Describes several assignments and activities that focus on writing for "real-world" purposes, including writing to pen pals, government agencies, and for children or the elderly. (MM)

Describes a study at the University of Leiden (Netherlands) that investigated whether students with different learning styles used different study strategies in a hypertext reading environment, the role of strategy regulation in strategy use, the consistency of strategy use over two different reading tasks, and use of the Inventory of Learning…

Presents five lessons designed to use art to inspire students to write. Notes that students can gain a certain focus from art but that they can also veer toward writing shapeless, rambling stories that fail to create pictures in the reader's mind. (RS)

Presents an approach to teaching various kind of business messages that helps students recognize that different situations call for different rhetorical strategies. Details a memo assignment that blurs the boundaries between message types. (HB)

Advocates the use of a portfolio approach to teaching business writing. Describes how a semester portfolio can be prepared by the student. Gives guidelines for the portfolio, suggestions for portfolio evaluation, and the benefits of such an approach. (HB)

Explores the concept worksheet, which can help students identify and analyze important mathematical concepts and is a simple assignment that can be completed by students overnight. Four types of exercises are included: definition, web of attributes, examples, and nonexamples. (MKR)

Suggests that, despite the expanding variety of the university population, despite diversity and challenges to the literary canon, writing assignments continue to be uninspired and outdated. Describes an "Alternative Responses to Literature" course whose aim was to open up the communal readings, the forms of response to them, and the…

For certain kids, doing homework is a near impossibility. Educators increasingly realize that they must change their traditional homework assignments to create opportunities for children to succeed. Written assignments can be replaced by interviewing projects, inclass cooperative learning activities, or afterschool study centers with appropriate…

Reviews briefly how imagery is integral to knowing and thinking, and how perception and reason do indeed reside under the same blanket. Details two college writing assignments that require writers to engage in "imaginal processes" in proportion to their verbal process. (SR)

Discusses a writing assignment in a business writing class in which students write business letters that meet legitimate needs and will be mailed to the addressee. (SR)

Offers a solution to the limitations of using case studies in business communication classes that use the double-message approach, in which students write a context memorandum along with their response to the case protagonist, thus providing instructors with a social context for cases and additional dimensions that enhance the instructor's ability…

Explains a descriptive analysis exercise based on Chapter 99 of "Moby Dick." Notes that students are given a description of a coin, asked to draw the coin, and then freewrite about what they and their classmates have drawn. States that the exercise is intended to illustrate the relationship between objective and subjective description.…

Describes a three-part assignment in which each student writes a complaint letter and an adjustment letter responding to another student's complaint letter. Discusses how the third part of the assignment--journal entries--allows students to formulate their own criteria for excellent letters based upon their reactions to the letters they receive.…

Describes a research assignment that enables students to recognize the context of a document, extract the document's message, and determine its usefulness. Suggests possible warm-up activities for this assignment. (MM)

Describes the first problem raised in an interactive case on communication taken from Dennis Moberg and David Caldwell's text "Interactive Cases in Organizational Behavior." Demonstrates a wrong and a right answer to this problem, and shows how the author developed writing assignments to supplement the solutions to the problems raised in…