Yes, we know it’s scary.

“Exactly what do they want?” the student might worry, after receiving an open, non-directive paper assignment: “This is not fair! If I don’t know what they want, I might get it totally wrong and fail!”

Students nowadays demand to know very precisely what is expected, and for good reason. School should be fair. But what if a professor has good reason to set students to work in partial uncertainty? After all, in professional life, handling uncertainty is an important part of practically every job. Maybe little children have to have things explained to them with no uncertainty, but the real world cannot be rightly described so easily. No one knows it all. So students should expect to be challenged to use creative thinking at least some of the time.

Since we can’t always have certainty, it's lucky that there is something we can put in its place: method. And there is one method that really works for producing a good paper from an open assignment. In a nutshell, it consists of fishing around for a worthwhile job to do, and then doing it:

1. Keep track of your responses to the literature you are studying, and wonder about those responses: What is the feeling of it? What attitudes does it exhibit? What happens with these feelings as the work proceeds? Wonder about connections between works, too, and about relations between the work and the writer, between the work and its social and historical context, and between the work and your own world.
2. Examine those responses: what questions arise concerning the work or concerning your responses? Are they questions that can be answered by looking something up, or are they enduring mysteries? If a work has power, where does the effect seem to come from? If it bothers you, in what way does it, and why?
3. Narrow your list of responses to the ones that can lead you to questions worth working on, not just for you, but for others too. That is, find questions that others might have, but that most of them wouldn’t pursue as far as you will. That is, find questions that matter.
4. Select one and draft an essay to explore and answer it. When you feel you have arrived at your best answer—often at the conclusion of the first draft—move it up to the end of your introduction. You have found your thesis! (And a thesis found this way is bound to be more original, more interesting, and far stronger than one that was cooked up at the very start.)
5. Subject your draft to self-questioning. Explore ways reasonable people might misunderstand you or disagree. Don’t just mention those differences; deal with them.
6. Polish your draft by making sure you have introduced your thesis as the answer to a question or puzzle any intelligent reader might ask, explained, supported, illustrated, questioned, and defended your thesis well and fully in the body of your essay, and concluded not by repeating your points but by exploring their consequences, their effects on our understanding—that is, by reminding us not of what you said but of why it matters.

If a student does these things, there is no chance whatsoever that the paper will be “totally wrong.”

In fact, this method makes essay writing more manageable, not less. In my classes, a paper is judged by the strength and freshness of its thesis, the fullness of its development, its organization of paragraphs, the clarity of its sentences, and the correctness of little things like spelling and punctuation—in that order of importance. These things come from the process—not from me, not from some cookbook recipe.

So please relax. I have been giving assignments like this for almost 20 years, and most students do just fine on them. Before that, I received open paper assignments in almost every English class I took. I give open assignments because I am convinced that the process of dealing with them is good for students. It is one of the best kinds of exercise for the mind, strengthening its self-awareness as well as many other important powers.