Common Writing Prompt Verbs

First, understand what you are being asked to do. Here are commonly used key terms in writing prompts:
● Analyze: Divide the topic into separate parts and show relationships between these parts and their
relationship to the whole topic. Analyzing requires acute observation and detailed description. Analytical
essays often use classification, compare and contrast, definition, and/or cause and effect for
development.
● Argue: Write to prove a point or persuade a reader to accept or entertain your position.
● Assess: In the case of ‘assess’ question words, you are expected to consider or make an informed
judgment about the value, strengths, or weakness of an argument, claim, or topic. ‘Assess’ questions
place particular emphasis on weighing views concerning the essay subject, as opposed to your opinion
only.
● Clarify: This means to provide insight into a subject, and quite literally, provide clarification. For example,
this could be done by making an argument or topic clearer by explaining it in simpler terms.
● Compare: Show similarity. Address the same ideas or aspects of each event or idea that you are
comparing.
● Contrast: Show difference. Address the same ideas or aspects of each event or idea that you are
contrasting.
● Describe: Tell about it in detail. Keep your description organized, for example: you can organize your
detail by time, space, order of importance, answers to questions, etc. Effective descriptions appeal to
your reader’s senses: sight, touch, sound, smell, or taste. Keep in mind the purpose of your description so
you can focus on significant details.
● Define: outline the precise meaning of the subject of the question. If the definition you provide is a
contested one then make sure you mention this. How do other scholars define the subject? Why is its
meaning contested and why have you chosen to use one meaning instead of the other if this is the case?
It is important that you provide more than one meaning if there are several of them as it shows that you
are very familiar with the literature.
● Demonstrate: The key to tackling ‘demonstrate’ questions is to use several examples, evidence, and
logical arguments. Essentially, you are required to show how a particular research topic or argument is
valid by using evidence and arguments to support your claim. Make sure you assert your position with
these types of questions. It's even more important that you support your arguments with valid evidence
in order to establish a strong case.
● Describe: When describing something, you must provide a thorough insight into the main characteristics
of a research subject in an objective manner. As answers to such questions will be inherently descriptive,
it is important that you recount or characterize them in narrative form.
● Discuss: Write a logical, focused commentary on your topic. This requires you to consider the topic from
various points of view and to recognize in your writing the specific differences that you have identified.
● Elaborate: Here, you are required to provide a lot of detail and information on a research topic or
argument. ‘Elaborate’ questions tend to elicit descriptive responses. Therefore. it's important to
demonstrate that you have done significant research on the topic to support the information you provide.
● Evaluate: reach conclusions about something’s value or worth. Substantiate all evaluations with evidence,
based on careful observation and analysis that follow the criteria you have established to use in your
judgment/evaluation.
● Examine: establish the key facts and important issues concerning the topic or argument by looking at
them in close detail. This means that you must adopt a very critical approach with 'examine' question
words.
● Explain or Show: Tell how or why.
● Explore: Needless to say, your answer must be exploratory and thus it is imperative that you adopt a
questioning approach when answering such questions. Because of the exploratory nature of such essays,
 objectivity is key. That is, you should give an overview of all viewpoints before providing any of your own
arguments.
● Identify: Essay questions that require you to ‘identify’ something in relation to a research topic or
argument require you to simply point out and describe the main ideas in a short and coherent way.
● Illustrate: Provide detail or examples to clarify a concept.
● Justify: Provide reasons, facts, and statistics in support of your position.
● Outline: outline answer requires you to present an organized description of a research topic or argument.
It is imperative that you provide the main points only (and any important supplementary information) as
opposed to focusing on the minor details. Remember to present your answer in a systematic and
coherent way.
● Review: An answer to a ‘review’ question word should demonstrate critical examination of a subject or
argument. This is done by recapping or summarising the major themes or points in question, and critically
discussing them while giving your opinion.
● Summarize: State main points. Do not evaluate or judge.
● Synthesize: Combine separate elements into a single or unified entry.
● To what extent: In essence, this asks how far you agree with a proposition put forward in the question.
This requires a very in-depth assessment of the topic, especially of the evidence used to present your
argument.

Next, find the limits of the topic For example, if the prompt says, “Discuss elephant health in Africa,” then all
of the facts you write into your essay should directly impact or help to explain the health of elephants in
Africa.