As a first-year writing instructor, I generally expect a few mainstays: a handful of bored students, recurring absences, and plenty of covert texting. In order to disrupt the usual lackluster engagement associated with required classes, I approach my writing seminar like a theatre class. By incorporating common performance practices such as the…

For beginning college students, effective paraphrasing is the most difficult of the research-writing skills they must learn and demonstrate. Many students understand summarizing, and the frequent appearance of unwieldy block quotations in their essays suggests their preference for using a source's exact words. But the art of paraphrasing escapes…

Argues that the perennial problem of boring student writing is solved when assignments provide writers with target readers, enabling students to find their appropriate voice. Discusses a sample assignment in which students explain how to do something they do well to readers who don't know how to do it. (JG)

Discusses how the development of critical thinking skills is inhibited in many students because they under-conceptualize the context in which controversy occurs. Suggests ways to raise students' awareness of being involved in a continuing debate, such as using written dialogue as a basis for extending a writing assignment that combines exposition,…

Describes an historical narrative assignment that stimulates students' interest in questions of rhetoric and scholarship as it requires students to combine role-playing, research, and revision. Discusses how students' role as participant/persona in writing the story prompts an intricate multiplicity of decisions as it forces them to filter data…

In order to have freshman composition students review and strengthen their research and documentation skills, they are asked to write 700 to 1,000-word papers synthesizing from sources such as anthologies, journals, government documents, films, biographies, almanacs, and interviews. Three assignments require the students to gather information…

The writing across the curriculum program at La Salle University, Pennsylvania, derives its basic philosophy from Charles Bazerman's "The Informed Writer" which stresses that students learn about academic writing and reading in terms of a community of discourse. Though Bazerman's text is not used in the freshman composition course,…

Questions raised by the misinterpretations evidenced in the final examination essays of a freshman English class should lead teachers to a new understanding of how the phrasing of writing assignments influences what students write. Some of the questions included: (1) How detailed must an assignment be to communicate its goals? (2) What type of…

Provides eight sequential, process-oriented writing assignments: (1) diagnostic essay, (2) personal account, (3) ghost writing, (4) summary, (5) developing a thesis, (6) exploratory essay, (7) proposal, and (8) final paper. (HTH)

A field of study sequence designed at the University of Iowa to introduce the research paper to freshman rhetoric students encourages them to view themselves as interpretive anthropologists entering a strange culture and exploring their declared majors or areas of special interest. Each student is responsible for (1) writing an essay in response…

In a required class on literature and composition at Eastern Illinois University, students learn about the short story by writing one of their own. Their stories then become the context for an introduction to literary terminology such as point of view, setting, and use of dialogue versus narration. Having just written their own stories, students…

The results of interviews conducted with 48 freshman writing/composition teachers in 11 two-year colleges in California are summarized in this report. After brief descriptive comments introducing each interview topic, responses are summarized by college to the following questions: (1) What placement procedures are used to assign students to…

Designed as a looseleaf resource, a supplement to established teaching plans, and an aid to meeting individual needs, this compilation of writing exercises represents the responses of 157 teachers from 87 two-year colleges to the request, "Describe a successful writing task -- what it is, how you teach it, and why." The compilation includes tasks…

Discusses how the works of Joyce, "Dubliners" and "Ulysses" specifically, can be used to help developing writers learn about the process of writing and as material for writing exercises. (SRT)

A freshman writing assignment sequence encouraged students to use metaphors to think their way through scientific topics, improving their writing skills in the process. The students were all women, aged 18 to 48 years, who had been journal writing for several months but who did not consider themselves competent readers or writers. Reading material…