Sarah Swofford Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The purpose of this assignment is to help students develop a process for learning unfamiliar genres successfully. This assignment is the first part of a two-assignment sequence (the second part is “A Proposal for Change on Campus,” also found in Writing Spaces’ Assignment and Activities Archive) in […]
Genre Analysis of Project Proposals Read More »
Sarah Swofford Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The purpose of this assignment is three-fold: 1) it helps students execute prior knowledge about genre so they are able to effectively compose unfamiliar genres of writing; 2) shows students how their writing skills are useful in professional and not only academic contexts; and 3) teaches students
Proposal for Change on Campus Read More »
Massimo Verzella Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description This assignment is informed by a pedagogical tradition that emphasizes the connections between the fields of writing and translation (Matsuda; Horner and Tetreault), a connection that becomes even more relevant in technical communication (Gnecchi et al.; Petts et al.). Just like writing, translation is process-based, iterative, and
Writing, Translating, and Revising Menus: An International Virtual Exchange Project Read More »
Kevin E. DePew Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description As instructors across the disciplines know, most incoming college students struggle to read academic texts. While there is an array of reasons that students might not be reading their assigned texts—from limited time to neurodivergent challenges to failure to see the assigned reading’s relevance—this series of
Tania de Sostoa-McCue Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description This assignment is intended to be a transition, preparing students for practice in moving from alphabetic to multimodal projects. The goal of this assignment is for students to take a familiar genre (in this case, post-project reflections) and practice how they might transform an alphabetic assignment
The Zine Project: Reorienting Concepts of Composition through Multimodal Reflection Read More »
Andrew H. Yim Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description In this activity, which will take around 3-4 weeks, students are tasked to research one discourse community (e.g., college club, job, volunteer organization) that they have never joined or recently became a member of. They need to pick out the 6 elements of the organization including:
Discourse Communities Manual Presentation Read More »
Quan Zhou Volume 6 Chapter Description Technical definitions and descriptions are essential in technical communication. Technical definitions describe and explain technical terms and concepts. They can not only explain what a term means, but also where it comes from, what it is made of, and what distinguishes it from similar terms. They help readers understand
Drafting Technical Definitions and Descriptions Read More »
K. Alex Ilyasova Volume 6 Chapter Description So, you’ve had writing assignments before, probably ones where you had to compare and contrast something or a few things, or where you wrote a story/narrative. And possibly a few where you’ve even had to write a research paper on a specific topic. You’ve maybe even had to
Last to Be Written, First to Be Read: Writing Memos, Abstracts and Executive Summaries Read More »
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
Getting in Conversation about Activism: Group Podcast Assignment Read More »
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
Unpacking Abstracts: Conventions of Empirical Abstracts in Social Science Papers Read More »
