This article is a pragmatic, classroom-focused conversation about the teaching of writing among three teachers living in the United States and China, separated by many thousands of miles and many centuries of tradition and culture. Our focus here is on classroom concerns: actual student writing, assignment design, and assessment. We seek to…

While writing pedagogy instructors assign their students a range of writing tasks, often as central or repeated features of the course, a crucial question has not yet been addressed: does it matter what new teachers write? If pedagogy students are being assigned writing in part to further develop their attitudes and practices related to teaching…

In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton's multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the…

Contract grading has achieved some prominence in our field as a practice associated with critical pedagogy. In this context we describe a hybrid grading contract where students earn a course grade of B based not on our evaluation of their writing quality but solely on their completion of the specified activities. The contract lists activities…