research

Impersonation Podcast: Understanding Untruth in Uncertain Times

Assignments, collaboration and group work, digital literacy, information literacy, research, rhetoric, rhetorical appeals and argument, visual/multimodal rhetorics /

Joseph S. Vuletich Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description In today’s media ecosystem, politicians dismiss unflattering news stories as “hoaxes” and AI-generated deep-fakes concern us because of their increasingly realistic qualities. Scholars teaching information literacy have responded by developing sophisticated methods for sorting fact from fiction, promoting credibility, and dismissing falsehood. Yet falsehood is not […]

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“Are Cats Good? An Important Study”: Using a Meme Article for Teaching Writing of Analytic Summaries

Activities, annotated bibliography, information literacy, reading, reading strategies, research, secondary source research, summary /

Wei Xu and Hongni Gou Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description This activity is designed as part of the major project “Annotated Bibliography” in a first-year writing course. At the time the activity is implemented, students should have learned the purpose, context, and audience of an annotated bibliography and that both summaries and evaluations are

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Source Speed Dating: Where Do Research Topics Come From?

Activities, demystifying writing assignments, prewriting and invention, primary source research, research /

Hannah T. Davis Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The beginning of a research paper assignment might involve a discussion of the goals of the assignment and a short brainstorming activity to help students think about possible topics. When students are asked to quickly choose a topic in this manner, without first conducting preliminary research,

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Discourse Communities Manual Presentation

Assignments, Community-engaged writing, genre and discourse community, Place-based Writing, research, writing technologies /

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:

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Informative or Argumentative Infographic

Assignments, information literacy, research, visual/multimodal rhetorics /

Erin Breaux Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description This multimodal assignment challenges students to think in a different medium and consider the impact of visual rhetoric. While composing an infographic, they learn skills such as concision, design principles, organization of texts and images, and use of statistics, charts, and graphs. The infographic works well for

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Let’s Party: Composing a Review of the Literature on a Technical Topic

Process, professional writing, research, secondary source research, Synthesis, technical writing, Volume 6 /

Daniel P. Richards Volume 6 Chapter Description A literature review can take many forms and can be found in a wide array of academic, scientific, technical, and workplace documents spanning all fields and disciplines. Sometimes it is the full document; sometimes it is but part of a document. From essays in philosophy to journal articles

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Developing Fruitful Research Questions

demystifying writing assignments, prewriting and invention, research, secondary source research /

Emily Spitler-Lawson Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description When I was a younger, less experienced writing instructor, I told a classroom full of first year composition students, “Write about whatever you want!” when introducing a major research-based assignment. As you can probably imagine, I very quickly learned that some student-generated topics and questions were more

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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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Dramatizing the Conversation: Creating Dialogue Scripts to Support Source Synthesis

Activities, drafting and revising, Process, reading, reading strategies, reading to write, research, secondary source research, Synthesis /

Kim Fahle Peck Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Kenneth Burke’s famous parlor metaphor presents a picture of academic research as a conversation between ideas and perspectives: Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too

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A Full Class Annotated Bibliography: In-Class Community Building & Applied Social Composing Practice

Activities, collaboration and group work, information literacy, Process, reading, research, secondary source research /

Zoe McDonald Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description This activity transforms a familiar annotated bibliography into a full class activity to give students hands-on knowledge of two central components of composing: writing as a social process (Adler-Kassner and Wardle) and “authority is constructed and contextual” (ACRL). As Tressie McMillan Cottom observes , “writing is always

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