ABSTRACT
My experience in teaching writing at various levels suggests that there are two main reasons that students have di culty “inventing,” “generating,” or “discovering” material for the essays they are assigned in their college classes. e rst is that they don’t understand the assignment and therefore don’t know how to proceed. e second is that they wait until the last minute to begin. And, of course, both of these reasons are interconnected. When students are confused about an assignment, they may wait until the last minute to begin working on it. And when they haven’t spent enough time thinking about it, they may be unable to gure out what to do. Whichever comes rst, the process causes considerable anxiety.
