Essay Punch Writing Prompts

Essay Punch provides nine guided writing prompts. Each unit concentrates on a specific type of essay – persuasive, informative, and descriptive. Here are the topics of each writing prompt:

Unit 1: Descriptive

• One of your friends always seems to have an interesting experience to relate. Sometimes it is a quiet experience, drawn from everyday life. Sometimes it is a vivid memory of a past event. Now it is your turn to describe an experience or event in your own life that you remember well because of how it made you feel or what you learned from it.
• Particular places often have a special meaning, interest, or importance. For example, a child you know loves to describe the exciting sights and sounds of a local amusement park. An elderly neighbor remembers in detail her overcrowded home in a far-distant town nearly seventy years ago. Now it is your turn to tell about a place, past or present, that is significant to you.
• You have learned about people whose lives were touched in some significant way by another person. Now you have a chance to write about someone who has affected your own life positively in some way

Unit 2: Informative

• One of your friends knows all about dolphins. Another can sing all the songs the Beatles ever wrote. Almost everyone has an interest, talent, or hobby that makes him, or her, an expert in some area. Describe an activity or area about which you are especially knowledgeable.
• Have you ever wondered what a visitor from an earlier time would make of our world today? Imagine that you have such a visitor. Describe a discovery or invention made in the last one hundred years and show how modern society depends on it.
• You have a new neighbor, a recent arrival in your community. Some of your friends already know something about his culture from a movie they saw. Movies and books allow us to meet people whose lives are different from our own. Here is your chance to tell about a movie or book that increased your knowledge of people from another land, or from another part of America, or from a different background.

Unit 3: Persuasive

• Some members of the school board in your community have recommended that all students be required to do community service each semester. Students are invited to express their opinions, in writing, for or against required community service.
• The principal of a local school wants to ban jewelry, hats, and leather jackets in school and set up a standard dress code for all students. Write an essay that argues for – or against -- the idea of a school's having a standard dress code.
• A teacher, a student, and a member of the town council appear on a local TV talk show and debate whether television does more good than harm, or the reverse. The program's host invites his home audience to write in their views.