Lesson 3. Make an Assigned Topic Your Own
Make an Assigned Topic Your Own
When a topic is assigned, find away to make it your own. Most of the writing you do will be in assigned topic. The way to get started on an assigned topic is to discover its connection with what you already know, with your own interests and experience. Suppose you are asked to write about the free enterprise system. Your first thought may be of huge corporations: Du Pont, IBM, General Motors, Chrysler, AT&T. but big firms like these are far out numbered by small ones such as pizza parlors, taxicab companies, barber shops, hair dressing salons, and drug stores. James is a businessman; but so is the street vendor selling leather belts or costume jewelry at a busy intersection, and so is the ten year old behind a lemonade stand on a hot summer afternoon. If you’ve ever had a job, you have had the chance to see how someone else runs a business. Personal experience, then, can be just what you need to find your way into a topic.
Consider what two different students did with two different topics assigned to them. Asked to write about the free enterprise system, Virginia decided to explain how she and a few other girls organized a summer playgroup when they were only nine-years-old and how their profits rose to nearly three hundred dollars each in the fourth summer of their operation.
EXERCISE 6
Describe a personal experience that you might use to make a point about any one of the following topics.
Families, computers, education, farming, crime, sports, housing, music, and transportation.
Spread the Word:
