Four child-crafted book projects help promote students' holiday spirit. The projects, all based on a simple accordion fold, resemble cards but open to reveal more than just a greeting, allowing students to think and write about what the holiday means to them. Projects include a poetry book, a rhyming book, and a memory book. (SM)

Discusses the importance of a good caption for action/reaction photographs in newspapers and yearbooks. Describes how to write a caption; gives sample captions; discusses the four parts of a good caption; and presents a caption-writing assignment, complete with pictures. (SR)

Teachers and students can use color to identify different types of writing. This article describes using color to highlight annotations, identity, topic sentences, thoughts and emotions, logical arguments, advertising and selling, showing and telling, and looking and seeing. Includes sample assignments for identifying emotional content, topic…

Describes a series of miniature writing assignments for college students, including reflections on freedom, writing down ideas in a notebook, writing postcards or letters, a gathering page, and doing a first draft in 20 minutes. Provides examples of each assignment. (PA)

Reports on the uncontrolled, spontaneous talk generated by one self-contained class of 22 first graders as they worked together in groups to compose written assignments. Describes the types of task-specific, task-related, and unrelated conversation that the children engaged in, and the implications of such conversation for the early childhood…

Provides an outline for an exercise for junior high and high school students that encourages them to develop a philosophy of life in the form of resolutions, similar to those written by Jonathan Swift, Benjamin Franklin, and Jonathan Edwards. Cites examples of resolutions written by students. (PA)

Describes how the author and her high school English students begin their study of Thoreau's "Walden" by mining the text for quotations to inspire their own writing and discussion on the topic, "How does Thoreau speak to you or how could he speak to someone you know?" (SR)

Considers how many students walk into the class with an array of technical communicating perspectives that open the door for practical experiences. Believes that a technical communicator employs the ethnographic process for the purpose of creating technical documents. Presents an ethnographic framed assignment that requires a collaboratively…

Presents an assignment in which students look through a handful of poetry collections or anthologies, seeking 20 poems they like and thus understand or want to understand to some extent. Describes the benefits of this assignment, including honing students' interpretive skills, dispelling their misconceptions about the genre, and continuing their…

Schools seem to serve certain groups of people over others. Schools become "sorting mechanisms in which select groups of students are favored on the basis of race, class, and gender." Students within the dominant culture gain cultural capital, while students outside the dominant culture are often left without the means to gain entry into…

Lab reports are the dreaded assignments of the laboratory course. Students dislike them, because they can be tedious and time-consuming. Instructors dislike them, because they significantly increase the grading load. For this reason, lab reports are often omitted or replaced by alternatives such as responses to lab questions, fill-in-the-blank lab…

High school teachers' experiences of teaching their students how to write a proper writing assignment and the people who have influenced their teaching of writing are described.

A high school teacher describes her transformed approach to teaching writing and offers specific assignments that help students think outside their five-paragraph-essay box. She changed the way she taught the eight-standard students after she found that they had mastered their five-graph essay formula but had lost their voice and style of writing.

The assessment of student learning in general education courses is of critical importance in higher education. This study examined the utility of a particular writing assignment, application essays, as a course assessment tool in a basic communication course. Application essays are one page compositions asking students to describe a communication…

The study reported on here explores the claim that computer conferencing is a valuable environment for students to rehearse academic debates and arguments which can then be drawn on in their written assignments. In order to carry out the exploration, the functional linguistic concept of ENGAGEMENT was employed. ENGAGEMENT comprises six sets of…