Academic Writing

23 Types of Assignments

No matter what method of delivery or purpose for your assignment, you will only be asked to do something that you already WOULD know about (because of past experience or universal knowledge), SHOULD know about (because it has been expressly taught to you), or COULD know about (because part of the assignment is to gather that knowledge). So you will never be going blind into an assignment.

The type of assignment you might get can be divided up into how the assignment will be delivered (submission) and what the assignment is going to achieve (purpose).

English at this Advanced Level requires students to be able to deliver:

  • An oral presentation
  • Paragraphs
  • Essays
  • A review of a literature-based text
  • On-demand paragraphs and essays
  • A research assignment

Students are required to satisfy the following purposes:

  • Summary
  • Compare and contrast
  • Classification
  • Definition
  • Persuasion
  • Exposition
  • Review
  • Synthesis

You might be assigned an oral presentation to persuade; a research assignment to synthesize; a paragraph to summarize; an on-demand essay to define…

Ground Zero: You need to know what your assignment is asking of you. How will you deliver it? What is an effective way to execute that type of delivery? What content should be in it? How should your ideas be organized to suit the purpose?

See more in “Patterns of Organization and Methods of Development” later in this text.

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Advanced English Copyright © 2021 by Allison Kilgannon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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