Activities

Getting Burned or Becoming Toast?: Problem-Exploring the Game “I Am Bread” as a Tool for Teaching Growth Mindset in First Year Writing

Activities, collaboration and group work, critical thought and analysis, prewriting and invention, Process, reading, reading to write, visual/multimodal rhetorics /

Laura E. Decker Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description First-year writers often struggle to take risks on projects, especially as they move from their composition courses to projects within new disciplines and contexts (Robertson et al.). However, taking risks by diving into new discourse communities, as Bartholomae argued, is required to participate effectively in the […]

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Our Sonically-Composed Worlds

Activities, Community-engaged writing, critical thought and analysis, prewriting and invention, rhetoric, visual/multimodal rhetorics /

Matt Hill Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The activity is meant to encourage thinking about sonic pollution in our world and about the rhetorical nature of such pollution. It could also move into other sonic topics: effects of noise on hospital care, effects of anthropogenic noise on the natural world, how military sonic technologies

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Concise Writing Strategies

Activities, drafting and revising, grammar and mechanics, Style /

Elizabeth Blomstedt Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Students often rely on writing strategies that make their writing wordy and bloated—sometimes subconsciously, sometimes to make their writing sound more sophisticated, and sometimes to meet word count. Presenting students with concrete strategies for making their writing more direct, clear, and concise increases student awareness of their

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Dramatizing the Conversation: Creating Dialogue Scripts to Support Source Synthesis

Activities, drafting and revising, Process, reading, reading strategies, reading to write, research, secondary source research, Synthesis /

Kim Fahle Peck Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Kenneth Burke’s famous parlor metaphor presents a picture of academic research as a conversation between ideas and perspectives: Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too

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A Full Class Annotated Bibliography: In-Class Community Building & Applied Social Composing Practice

Activities, collaboration and group work, information literacy, Process, reading, research, secondary source research /

Zoe McDonald Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description This activity transforms a familiar annotated bibliography into a full class activity to give students hands-on knowledge of two central components of composing: writing as a social process (Adler-Kassner and Wardle) and “authority is constructed and contextual” (ACRL). As Tressie McMillan Cottom observes , “writing is always

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Unpacking Abstracts: Conventions of Empirical Abstracts in Social Science Papers

Activities, critical thought and analysis, genre and discourse community, primary source research, reading strategies, research, secondary source research, STEM, Style, writing across the curriculum /

Faqryza Ab Latif Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The goal of the activity is for learners to be able to describe the components that make up the abstract of an empirical social science paper and apply them to other abstracts in the field. This goal is connected to introducing students to the conventions of

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Playing with Paywalls: Information Literacy in Theory and Practice

Accessibility, Activities, critical thought and analysis, information literacy, reading strategies, research, secondary source research /

Arielle Bernstein & Chelsea L. Horne Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Increasingly, online publishers and distributors of information – news sites, popular magazines, professional blogs – have implemented paywalls to limit the number of articles to which the public has free access. This has traditionally been true for scholarly sources and databases, and prompts

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“Upstream” and “Lateral” Moves Through Information Networks

Activities, critical thought and analysis, information literacy, reading strategies, research, secondary source research /

Philip Longo Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Recent widespread concern over the spread of misinformation and disinformation has placed a renewed emphasis on information literacy skills in FYC courses. Traditional approaches often draw on student skepticism, asking them to analyze the credibility of a single source. But such skepticism-laden approaches risk adding to our

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“I Didn’t Know I Could Research That”: Using Objects for Research Topic Invention

Activities, Community-engaged writing, Place-based Writing, prewriting and invention, research /

Mario A. D’Agostino Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Objects matter. As material rhetoricians (Barnett & Boyle; Gries & Brooke), cultural materialists (Bennett), and compositionists (Rule) have recently noted, objects play an important role in our lives and composing processes. An excellent example of the cultural significance of objects and what they mean to their

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