Read the Direction Words Correctly for Higher Grades!
When you’re in class and you’re asked to write an essay, or even a normal test paper, the first thing you must do is to read the question carefully.
Each question will have a clue, direction words, as to the kind of response you need to give in order to answer the question correctly – and even if you manage to get the answer right without having it in the right format, you won’t get as high a grade as you could have, simply because you didn’t take the time to read the question properly before you started.
The most common words you are likely to encounter on an essay or test paper are:
Compare – take a look at something against something else (the paper will tell you what you’re comparing, apples and oranges for example) and talk about how they are different, and how they are alike. You compare one against another.
Contrast – in this situation, you only look at how the items are different and what their contrasts are.
Describe – here you need to go into great detail about whatever you’re asked to describe. Break it down into its component parts, and give as much information for each part as you can.
Explain – write about something in a way that’s easy to understand, as if you were telling someone else how to do something.
Define – very similar to “explain” except you should keep it as much to the point as possible.
Diagram – this isn’t writing; this is illustrating your point without sentences. You can use words to label your diagram but your answer should be clear from looking at the illustration without needing a paragraph to explain it.
Justify – give reasons that support an issue or statement.
List – it’s what it says, it’s a list – not an essay, not flowing on paragraphs, just a list.
Outline – this is just the salient points of something set out in a well organized format.
Summarize – take what you know about the subject and write about it in a concise manner. It should contain as much relevant important information as possible, but should still be relatively short.
Trace – this is like a written time-line.Take the subject area back as far as you can, and then write about it up until the event or present day (depending on the topic). Some of the above words are very similar but they have subtle differences so be sure to learn exactly what each one means. Identifying the right word in your next essay or test could make the difference between an excellent, or average, grade!
