Module: The assignment

Understanding the assignment

Task words: the verbs in the assignment text

Task word: explain

Task word: discuss

Formulate a research question

Many task instructions will contain verbs which tell you what is expected of your text; what we call 'writing verbs' or 'task words'. These will say something about how you should write your text, for instance to describe, to assess, to discuss and so on. But what does it mean to discuss? And what is the difference between analysing and interpreting?

On this page you can read about these task words and how important it is to understand them when writing your assignment.

Different approaches for different purposes

Below, you will find a list of the most common task words used in academic texts. Each of them comes with a description. On the following two pages of this module we have gone deeper into the two most common task words; to explain and to discuss. These two are crucial to any piece of academic writing, regardless of whether the task description asks for them specifically or not.