How do you quantify ordinal data to do a linear regression?

I am trying to obtain a scatter chart with both numeric data and ordinal data. I got the chart done but now I have to do a linear regression and my teacher says that we may need to quantify the ordinal data. How do we do this and how do I know that I need to do this?How do you quantify ordinal data to do a linear regression?
You need to assign numbers to your data. For instance if you had a survey and your answers were


Strongly disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree, and Strongly agree.





Perhaps you can assign values 1 to 5 for them ... like


1=Strongly disagree; 2=Disagree; 3=Neutral; 4=Agree; 5=Strongly agree.





Basically you are just assigning numerical values to qualitative data.