Highlighting When Answering Long Essay Questions

COMMUNICATION IN THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Department of Biology

UNDERSTANDING LONG ESSAY EXAM QUESTIONS

A Sample Essay Question Requiring a Longer Answer:

Compare and contrast a carnivorous mammal and an herbivorous mammal focusing on how their teeth and digestive tract are specialized for their lifestyle. Use specific examples from class to support your answer. Provide at least one diagram depicting specializations in the anatomies of a carnivore and herbivore.

When Highlighting Does Not Work:

Compare and contrast a carnivorous mammal and an herbivorous mammal focusing on how their teeth and digestive tract are specialized for their lifestyle. Use specific examples from class to support your answer. Provide at least one diagram depicting specializations in the anatomies of a carnivore and herbivore.

Explanation of Highlighting:

Unlike the first example question, virtually every word in this question is asking you to do something specific in your answer. So as you can see, highlighting, by itself, does not help much.

A better approach is to number the different tasks that the question asks you to perform. By using this technique, you will be less likely to forget to do part of the question.

On your exam, you may want to circle different aspects and number to the side with an arrow. In the following example different tasks are color-coded and numbers have been added right in the sentence:

(1A) Compare and (1B) contrast a carnivorous mammal and an herbivorous mammal focusing on how their (2A) teeth and (2B) digestive tract are specialized for their lifestyle. (3) Use specific examples from class to support your answer.(4) Provide at least one diagram depicting specializations in the anatomies of a carnivore and an herbivore.

Click here to see how to plan your answer for this question.

Click here to see good and bad answers to this question.

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