critical thought and analysis

The Grammar of Text Messaging: Analyzing Non-Standard English to Develop Genre Awareness

Critical Language Awareness, critical thought and analysis, digital literacy, grammar and mechanics, language bias, linguistic difference, linguistic diversity /

Kristen Vogel Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description In every course I teach, I work to instill in students the understanding that Standard English is merely one variety among many, rather than a superior form. In this assignment, students are asked to write an essay that analyzes the “grammar” of their own writing in a […]

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Large Language Models and Chain Stories: An Exploration of Creativity and Artificial Intelligence

Activities, collaboration and group work, critical thought and analysis, digital literacy, genAI, narrative and storytelling, writing technologies /

Chris Mayer Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description This lesson develops students’ awareness of the synergistic and disruptive potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in storytelling. Designed for a first-year writing class, the lesson explores the interplay between creativity and AI by examining LLMs’ storytelling capabilities. Students will collaboratively create a chain story, then use

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Putting Ourselves in the Company of Writers: Overcoming Obstacles to Creating Successful Collaborations

Assignments, collaboration and group work, critical thought and analysis, identity, metacognition, reflection /

Samantha NeCamp & Connie Kendall Theado Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description “Don’t wait for the muse. As I’ve said, he’s a hardheaded guy who’s not susceptible to a lot of creative fluttering. This isn’t the Ouija board or the spirit-world we’re talking about here, but just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul

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Engaging Audiences Beyond the University: Writing in and Reflecting on Non-Academic Rhetorical Situations

Assignments, critical thought and analysis, drafting and revising, Public Writing, research, rhetoric, rhetorical situation, secondary source research /

Rebecca Chenoweth Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description This assignment invites students to identify academic knowledge that they value, and to share this knowledge with a new audience that is impacted by and/or can impact the topic. They are then tasked with analyzing their own writing in this “non-academic” rhetorical situation. Both components of this

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Getting in Conversation about Activism: Group Podcast Assignment

Anti-Racist Pedagogy, Assignments, collaboration and group work, Community-engaged writing, critical thought and analysis, genre and discourse community, narrative and storytelling, Place-based Writing, Public Writing, visual/multimodal rhetorics /

Jeanette Lehn Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description In my class on public rhetorics, I strive to empower students to possess agency in speaking to an unbounded global public with the understanding that all rhetors are constrained and imbricated in complex systems. Cooper writes, “Rhetors—and audiences—are agents in their actions, and they are responsible for

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Towards Self-assessing Writing beyond Writing Center Consultations

Activities, critical thought and analysis, drafting and revising, Feedback, metacognition, reflection, writing center and other resources /

Saurabh Anand Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description This activity sheet’s idea and its relevance in the writing center consultation mushroomed from my English composition teaching days to my (multilingual) students. In between drafts, I often invited my students to reflect on the writing they produced to intentionally let them self-access to intentionally let them

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Getting Burned or Becoming Toast?: Problem-Exploring the Game “I Am Bread” as a Tool for Teaching Growth Mindset in First Year Writing

Activities, collaboration and group work, critical thought and analysis, prewriting and invention, Process, reading, reading to write, visual/multimodal rhetorics /

Laura E. Decker Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description First-year writers often struggle to take risks on projects, especially as they move from their composition courses to projects within new disciplines and contexts (Robertson et al.). However, taking risks by diving into new discourse communities, as Bartholomae argued, is required to participate effectively in the

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Our Sonically-Composed Worlds

Activities, Community-engaged writing, critical thought and analysis, prewriting and invention, rhetoric, visual/multimodal rhetorics /

Matt Hill Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The activity is meant to encourage thinking about sonic pollution in our world and about the rhetorical nature of such pollution. It could also move into other sonic topics: effects of noise on hospital care, effects of anthropogenic noise on the natural world, how military sonic technologies

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Using Reflection and Metacognition to Develop Your Half Essay

critical thought and analysis, drafting and revising, Racial Literacy, reflection, Writing Transfer /

Lindsay Knisely Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description I created an exercise for first-year writing students titled “Using Reflection and Metacognition to Develop Your Half Essay” because I wanted my students to use reflection recursively, as a tool to strengthen the analysis in their essays while they were still engaged in writing the essays themselves.

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Unpacking Abstracts: Conventions of Empirical Abstracts in Social Science Papers

Activities, critical thought and analysis, genre and discourse community, primary source research, reading strategies, research, secondary source research, STEM, Style, writing across the curriculum /

Faqryza Ab Latif Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The goal of the activity is for learners to be able to describe the components that make up the abstract of an empirical social science paper and apply them to other abstracts in the field. This goal is connected to introducing students to the conventions of

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