Rebecca Chenoweth Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description This assignment invites students to identify academic knowledge that they value, and to share this knowledge with a new audience that is impacted by and/or can impact the topic. They are then tasked with analyzing their own writing in this “non-academic” rhetorical situation. Both components of this […]
Anthony Edgington Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description There may be no writing classroom activity that garners such intense reactions as peer review. For some, peer review is seen as a positive, enthusiastic experience, one where students gain feedback on their essays that lead to robust revisions and extended development of the student as writer.
Peer Review and the Writer’s Worksheet Read More »
Saurabh Anand Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description This activity sheet’s idea and its relevance in the writing center consultation mushroomed from my English composition teaching days to my (multilingual) students. In between drafts, I often invited my students to reflect on the writing they produced to intentionally let them self-access to intentionally let them
Towards Self-assessing Writing beyond Writing Center Consultations Read More »
Roger Powell Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description The purpose of this revision plan assignment is to help students in first-year composition courses effectively process teacher comments on their writing and make a plan to use them to revise their writing. The assignment rests on the notion that if students approach comments on their writing
Using a Growth Mindset and Revision Plan to Interpret and Apply Instructor Comments Read More »
Lindsay Knisely Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description I created an exercise for first-year writing students titled “Using Reflection and Metacognition to Develop Your Half Essay” because I wanted my students to use reflection recursively, as a tool to strengthen the analysis in their essays while they were still engaged in writing the essays themselves.
Using Reflection and Metacognition to Develop Your Half Essay Read More »
Roberto S. Leon Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description When students think about cohesion and coherence, many of them think about transition words. While transition words are useful, they are not the only coherence moves available, especially when it comes to longer essays. The purpose of this activity is to help students add to their
Beyond Transition Words Read More »
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
Concise Writing Strategies Read More »
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
Dramatizing the Conversation: Creating Dialogue Scripts to Support Source Synthesis Read More »
Zack DePiero and Ryan Dippre Volume 5 Chapter Description The writing process is often oversimplified as a series of linear steps: brainstorming, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. While this notion enables students, like you, to conceptualize writing as something that improves over time, it also conceals the chaos of writing and its social, emotional, and
How Writing Happens Read More »
Keri Epps Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description As a writing instructor dedicated to researching and teaching rhetorical genres, I often struggle with how to facilitate students’ learning of what makes a genre, how it circulates, and who it matters to. In short, designing scaffolded assignments around “genre” has seemed difficult in writing courses at
How to Write a _____ Like a _____ Read More »
