
In Their Words: Students Reflect on Positive Experiences with Writing this Semester
Welcome to the last two weeks of the semester! Amid the rush of completing and assessing final projects and navigating end-of-term challenges, we invite students and instructors to pause and reflect on positive writing experiences—perhaps even milestones—from this semester. Doing so can provide a much-needed dose of motivation and gratitude during these final days of shortened light, dropping temperatures, and fervid intellectual labor. Looking back can also inspire us as we begin to look ahead to the Spring semester: “Blue skies, nothing but blue skies from now on….”
Differentiating Writing Assignments: Providing Options and Opportunities to Increase Engagement
Our first blog posts of the semester have suggested how we can effectively engage students by providing multiple pathways and trailheads to writing in course documents and how
Write Now: Making Time and Space to Practice Writing
This blog post, including examples of practice for suggestions 1 and 2, draws on the insights of Leah Senatro, an English PhD candidate at the University of California Irvine whose research explores the rhetorical consequences of the body and sensorial experience as well as digital multimodal composition.
Problems with Paraphrasing
The ability to paraphrase is a pivotal skill for writing and learning, but our tacit understanding of the complex purposes of paraphrasing is often clouded by its apparent simplicity. We may tell students that paraphrasing is simply “restating information from a source in your own words,” but choosing to include restatement from sources involves a much more significant set of questions about purpose, audience, writing task, and form.
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How's it going so far?: Students react to writing assignments and activities
Last month’s Teaching with Writing blog focused on strategies instructors can use when providing students with feedback on their writing. This month’s blog turns the tables by describing tools students can use when providing instructors with feedback on their writing instruction. Yes, this sort of feedback is routinely gathered at the end of the semester, but getting it at a semester’s midpoint is even better.
Writing Activities to Establish and Improve Classroom Climate
In recent years, instructors have heard a great deal about the benefits of fostering a positive classroom climate. Not only does a positive classroom climate help boost students' performance in their assignments and assessments, but it can also encourage students' persistence with challenging courses and topics.
Finding the Right Words: Using Mind Mapping to Develop Research Topics
Co-written by Kate Peterson
Freshest Fruits: Getting the most from peer response
The Writing Across the Curriculum program offers many resources on peer response as an effective strategy for improving student writing. Students become more effective readers and writers when they can engage each other with formative feedback. At the same time, instructors may be challenged to find time to assign and implement peer response activities in their courses, especially if those courses have large enrollments.
Greatest Hits from the Teaching with Writing Blog: Writing with Sources
The Teaching with Writing Blog uses categories to describe the contents of previous entries to assist readers in finding timely and appropriate resources. In this March Blog Post, we’ll reissue some of the most popular and cited posts on working with sources.
Discussing ChatGPT and Writing with Students
The arrival of ChatGPT has sent shockwaves through popular media and higher education circles. Headlines have suggested that artificial intelligence could render some familiar genres and technologies obsolete (including the college essay and Google).