaries or limits of something." Your definition essay should therefore explore the meaning of a word in the same way that you would explore a campsite—walking edge to edge, checking out the fire pit, figuring out where to pitch a tent, noticing where the trails lead, taking in the view. You need to explore the topic of your definition essay just as you would explore a place. In fact, the word topic comes from the Greek word for "place." These activities will help you explore your topic and set up camp within the word.

Prewriting to Select a Topic

The topic of your essay can be any word that fascinates you. It could be a word from a school subject or just a word that you find intriguing:

Subject

Words

Math

angle, parallel, congruent, linear, average, significant, variable, fraction, difference, symbol

Science

force, mass, vector, field, wave, gravity, cycle, system, biome, organism, consciousness, microbe, process, symbol

Social Studies

era, policy, right, rule, produce, consume, conflict, genocide, compromise, belief, symbol

Language

thesis, argument, verb, preposition, literature, theme, character, mood, tone, symbol

Life

intrigue, nerd, geek, donnybrook, widdershins, eclectic, obtuse, inordinate, sensation, spectacle, symbol

What word fascinates me most and why?

I often hear the words nerd and geek, but some people insist that they are nerds and not geeks and some that they are geeks and not nerds, and some people say they are both. I know these words used to be negatives, but a lot of people see them as positives. I'd like to know what the difference is between them and how they started to be used the way they are used now.

Note that each of these lists ends in the word symbol, which directly relates to each subject. Look back over the lists. Many of the other words in the individual lists also relate to the other subjects. For example, angle, parallel, congruent, linear, average, significant, variable, and so on relate not just to math but also to science, social studies, life, and language. The best topics for definition essays do not have one meaning but many meanings. (In other words, you could explore the word triangle or even equilateral over many pages, but you'd be hard pressed to write much about isosceles.)

Think of fascinating words and pick a topic.

Create a chart of interesting words from your school subjects and words that intrigue you from everyday life. Choose a word or a set of words that you want to explore in a definition essay.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.8