This paper describes the collaboration of a Writing Center director and a professor of a Fisheries Biology course in support of a research paper entitled, "The World Without," which asks students to convince readers of the likely ecological consequences associated with the extinction of a finfish species or aquatic habitat. Opportunities…

This My Favorite Assignment (MFA) article features 11 teaching innovations first presented at the 2023 Association for Business Communication Annual International Conference held Denver, Colorado, USA. These assignments are designed to boost students' writing, persuasion, crisis management skills, and personal and professional development.

After ten years of public school teaching and countless student teaching observations, the author knows firsthand that English language arts (ELA) teachers are committed to teaching researched argumentative writing and, further, they often frame their assignments as questions. In this article, the author proposes that ELA teachers accelerate…

Positioned within our field's work on supporting transfer of writing-related knowledge through careful course design, this article describes the development of a pedagogical intervention designed to help students identify knowledge gaps and pose questions about rhetoric and genre. Below, I tell the story of a 2012 teacher research study that…

Courses: Business and Professional Communication, Persuasion. Objectives: Students demonstrate application of rhetorical invention and improved persuasive writing style through a brief, multi-draft writing activity.

The authors of this essay discuss the impact of corpus collection and analysis on the writing program at The City College of New York, CUNY, the digital literacies encouraged by the corpus collection process, and how corpus studies can be used to support genre awareness and build communities of practice in basic writing classrooms and among…

In this article, we draw on the work of Michel Foucault to analyze one student's subject development in an expository writing classroom. James, the participant, was embarking on the project of becoming a good student, as he understood it, after struggling and leaving school previously. Drawing on interviews, classroom observations and written…

Local teachers have been working with their colleagues and math coach for years on ensuring that oral discourse during their mathematics classes has them acting as a facilitator and allowing students themselves to make sense of the mathematics. Specifically, their discussions are aimed at having students reason mathematically because discourse and…

Over the last couple of years, White nationalist groups have been at the forefront of American political life, especially with the events in Charlottesville, Virginia. The historical roots of White nationalist movements run deep in the United States and are most closely associated with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). In this article the authors explore…

In a world that is fraught with a troubling political climate, Lu believes it is especially important that teachers provide guidance to students not only for their academic endeavors but also for their understanding of the complexities in language and the social implications of language varieties. With such belief in mind, she asks: How can…

Despite widely acknowledged benefits of integrating writing into economics courses, instructors' costs are often prohibitive. To reduce costs and make writing assignments more feasible, the authors describe multi-part, scaffolded writing assignments developed by an economist and a WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum) specialist, integrated into an…

The task of turning undergrads into academics requires teaching them to reason about the world in a more complex way. We present the Argument Complexity Scale, a tool for analysing the complexity of argumentation, based on the Integrative Complexity and Conceptual Complexity Scales from, respectively, political psychology and personality theory.…

Various instructional approaches have been laid out for conceptualizing argumentation talk and writing in English classrooms. One prominent, and historically durable, approach is formalist--teachers slot the teaching of argument into a form-based approach, usually using the 5-paragraph theme. This model too often fails to persuade students of the…

This article examines methods of teaching students immersed in online media to write extended persuasive text. Specific examples for the writing classroom are outlined to engage students in persuasive writing through the use of online media. The persuasive writing examples are linked to the Common Core State Standards.

Annmarie Guzy teaches honors composition at the University of South Alabama. This essay discusses her observation that students who took her class were more likely to complete the honors program, which led to her wondering what elements of her course might give students an edge in honors program completion. As an English professor with training in…