This article explores how college instructors can use William Blake's unique pairing of image and text -- what W.J.T. Mitchell calls "composite art" -- to encourage students to think and write about the dynamic interplay of image and text in modern communications. Opening with an anecdote of teaching Songs of Innocence and of Experience…

This paper explores a suite of close writing practices and exercises that ask students to attend closely to language at the level of morpheme, word, line, sentence, or stanza. Close writing aims to move students beyond a conception of reading as mere transaction and technology, while pushing writing pedagogy beyond the development of expository…

Drawing on the scholarship of writing and learning, this article motivates the use of writing assignments in analytics courses and develops a framework for instructional design that advances both writing skills and discipline-specific learning. We translate a best practices set of foundational writing concepts into a matrix of design levers for…

This article explores the connections between creating an equitable classroom and antiracist assessment. The article attempts to explain the impact of the equitable classroom on student apathy. Additionally, rigid concepts of "failing" under this equitable classroom model are interrogated. Finally, the article provides some insights into…

In this conceptual paper, borne from the experiences of two academic literacy lecturers at the NWU, we ask, regarding elements of assessment, how we can sensibly adapt an intervention-style writing course in a post-COVID higher education context. We propose a course correction model, applicable to academic literacy writing courses, to address the…

Newspaper op-eds, dedicated to commentary essays from outside of a newspaper, function as a platform for the public to exchange opinions. We designed an op-ed writing assignment as part of a semester-long course project in global supply chain management (SCM). Student teams conducted research on a SCM topic, presented their findings in the…

Writing about writing (WAW) is an increasingly popular approach to teaching writing that, while often discussed as a single pedagogy, has always referenced a wide variety of curricula, pedagogies, courses, and assignments. While this diversity has been acknowledged, scholars have yet to fully explore the sources, nature, and implications of this…

This article argues that the intersection of invention and style is a rich site for rhetorical study, for amplification, and for critical-creative tinkering, a process of writing new versions of an old text. At this intersection, writers can tinker to amplify an existing text and thus work to continue or begin anew the inventive process. To…

This article is an essay exploring the unique pedagogical challenges of an approach to journalistic writing instruction which not only allows--but actually might even encourage--students to consider using a first-person narrator. While some of the pitfalls of the technique are discussed, the central argument is that the first-person voice, rather…

How can secondary English teachers assign and teach argumentative writing to foreground its significance for students and their life trajectories? This article compares three approaches -- formalist, structured process and conversational entry -- in the light of this aim. Through analysis of exemplar assignments, the comparison illustrates the…

Proficient writers spend substantial time planning for writing, and that planning begins with analyzing the writing task. They spend time considering the topic, the audience and its needs, and the genre and form of the writing. This rhetorical analysis helps them set goals, orient their attention, and get organized. Task analysis can also help…

Stance is a growing focus of academic writing research and an important aspect of writing development in higher education. Research on student writing to date has explored stance across different levels, language backgrounds, and disciplines, but has rarely focused on stance features across genres. This article explores stance marker use between…

This essay describes a prison-university writing exchange that culminated in the collection of audio and written essays "Why I Write" (http://www.why-i-write.com) and offers "writing to listen" as a strategy for communicating and listening across institutional and social boundaries. I argue that sound reveals the material…

This article uses Zak Lancaster's 2016 discovery that academics do not actually write the way "They Say/I Say" says they do to reflect on relations between, on the one hand, facts about academic writing and, on the other, the pedagogical values that underlie and guide those facts--or, put another way, to reflect on how values we may…

Thomas Nunnally equates five-paragraph format essays with square cucumbers found at farmer's markets: they have an established structure but no argument. The real square cucumbers are students who need a formula to write competently. By providing students with a real audience, a teacher can show that he or she takes students' desires -- and…