Lisa Tremain Volume 5 Chapter Description This essay explores how discourse communities change over time and through participation, and it shows how we can negotiate the expectations for discourse through translanguaging and code-meshing. As discourse community members learn and practice the language rules of a community, they also act as agents to develop, change, or […]
Meng-Hsien (Neal) Liu Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description As Writing Studies has sought to address multimodal and embodied composition, one area has focused on how objects mediate writing processes and identity formations (Shipka). This assignment represents a final term project for an advanced composition class with the overall objective of complicating students’ thinking regarding
Sarah Bramblett Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description I’ve encountered several jarring writing submissions: an essay describing a student’s family member’s tragic death, an essay detailing a student’s battle with an eating disorder, an essay telling of a student’s loneliness in their first semester of college, and an essay recounting a student’s suicidal thoughts. These
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Charisse S. Iglesias Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description “Avoiding the Savior Complex in Community-Engaged Writing” is a three-day activity to prepare students for community-engaged writing partnerships. Community-engaged writing is a common undertaking in composition courses (Schutz and Gere). While community-engaged writing encourages civic responsibility, exposure to different communities, and engaged pedagogies, the practice does
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Chris Thaiss and Stephanie Wade Volume 5 Chapter Description This essay aims to help students who have interests in STEM fields make the most of their first year by showing them how to find opportunities to explore STEM topics in typical first-year writing classes, as well as in the STEM courses they will take, and
Matthew A. Vetter and Oksana Moroz Volume 5 Chapter Description In a previous Writing Spaces essay entitled, Wikipedia Is Good for You!?, James P. Purdy introduces us to the idea that the online encyclopedia, often devalued in educational spaces, can serve as a starting place for research and a process guide to research-based writing. By
You Are Good for Wikipedia Read More »
William Duffy Volume 5 Chapter Description Providing an introduction to rhetoric is a foundational component of most first-year writing courses.1 Discussion of rhetorical appeals, for example, is standard fair in these contexts, as are activities that ask students to develop an appreciation for rhetorical situations, audiences, purposes, and even more nuanced concepts such as kairos
What Is Rhetoric? A “Choose Your Own Adventure” Primer Read More »
Kara Taczak Volume 4 Chapter Description This essay explores the importance of transfer in first year writing. Transfer is the ability to take writing knowledge and practices from one context and use it to repurpose or reframe it in a new/different writing context. To help students better understand how to effectively transfer, this essay examines
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Sarah Seeley, Kelly Xu, & Matthew Chenn Melzer Volume 4 Chapter Description This chapter is a collaboration between a professor (Sarah Seeley) and two former students (Kelly Xu and Matthew Chen). We begin with a discussion of a key concept: the discourse community. In doing so, we illustrate why it is necessary to examine the
Read the Room! Navigating Social Contexts and Written Texts Read More »
Brad Jacobson, Madelyn Pawlowski, & Christine M. Tardy Volume 4 Chapter Description When approaching new genres, students often wonder what kind of information to include and how. Rhetorical moves analysis, a type of genre analysis, offers a useful, practical approach for students to understand how writers achieve their goals in a genre through various writing
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