This tip suggests informal writing activities to assist with a vexing challenge for instructors: How can instructors promote engagement with course reading, viewing, and listening materials through writing?

Establish context for reading, viewing, and listening assignments

Unfortunately, the direction to “read Chapter 10” or “watch the linked Ted Talk” may not be enough to promote careful reading, viewing, and listening. Students are more likely to be engaged when they investigate and establish the context of reading and viewing activity.

Welcome back to the spring semester! As you prepare your courses, syllabi, and assignments, it may be valuable to think about three distinct ways that writing can help your students learn and use course content. While we often think of formal graded assignments as the cornerstone of “college-level writing,” shorter, less formal writing activities can help students to master complex course content, understand connections among course topics, and consider their own learning and development.

The end of the semester and the end of the year provide an opportune time for reflection. Previous TWW tips have encouraged instructors to use this time to take stock of what has worked well in their courses as an impetus for future course planning.

It’s November, and we are two-thirds of the way through the semester. Temperatures are dropping and anxieties are rising. Midterms have just finished, registration for Spring semester opens next week, and we have little more than a month of classes. Student Writing Support in the Center for Writing is averaging over 400 appointments a week and will maintain this frenetic pace through the semester. To top it off, daylight savings time has ended; our work days end in darkness.

Many writing prompts begin with a question or two, often framed with context from the course. Here are two examples, one from an Introduction to Ecology course, the other from a Studies in Short Fiction class: 

Congratulations! Week 1 is in the bag. All that remains is the rest of the semester. Take a moment to appreciate all you have already done. You have created and distributed your course syllabus and schedule. In those documents, you have likely provided an overview of the key assignments and assessments you will use to measure student learning. Perhaps you have also indicated ways that students can avail themselves of the rich resources available through Student Writing Support and other campus organizations.

Before the hurly-burly of the academic year begins, it’s worth carving out time to fine-tune your syllabi and the key writing assignments in your courses. The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) team can support your efforts.

Academic voice is a difficult concept to capture, and in most cases, is not a topic of direct instruction. In part, this difficulty stems from competing senses of what voice means: Is it personal expression of the writer, a conventional scholarly tone owned by a discipline, or both? Although experienced readers can tell when a piece of academic writing sounds ‘wrong’ (perhaps too descriptive, too informal, too stilted, or too oblique), we might be hard pressed to identify which features of the writing contribute to the sense.

Undergraduate students face a challenging terrain when writing with sources. In their prior language arts courses, they often used the MLA style to incorporate ‘textual evidence’ in ‘research papers’. As they cross the university curriculum, they confront a host of different strategies for incorporating summary, paraphrase, and quotation, many new and unfamiliar ways of producing research writing, and a myriad of documentation styles.

As the semester winds down, your students may be winding up. The syllabus and assignments you worked hard to craft and sequence in August take on new urgency in December. Office hours and Student Writing Support are now a lived reality. Amidst the end-of-term immediacy—the present tense, or tense present—it is worthwhile to ask your students to take some time to look back and to look ahead.