Does your assignment ask you to ...

  • Tell readers about an idea, concept, or phenomenon?
  • Write a paper-length definition of a specialized term?
  • Inform readers about the causes, effects, or categories of a general subject (not a specific person, place or thing)?

If so, Explaining a Concept might be for you. (Note: If you're using the St. Martin's Concise Guide to Writing or St. Martin's Guide to Writing as your textbook, and you're working with the "Explaining a Concept" chapter, this session definitely is for you -- we designed it for that assignment, though it can be used for others.)

A concept is a general idea, classification, or term that is based on multiple specific examples. Often, concepts are abstract things like theories: chaos theory is a concept. But so are categories of things (like homo sapiens, or black holes), phenomena (like landslide tsunamis or pyroclastic clouds), or practices (like texting, or cannibalism).

Explaining a Concept can help you ...

  • Identify a concept.
  • Define the concept, using examples.
  • Analyze the concept by breaking it down into types or categories.
  • Compare and contrast the concept with other ideas, practices, or categories of things.
  • Describe possible causes of the concept.
  • Describe a concept's effects.
  • Describe a process or procedure related to a concept.

If the description above sounds close to your assignment prompt, you can probably use it to generate a draft of your paper. If your assignment prompt is more complicated -- maybe it asks you to do some of the things above, but then it asks you to do something else -- you can use this session to create the explanation part of the paper, or as a way to brainstorm parts of the paper.

A final note: Many college writing assignments ask you to persuade or to argue. Look in your assignment prompt for words like "argue," "persuade," "convince," "evaluate," "propose" -- if you see those sorts of words, you might want to consider using a different session, like "Argument," "Proposing a Solution," or "Review."