The Writing Board acts as an advisory body, providing materials, suggestions, and support to departments and faculty members. We help to share information among programs and to sponsor faculty development relevant to the teaching of writing. The Writing Board also hosts formal and informal events to facilitate the discussion of writing and pedagogy across campus.
The Summer Seminar for the Teaching of Writing (SSTW) is dedicated to improving student learning by helping faculty members from across all disciplines become better teachers of academic writing. Even though writing is something that all of us assign and grade, we rarely have the opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue about how to teach writing to undergraduate and graduate students. The SSTW provides faculty with just that opportunity.
Keep an eye on your RIC email for more information on upcoming events!
The concept of “college readiness” is increasingly important in discussions about students’ preparation for postsecondary education. This Framework describes the rhetorical and twenty-first-century skills as well as habits of mind and experiences that are critical for college success. Based in current research in writing and writing pedagogy, the Framework was written and reviewed by two- and four-year college and high school writing faculty nationwide and is endorsed by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project.
This guide offers information about WAC – writing across the curriculum.
The resources that follow are designed to give practical help regarding student writing to professors across the full range of disciplines—faculty who are neither trained as “writing teachers” nor have “teaching writing” as their primary professional identity. In offering them, my goal is by no means to proselytize or convert but, rather, to inform and encourage. There are some practical and economical things all faculty can do with writing to benefit their students and their disciplines—things that respect the complex professional lives that professors lead.
The bibliography...was developed to support teachers across the disciplines who are interested in using writing and speaking in their courses; scholars who are interested in WAC theory and research; and program administrators, designers, and developers who have interests in the latest work in faculty outreach, program design, and assessment.
An exhaustive list of bibliographies on topics related to writing and writing instruction.
Writing Commons, http://writingcommons.org, helps students improve their writing, critical thinking, and information literacy. Founded in 2008 by Joseph M. Moxley, Writing Commons is a viable alternative to expensive writing textbooks.
While we can parse the writing process in various ways, it's perhaps simplest to see writing as a three-step process: pre-writing, writing, and re-writing. Some students arrive in college with strategies for managing all the steps of the process; others have habits that have served them in high school but that limit them in college; still others have no strategy for writing at all.
There are lots of resources that talk about how to design a writing assignment, and I don't pretend to have the absolute best stuff here. These are just the ideas that I keep in mind when I design assignments.
Faculty can improve the quality of student writing by designing assignments that build upon student skills as an assignment unfolds (Lindemann). Breaking up a writing assignment into a series of steps or stages can dramatically improve student performance. At a minimum, intervening during writing prevents students from turning in last-minute, poorly considered papers and gives students feedback—whether from you or from other students—at useful points in the development of their papers.
Most professors are competent critics of student writing. They can spot a weak sentence, or a confused paragraph, or a muddled sentence, and they are willing to spend time making thoughtful and thorough responses. However, they may not know how to fashion their critical response to facilitate students' learning.
Video sharing student perceptions of faculty comments on their writing.
Plagiarism has always concerned teachers and administrators, who want students’ work to represent their own efforts and to reflect the outcomes of their learning. However, with the advent of the Internet and easy access to almost limitless written material on every conceivable topic, suspicion of student plagiarism has begun to affect teachers at all levels, at times diverting them from the work of developing students’ writing, reading, and critical thinking abilities. This statement responds to the growing educational concerns about plagiarism...
These OWL resources contain lesson plans and activities to help teachers instruct students on how to understand and avoid plagiarism.
If you are a professor in the United States and you have a pulse, you have heard about the problems of Internet plagiarism. Exactly what you have heard may vary, depending on what you have read, whom you have been listening to, and how you have been filtering the information or opinions that you have encountered. But everyone is worried about it -- and for good reason.
The Citation Project is a multi-institution research project responding to educators’ concerns about plagiarism and the teaching of writing.
Students develop disciplinary knowledge and become better critical thinkers by engaging in a rich variety of writing and speaking activities throughout their undergraduate experience. Using writing in your classes encourages students to become more active and engaged learners while increasing their learning and retention. Reviewing their writing keeps you in closer touch with the learning of your students. For many who teach large classes, however, the idea of adding writing to their courses is daunting: writing takes time in courses where there is already too much content to cover. And many faculty feel they have too little expertise in grammar or in teaching and grading writing. So, the question arises: How difficult are these obstacles to overcome?
A grading rubric is a scoring guide or checksheet that identifies the standards and criteria for a given assignment. Rubrics work particularly well for assessing communication activities such as presentations, written assignments, or teamwork. They help you and your students come to a shared understanding of the requirements of an assignment. (Includes sample rubrics.)
Instead, "teaching grammar" as we explore it is really about dealing with grammatical errors as they arise in student essays. How does one address errors in student papers? Should one mark every error, or just a few? Which methods of marking are most efficient? Most effective? And what resources are available to students who have persistent grammatical problems with correctness? This page will help professors seeking very practical advice on handling grammatical errors in student writing.
To help you better understand the conventions of academic and professional writing, we have identified the twenty error patterns (other than misspelling) most common among U.S. college students and list them here in order of frequency.
The writing workshop is the heart of the successful writing classroom. In these workshops, instructors use student papers (in part or in whole) as the basis of discussion and instruction. If you're lucky enough to teach in a smart classroom, student work can be projected from Blackboard or via a document camera. If you're not in a smart classroom, you can share papers the old fashioned way (i.e., photocopy them). Talking about student writing in class signals to your students that their writing is important. Treating student writing as one of the many course texts lets them know that they have, indeed, entered into the ongoing conversation of scholarship.
Peer Review: Looking at Texts from a Reader's Point of View
The CWSP outcomes cycle includes writing and speaking outcomes, implementation plans, and assessment plans. These cycles are on-going; programmatic portfolio reviews, which are required by the institution on a seven-year cycle, and mandate a section on curricular progress in the area of writing and speaking.
The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) recognizes the presence of a growing number of second language writers in institutions of higher education across North America, including technical colleges, two-year colleges, four-year institutions, and graduate programs. As colleges and universities have actively sought to increase the diversity of their student populations through recruitment of international students, and as domestic second language populations have grown, second language writers have become an integral part of writing courses and programs...
The professional resources listed below are both theoretical and practical. The list includes links to organizations and journals of interest to language teachers and language policy developers, as well as to a selection of online teaching and reference materials. Each of these links is a portal to an extensive collection of further resources for the professional ESL community.
