Chapter 2: Reading the Assignment and Course Guidelines

What You Will Make

Create a requirements list with a planned action beside each item. Keep the prompt and rubric as the governing documents; your checklist is a working interpretation of them.

Read for Intellectual and Practical Requirements

Separate the work of thinking from the conditions of submission. “Evaluate” needs criteria for judgement. A specified dataset limits the evidence you may use. A word limit affects how much analysis is feasible. Source counts, citation systems, collaboration rules, and file formats belong in the list without becoming substitutes for a clear argument.

Fictional teaching case: This lesson uses the invented campus-transit records in Chapter 1. Record labels and numbers are practice material, not real research to cite or submit.

Parse a Practice Assignment

Invented prompt: “In 1,500 words, evaluate whether the transit change improved evening access using Records A–C. Discuss the limits of the evidence. Use only this dossier.”

Translate “evaluate” into an action: define evening access and test the records against it. Translate “limits” into checking boardings versus people, timetable versus reliability, and volunteers versus a representative sample. “Use only this dossier” means finding outside evidence would not answer the specified task.

If your draft only calculates the boarding increase, it addresses one indicator but leaves the main access question unanswered. If you survey classmates instead, you have changed the evidence base without authorization. Those are planning errors that formatting cannot repair.

Try It Yourself

Write each requirement on a separate line, followed by where you will satisfy it. Example: “Evidence limits → discuss Record C’s voluntary recruitment beside its result.” Mark unspecified issues, such as whether the word count includes references, for clarification.

Use the same process with your course prompt. Ask a precise question when instructions conflict: identify the two requirements and explain the decision you need to make. Keep the clarification with your planning notes.

Check Your Work

• Can every requirement be traced to the prompt, rubric, or instructor?
• Does each intellectual requirement have space in the planned argument?
• Have you avoided silently turning assumptions into rules?
• Are you using the permitted sources and methods?

Revise the plan if it cannot satisfy the requirements within the available time and length.

Source Guidance

Action verbs, scope, and audience help identify what an assignment asks. (Harvard College Writing Center)