46 Tackling Assignments

Why should you break down assignments?

• It keeps you on track towards meeting long-term deadlines and spreads the work over many days/weeks
• It makes overwhelming tasks seem more manageable and easier to start
• It is easier to plan for, as you can schedule the tasks into your weekly timetable and help avoid procrastination

Breaking Down an Assignment

What are the steps to working through an assignment? How long will each step take? Depending on the type of assignment, your order of tasks might look something like this:

Brainstorm

Too often, this is a step that gets skipped, as students move directly into the writing stage, trying to plan and organize their ideas in their head and directly translate them onto paper or type them into their computer.

However, setting aside time to brainstorm lessens your cognitive load as it allows you to generate rough ideas without worrying about format and grammar, and it can also help plan and separate your time by spreading the process into discrete activities. Especially if you have any executive functioning challenges (learning disability, ADHD, etc.), setting aside adequate time for brainstorming before you begin writing can do a lot to improve your writing product.

There are several different strategies that you can use to brainstorm ideas: free writing, mind mapping, journaling, and chatting with someone.

Research

Depending on the type of assignment that you’re given, you might need to research a certain topic to learn more about it or to incorporate it into your assignment. Research is often an important sub-step that is relevant to the planning stage of the assignment process.

At the pre-writing level, using your school library’s physical and/or electronic resources such as academic books and journal articles is often a great way to generate and refine ideas for a written assignment. It can also help to inform processes such as brainstorming. Check out Bow Valley College’s explanation of how to identify an academic journal article.

You may not always have to rely on purely academic resources when researching. You may be permitted to explore podcasts, documentaries, YouTube videos, news articles, and blog posts! Your instructor will be specific about the types of resources you can and can’t incorporate in your assignment in the instructions. However, even if you’re instructed to only use academic sources in your assignment, it doesn’t mean that you can’t use non-academic sources to simply learn more about your assignment’s topic or theme before diving into academic material.

Developing a Thesis

Some assignments will ask you to generate a clear position/thesis that can be effectively supported by the rest of your work. For many, developing an adequate thesis or argument is the most difficult part of the assignment. Purdue OWL offers some excellent tips for developing a thesis statement based on the type of assignment you are writing.

However, this step may not be necessary depending on the class you’re in and the assignment itself. Different types of assignments will ask for different elements!

Outline

There are many benefits to outlining your assignment before writing it. Outlines help you organize a large amount of researched information, clearly articulate and organize your assignment’s structure and flow, and see any gaps or inconsistencies within your points before writing a full draft. Check out Purdue OWL’s tips for creating an effective outline.

Write and Rewrite

You are finally ready to begin drafting your assignment! It is important to give yourself time to take breaks as you generate your assignment and return to it over a few days, as new ideas will come to you every time you take a new look at it. Creating, writing, and editing over time will give you much better results than attempting to crank out a single final draft in one sitting.

Revising and Editing

Once you are satisfied with your assignment, be sure to review the instructions/rubric/grading scheme once more to ensure that you did not miss any important instructions (do this before the deadline!). Get a good sleep the night before submitting it so you can review it once more with refreshed eyes and an alert mind.

These different tasks will take you varying amounts of time depending on your strengths, weaknesses, and the size and type of the assignment itself. You will eventually learn how long these steps typically take you as you begin tackling assignments! Everyone completes different stages at different paces. However, it is always a good idea to give yourself more time than you think you need to complete an assignment. Sometimes other life demands and responsibilities get in the way and your academics get put on the back burner, so you will thank yourself for starting your work a few days early to account for unexpected situations! One possible method is noting the due date for your assignments one day before their actual due date and building your plan around this adjusted date. If things don’t go as planned, you’ll have that extra day as a buffer!

Assignment Planners

You may find that you benefit from using a physical assignment planner to help you break them down into smaller and more manageable tasks. Check out some of these planners offered by different institutions.

• University of Waterloo
• Algonquin College

Ontario Tech University also offers an assignment planning calculator that generates an ideal assignment plan based on when you start it, when it is due, and the type of assignment it is.  Goblin Tools also offers a Magic To-Do list that will help break down any large task into smaller parts.