This handout is a guide to some of the important writing challenges you are likely to encounter as a Hunter student and offers a few basic strategies and formats you will want to become familiar with. The ability to express yourself clearly, communicate comprehension of subject matter, and apply critical thinking and analytical skills through writing is crucial to your academic success. Therefore, you must develop a writing process, a way to write papers, that gives you the opportunity to demonstrate that ability in all your academic writing.
       As a college student, you are likely to encounter certain types of writing assignments and writing situations in your various courses, from reaction papers to lab reports, to formal research papers and in-class essay examinations. You may need to learn specialized formats and vocabulary for writing in particular disciplines, and you will need to master one or more styles of documentation for citing sources in your writing. As a student of the City University of New York, there are also several important standard writing assessment tests that you may be required to take during the course of your academic career at CUNY. And as a Hunter student you will take English 120, Hunter's Freshman composition course, which will introduce you to the college-level academic essay, help you develop your writing process, and give you an opportunity to practice important writing skills. If you need help with a writing assignment in any class, you may use Hunter College's Writing Center, which offers a variety of resources for students, including tutoring, workshops, handouts, and a web page with information, interactive exercises and links to other writing resources.

The Writing Process

       When working on a writing assignment, many students focus on the end product: the final draft, the finished essay, the grade. They are likely to do a better job, however, if they re-focus on the process by which they will create the product. Every student's individual writing process is different, but in general the set of tasks that are necessary to successfully write an academic paper is identifiable and stable.
       Almost all academic writing assignments call for a response to a reading, either a text assigned in the course syllabus or a source found by research. Therefore, reading is usually the first step of the writing process. It is important to be an active reader, using note-taking techniques and summarizing. The principle of analytical, critical reading should also be applied to the assignment itself to make sure your paper responds appropriately and satisfies the assigned requirements.
       Writing is thinking. Teachers give you writing assignments to see what you think about what you read. Whichever invention technique-freewriting, brainstorming, questioning-you use, it is important to think first, and then write the paper, even on exams. What is the main point you want to make about the topic?
       You need to explain to the reader how you arrived at that point and what evidence you have to support it. That explanation needs to be focused, coherent, developed, logical, the product of critical thinking. Organize your thoughts, using an outline or rough draft to order your ideas and evidence. At some point in your academic writing you will be required to write a formal outline, and it is difficult to write a long research essay (15-20 pages) without using an informal one, a list of notes to yourself about how you are going to order your ideas and evidence. So it is a good idea to practice using outlines early in your academic studies.
       Then write the paper. Notice that while writing can be employed in every step-summarizing, freewriting, outlining-the act of writing the paper itself usually takes place in the middle of the process.
       Every paper can be improved with revision. Revising does not mean correcting errors; it means, literally, to see again: reading your work over with a critical eye and considering what improvements can be made in the argument and organization, as well as the expression. It may mean re-reading the research, re-thinking your point, re-ordering the outline, re-stating the evidence. The writing process is recursive in that you give yourself the best chance to write the best paper you can if you go back over the steps and write more than one draft.
       And everyone knows you should proofread your papers before you hand them in. Many student writers proofread too fast and miss errors they could have corrected. Leave yourself time for this step so you can slow down, take care, and listen carefully to your writing. Give yourself the best chance to find and fix your mistakes, to apply your language skills as thoroughly as you can.
       Read actively, think critically, organize logically, write clearly, revise as necessary, proofread carefully-practice the writing process.

The CUNY ACT

       All students entering a CUNY college must take the ACT exams (with the exception of those students who achieve a certain score on their SAT or Regents exams). The CUNY/ACT Basic Skills Test in Writing measures the level of writing skills that you have attained before entering Hunter and is the exit exam for Hunter's ESL courses. The ACT Writing Sample takes the form of a letter, but the primary skill being tested is the ability to develop an argument on a community-based issue. So from the beginning of your career at Hunter-before the beginning-your writing is tested, with a focus on argumentation.

English 120-Expository Writing

       After taking the ACT and upon entering Hunter, you will have to take a required Freshman composition course, English 120 (unless you have taken an equivalent course at another college or had an Advanced Placement course in high school). The name of the course is Expository Writing, and in it you will learn some of the major principles of exposition, how to "expose" your thinking to others through writing. English 120 is a prerequisite for many courses at the college and for all other writing courses.
       In this course you will learn the features of the academic essay. "Essay" comes from the Latin word meaning "to weigh" or "to try"; to write one, you must weigh the evidence on an issue and attempt to make your thinking on the topic clear to a reader. Essays must be written in well-formed paragraphs that each develop an idea or support a point you want to make, and paragraphs must be written in well-formed sentences that state, explain, and/or combine your ideas and/or your evidence.
       The work involved in writing an essay is the work described by the writing process, so English 120 is structured as a course to teach the writing process. Your writing is assessed at the end of the semester by the portfolio method; you decide which of your essays to include in your portfolio, and for several assignments you will also include all the drafts you have written. Revision, therefore, is built into a number of the assignments, most of which are based on readings, require students to state their thinking on topics in thesis statements, and are evaluated on the basis of the organization of ideas and the conformity to conventions grammar and mechanics.
       The portfolio must also include two of the most common kinds of papers you will be required to write as a college student: the research essay and the in-class essay exam. For the research essay, the reading needed to investigate your topic and make your argument will go beyond assigned texts and require that you gather information from sources (usually books, academic journals, newspapers, and/or internet sites). These papers are also called "documented essays" because in them you must provide documentation of your sources: every time you quote or paraphrase in your paper you must cite the source, and you must append a bibliography or list of Works Cited to your essay. In English 120 you will learn MLA (Modern Language Association) documentation style. And in both assignments-though it is especially challenging in in-class exam situations-you will be expected to apply the writing process.

Rhetorical Strategies

       "Rhetoric" is the practice, by various methods, of persuasion. Most papers in most college courses try to persuade a reader that a particular point of view, a particular argument, is valid, reasonable, best. Argumentation is the most common rhetorical strategy in academic writing. Most academic essays, then, are expected to have a thesis.
       A writing skill that is called for in support of many different rhetorical strategies is summary. What goes into a summary? If we agree that a summary includes the main points of a reading, than a summary is not just a re-statement of the original text. It is an analysis of the text-breaking it down into its constituent parts, its ideas, and examining how they work-and evaluating those ideas to find the "main" ones. Summary assures active, critical reading.
       Student writers are also often asked in assignments to "respond" to a reading. The response can be anything from a freewrite to a research essay. A book report or critique is one kind of response, which usually requires the writer not simply to summarize, but to offer insights and opinions, usually including a thesis. Theater and film reviews take much the same form, as do many assignments in Art History.
       Another common assignment is to compare and contrast two or more texts, concepts, historical periods, etc. To compare, discuss common characteristics, similarities; to contrast, discuss differences or points of divergence from common structures or parallel dynamics.
       The narrative-descriptive method is another common approach to essay writing. It often is assigned early in your college career ("Describe your neighborhood") and later, when you have gained experience and expertise in a field (in case histories and descriptions of fieldwork). This rhetorical mode is often the basis for a process-analysis, which analyzes a case study, an historical account, a lab experiment, etc.
       These rhetorical strategies, most of them introduced in Expository Writing, will be useful in most of the writing you do in the rest of your academic career. Writing assignments in a variety of disciplines often require one or more of these strategies to successfully fulfill the requirements and carry your point effectively and convincingly to your readers.

Writing Across the Curriculum

       The English department at Hunter offers a number of academic writing courses (Intermediate and Advanced Expository Writing, Theory and Practice of Expository Writing, Essay Writing), and, as part of Hunter's General Education Requirement, many departments schedule designated Significant Writing courses. But, in fact, a majority of courses at Hunter, at every level, across the curriculum, require writing of some kind.
       Different departments and disciplines require different kinds of writing. Most of the sciences, for example, require lab reports, which present the results of laboratory experiments and can be written in several different formats. Like research essays assigned in the upper levels of some of the social sciences, these reports include abstracts (summaries of the reports' or the research's findings), descriptions of the experimental or research methods, a statement of the results, and an interpretation of the significance of the results.
       Once in your major, you may have to write an annotated bibliography as part of a research project or as an assignment in and of itself. Such bibliographies include short summaries of each work listed, focusing on the significance of that work in relation to the research topic. Research assignments in different disciplines can require that you use particular documentation styles, such as those designated by the APA (American Psychological Association), common in many of the social sciences, ASA (American Sociological Society), required in some sociology courses, CBE (Council of Biology Editors), standard in some sciences, and the Chicago Manual Style (Documentation Style 1, the Author-Date system), used in papers for Hunter's History department. The MLA, which is introduced in English 120, is used for most humanities courses, including English, Philosophy, and Classical Studies.
       Some writing assignments, like the lab report and the annotated bibliography, may not call for a thesis. Papers in the Philosophy department, for instance, may ask that you put forward a "proposition," a statement not to be argued but discussed from various points of view and judged not for its validity but for its complexity. Your essay, then, need not be persuasive with regard to a particular opinion but must be interesting and thoroughly thought through. Most writing assignments, though, will require some kind or level of argumentation.

The CUNY Proficiency Examination

       Once you have earned at least 45 credits and before you go beyond the 60 credit mark, you will be required to take the CPE (CUNY Proficiency Exam), which will measure how far your reading comprehension, reasoning, and writing skills have progressed by the midpoint of your academic career. There are two parts to this test: critical thinking and data interpretation. Task I will test your reading comprehension, critical thinking, and writing skills; Task II will examine your ability to interpret data from charts, graphs, or tables and to explain whether or not the data supports an argument. Clearly, the CPE calls upon the writer to demonstrate the skills introduced in English 120 and required in writing across the curriculum. It is a test of your ability to perform and apply your writing process in a proficient manner. Hunter is confident that by the time you are required to take the CUNY Proficiency Exam, you will have the skills, method, and practice necessary to do well.

Writing help at Hunter

       There are resources and services at Hunter that can help you with your writing assignments. The Hunter College Writing Center (416 Thomas Hunter) offers tutorial assistance to all Hunter students for help with generating and developing ideas, essay organization, grammar and editing, and general difficulties with writing in any course, undergraduate or graduate. The Center provides regularly scheduled weekly tutoring, drop-in assistance, and tutoring by email. The center also offers a changing schedule of workshops on a variety of writing issues, extensive handout materials on all aspects of the writing process, and online services including links to other resources. The Hunter College Library has vast resources of information for you to use in your writing and trained staff to help you access those resources. The Study Skills Center (C001 North) schedules workshops in a variety of writing-related issues, such as note-taking and test anxiety.

Some Related Writing Center Handouts:

-Overview of the Writing Process -Invention Techniques -Critical Reading -Organizing an Essay -Revision Guidelines -ACT Guidelines -Guidelines for Writing a Summary

-Argumentation -Comparison and Contrast -Developing a Thesis Statement -The English 120 Portfolio -The Portfolio Cover Letter -How to Prepare for In-Class Essay Examinations -Vocabulary used on Essay Examinations

-General Guidelines for Research Papers -MLA Documentation Style -APA Citation and Bibliography Form -Chicago Manual of Style Documentation