I hear the music from Jaws playing when one of my students shows me a certain kind of assignment. Point by point, paragraph by paragraph, the professor prescribes an encyclopedic portion of prompts to the pupil. No thinking is involved other than “fetch.” Dun dun. Dun dun. Dun dun. It’s ominous and hard to miss, like a great white shark.

I call this assignment the essoid. It’s the stroad of homework. It’s a simple, tedious, written exercise that serves neither the student nor the professor meaningfully. It is not writing.

The essoid, in which the student writes about a particular subject at length, resembles—but is not—an essay. An essoid lacks a central argument. No single thesis is maintained across a logical presentation of evidence and explanation. Critical thinking is minimal. Retrieval and regurgitation are maximal.

Essoids are dead giveaways, so a tutor should recognize the tell-tale signs.

1. Is the student asked a primary question, to which an answer would be a thesis? Or are several questions being asked, to which the answers would be short, written responses divided into paragraphs?
2. Are the students arguing and supporting a central idea with evidence, thus creating an original perspective on a topic? Or are they providing a list of superficial information according to trivia-esque prompts?

If you answered the latter to both sets of questions, you are dealing with an essoid. It is a written assignment. Again, it is not a writing assignment.

A writing assignment allows the student to be heard. It challenges and measures the student’s ability to capture and present information with a defensible position. The student is transformed by the end of the writing assignment. They are merely taxed by the end of the essoid.

I suspect that essoids are byproducts of managerialism—probably quantitative management. Writing, a qualitative exercise of inquiry and expression, was too cumbersome for managerialists. So writing was reduced to rubrics and numeric grading systems, turning the discipline of writing into a game of easy-to-measure numbers.

As a consequence, students and teachers become rational actors who are trying to maximize their outcomes. Thus, teachers give written assignments that can be easily assigned, and students return written assignments that are easily graded. The student is no longer a writer. The student is a writtener.

Sometimes, in the writing center, when I help a student get through an essoid, I know that I am helping them become gradable. All the humanity of active literacy has been stripped from their education. In place of learning, they are numbering. The world is telling the student to know the world without giving the student the opportunity for the world to understand them. Most students are none the wiser. I don’t know if their professors are, either.