subject: Decoding School Assignments Sheets: [print this page] Author: Mike Jason Author: Mike Jason
School assignments acts as an activity that helps students in writing, learning, understanding, interpreting and facing challenges of academic careers. The main hurdle, which often occurs and where students find themselves helpless is struggling with their assignment sheets.
The assignment sheets, which are prepared specifically for school projects creates the most confusion in students mind. The problem is incorrect interpreting of the language of assignment sheets. To solve the problem, we have involved the de-coding process here, which will assist students how to de-code the correctly.
De-coding assignment sheet includes some keywords/ key sentences that help identifying and interpreting correct message. These key words act strategy words.
How to identify the key sentences?
It is not easy to identify the key sentences in an assignment sheet. The best way is to read it again and again and highlight the sentences that give you some command, or parameter to write an assignment, for instance, what will be the word length, what sources can be used, etc. A key sentence is one which demonstrates the type of action required to accomplish the paper successfully. The verbs are a great source to determine the key sentences in both the cases.
How to identify the strategy words?
Strategy words are the verbs that guide students to take an action, which is necessary to write and interpret the assignment sheet. The most common verbs used in school assignment sheets are; Discuss, analyse, define, contrast, compare, explain, evaluate and summarize. Once a student becomes aware of the meanings of these strategic words, it would become easier to assess the format and other necessities
Additional tips for de-coding:
After learning the de-coding process, the tips which can help students further are:
Once de-coding the right message from the assignment sheet, a student can easily review the standards for writing and formatting, for example, persuasive essay writing involves thesis statement.
Brainstorming the topic before writing an assignment is a pre writing activity, which is beneficial in de-coding the assignment sheet
The keywords and key sentences that helps in de-coding, not only helps in better understanding, but also helps in learning from other courses too.
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