Texas A&M University-Commerce English 1301 syllabus (Spring 2013) w/ majority ESL students
Category Archives: Teaching Resources
rhetorical analysis prompt
This is a two-page handout I used in an upper-level course called “Theory and Practice of Expository Writing” at Hunter College. As you’ll see in the various (and rapid) deadlines, this version is from a compressed summer session, which met for four days a week for five weeks.
handout – prompt for academic essay, with scaffolding – summer 2012
This assignment entered in the second unit of the course, in lesson 11 of 20, and I was happy with the idea that students could use the readings from unit 1 and the first part of unit 2 to provide enough context that they would feel confident about their claims. That said, a good number of students opted instead to read further and to take on something new.
I’m happy to discuss anything about this assignment — including, possibly, critique — in the comments or by email.
Teaching Writing about Writing 4C15 SIG
Our CCCC 15 WAW SIG (gotta love acronyms) teaching group shared some really interesting ways to teach Writing about Writing.
We had a diverse group, from people teaching at a fully integrated WAW school to STEM WAW to WAW going rogue. Thanks to all of our participants. I walked away from the SIG with many, many great ideas!
Part of our discussion seemed to circle back on ways to get students “over the hump” of a difficult and rigorous writing curriculum. Here are some ideas we discussed:
- Teach the literacy narrative first to ease them in.
- Use children’s literacy TV shows to get them thinking about literacy (Reading Rainbow, Dora the Explorer)
- Use the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (http://daln.osu.edu) as a resource.
- Teach some reading strategies such as reading the first time very quickly for main ideas, reading headings and subheadings, skimming methods and data sections while concentrating on introductions and conclusions.
- Understanding that this difficult materials is about treating students as adult/college level learners. We don’t “water down” anything for them.
- Reminding them that they’ll be proud of their own hard work at the end of the semester.
We also discussed a variety of ways to think about WAW courses:
STEM WAW can focus on STEM genres, using a science accommodation assignment, reading Jeanne Fahnestock’s 1986 article, “Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts.”
Approach WAW thematically by deconstructing preconceived notions of writing that students bring with them.
- What about a whole course on revision?
- What if a first-year course focused on deconstructing the five paragraph essay? Think of White’s “Five Paragraph Theme Theme.”
- How might we deconstruct the use of “I” in academic writing?
- This could also be a course around one of our Threshold Concepts
- Why not construct a course around major people in writing studies? Read and write about Donald Murray’s ideas and how they’ve changed over time. What other figures might work for this approach?
Please consider using this space to comment about other ideas or assignments that work for you!
Downs, “Teaching first-year writers to use texts: Scholarly readings in Writing-about-Writing in First-Year Comp”
Downs’ article provides great suggestions for helping students navigate scholarly articles.
Downs, Doug. “Teaching First-year Writers to Use Texts: Scholarly Readings in Writing-about-writing in First-year Comp.” Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy (2010): 19-50.
Barbara Bird’s basic writing course at Taylor U
In “Meaning-making Concepts: Basic Writers’ Access to Verbal Culture,” published in the Basic Writing E-Journal, Barbara Bird describes her basic writing course at Taylor U. The appendices include a master list of readings and a syllabus.
Interview with a Writer (Betsy Sargent)
This assignment, developed by Betsy Sargent for WRS 101: Exploring Writing (U of Alberta), tasks students with the following:
You are going to interview an individual in that field or line of work about the writing they do every day and how they go about doing it. Interviews with individuals who have more work and writing experience than you do—or experience of a different kind—can generate rich material to help you, your colleagues, and your instructor get a better sense of the wide variety of writing that gets done in the world.
U Alberta, WRS 101: Exploring Writing (Jon Gordon, Fall 2011)
This syllabus, for WRS 101: Exploring Writing (Fall 2011), is from Jon Gordon of the University of Alberta.
Textbooks
Below, from newest to oldest, are some textbooks that instructors might be interested in. Please write with other suggestions!
Readers
- Writing about Writing: A College Reader (2023, 5th ed), by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs, published by Macmillan
- Language Diversity and Academic Writing: A Bedford Spotlight Reader (2018), by Samantha Looker-Koenigs (see also Looker-Koenig’s article about her writing-about-language pedagogy in the Dec. 2016 issue of Teaching English in the Two-Year College)
- Visions and Cyphers: Explorations of Literacy, Discourse, and Black Writing Experiences (2016), by David F. Green, Jr. (also see his 2019 chapter, “A Seat at the Table: Reflections on Writing Studies and HBCU Writing Programs” in Black Perspectives on Writing Program Administration, edited by Staci Perryman-Clark and Collin Craig (pp. 51-73).
- Everything’s a Text: Readings for Composition (2011), by Dan Melzer and Deborah Coxwell-Teague
- Literacies in Context (2007), by Shannon Carter, published by Fountainhead Press (available as a PDF via her academia.edu account)
- Considering Literacy (2006), by Linda Adler-Kassner, published by Longman. (website links to instructor’s manual)
- Conversations about Writing: Eavesdropping, Inkshedding, and Joining In (2005), by M. Elizabeth Sargent and Cornelia C. Paraskevas, published by Nelson Education
- On Writing: A Process Reader (2003, 1st ed.), by Wendy Bishop (appears to be out of print; could not find entry on McGrawHill’s website. Two later editions have been published))
Texts by a Single Author(s)
- How Scholars Write (2021), by Aaron Ritzenberg and Sue Mendelsohn, published by Oxford UP.
- Focus on Writing: What College Students Want to Know (2018), by Laurie McMillan, published by Broadview Press. (companion website has links to readings, assignment supports, and other resources)
- Academic Writing: An Introduction (2014, 3rd ed.), by Janet Giltrow, Richard Gooding, Daniel Burgoyne, & Marlene Sawatsky, published by Broadview Press (companion website has additional exercises for each chapter and sample student essays; request exam copy for access to it)
- Exploring College Writing: Reading, Writing, and Researching Across the Curriculum (2011), by Dan Melzer, published by Equinox
- The Elements of Literacy (2009), by Julie Lindquist and David Seitz, published by Longman.
Essay Collections
- Open English @ SLCC: Texts on Writing, Language, and Literacy (evolving digital textbook)
- Bad Ideas about Writing (2017), edited by Cheryl Ball and Drew Loewe
- Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts in Writing Studies: Classroom Edition (2016), edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle
Other
- In 2011, Betsy Sargent created this list of possible primary and supplemental textbooks for a University of Alberta FYC course, WRS 101: Exploring Writing
Stylus: UCF’s Journal of First-Year Writing
The University of Central Florida has been publishing Stylus: A Journal of First-Year Writing since 2010. The issues are open access, and if you browse you’ll find examples of outstanding undergraduate research in literacy, composition, and rhetoric, including literacy narratives and studies of discourse communities.
Student writing: Literacy memoir by Jehrade McIntosh
Check out this literacy memoir by Jehrade McIntosh, a student in Ligia Mihut’s English composition class at Barry University. Jehrade’s piece was published in the “Beyond a Single Language/Single Modality” Blog Carnival hosted by the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative.
Writing about Writing Network 