Teaching with Writing Blog

The new semester is here, and it’s a great time to introduce writing in your classes. Early writing assignments can help to determine prior knowledge, familiarize your students with course goals, and help you to recognize students' abilities and challenges. Similarly, preparing students early for writing assignments encourages better drafting and revision, circumventing the tendency to write in one sitting. Here are five tips to assist you in preparing for a semester that includes discipline--specific writing opportunities that benefit students and won’t overwhelm instructors.

This is the last in a three-part series of summer tips that invite you to think about when, where, and how writing appears in your courses, either in new ways or more effectively in familiar ones. While usually tips emphasize practical advice about ways to incorporate writing instruction into diverse course offerings, these three tips emphasized writing activities, assignments, and instruction in course preparation and design.

This is the second in a three-part series of summer tips that will invite you to think about when, where, and how writing appears in your courses, either in new ways or more effectively in familiar ones. While usually tips emphasize practical advice about ways to incorporate writing instruction into diverse course offerings, these three tips will emphasize writing activities, assignments, and instruction in course preparation and design.

This is the first in a three-part series of summer tips that will invite you to think about when, where, and how writing appears in your courses, either in new ways or more effectively in familiar ones. While usually tips emphasize practical advice about ways to incorporate writing instruction into diverse course offerings, these three tips will emphasize writing activities, assignments, and instruction in course preparation and design.

Students throughout the university write with statistical information. At the simplest level, they many report findings from research as evidence for a claim. At the most sophisticated level, students may need to both perform and interpret complex multivariate analyses using data they have collected and organized. In both cases, students may undervalue attention to the ways writers use statistical information, presuming that numbers will speak for themselves.

Many program, majors, and courses require oral presentations, in part because oral presentations will be a fact of professional life upon graduation. Oral presentations may involve different technologies and modes of expression, but the writing of oral presentations isn’t always addressed in assignments or instruction. The following ideas can help your students to become familiar with some conventional strategies for writing oral presentations. Note: this tip does not address specific presentation technologies or ‘writing effective slides.’

Tables, charts, and figures are commonplace in academic and scientific writing, as well-organized visual displays make it easier for audiences to draw conclusions. Producing effective visual representation of data can be challenging, even with the help of sophisticated software. Selecting appropriate data, preparing data for display, plotting using appropriate tools, and reviewing for consistency and clarity are all essential steps in the process of building effective visuals. Here are some of the best ways to help your students communicate with data in tables, charts, and figures.

Although it is often suggested that numbers speak for themselves, written explanations can make data meaningful and valuable. As Growe and Ruiz have noted about the interplay between text and numeric data, “Academic arguments involve the construction of meaning based in evidence: quantitative reasoning supplies an important category of evidence for successful argument”. In order to help students write effectively with numbers, instructors may find it helpful to incorporate some of the following strategies into their assignment design and coaching practices.

As writers, we know that writing is a process that takes place over time and is made up of different sorts of intellectual activities. As instructors, however, we often assign writing tasks as large, single assignments at the end of a semester. This can be too late for feedback to be meaningful or effective for future use and can encourage students to procrastinate until the last minute.