Writing Across the Curriculum

The Second-Level Writing Handbook // Creating and Implementing Effective Writing Assignments // Responding to Student Writing // In-Class Writing Activities // Peer Response // Preventing Plagiarism // OSU Resources.

Download Samples and Suggestions for Formal Out-of-Class Writing Assignments as a Microsoft Word file.

In this section, we will describe some longer writing assignments that you might want to include and/or adapt for use in your courses. The dominant philosophy in this section is that students can use the informal writing assignments to explore and resolve difficult concepts that will help them with more formal writing, writing whose primary purpose is to communicate information to a reader in a certain way.

Here are a few suggestions to keep in mind when designing communicative writing assignments:

1. Design assignments to parallel, as much as possible, genuine writing contexts and to satisfy overall course goals. The typical term/research paper has its value in some situations, but there are many other possible writing activities that could be more effective, depending on your course goals.
2. Design out of class assignments in a progressive manner; use Writing to Learn activities as invention strategies to help students prepare for these longer writing assignments, and schedule due dates for drafts so students will begin work early.
3. Use class time to address students' writing concerns or to engage students in invention strategies when you think they need motivation to get started; students' leaving the classroom with a page of notes--even disorganized, messy notes--may prevent that staring-at-the-blank-page panic that can set in back in the dorm room and lead to procrastination.
4. Allow time between drafts for students to receive responses from you and/or from their peers before revising. This response process is essential if students are to benefit from the drafting process as a whole. Design a creative responding strategy, which might include conferences with students, responses from classmates, etc. For more information on responding strategies, call the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing (CSTW) and ask for our packet on "Responding to and Evaluating Writing."
5. Allow the nature of longer assignments to be dictated by your discipline. For instance, what is appropriate for an extended project in art is clearly not so for a long project in physics. Think about the kinds of writing professionals do in your field, either inside or outside of the academic world, and develop your assignments from those "real" models.
6. Consider bringing both good (and/or bad) models of the assignment to class for analysis and discussion. Have students identify the purpose of the model, map the organization, and analyze the rhetorical devices used to develop the main focus. Using a concrete example is the best way to teach students the conventions of the kind of writing you want from them; it also teaches them to look critically at a piece of writing.
7. In general, encourage students to engage in a successful writing process when writing longer assignments by beginning work on the project early in the term, perhaps first in a group brainstorming session and then in a brief proposal or prospectus. It may be most productive for students to write their initial conceptions in prose form, rather than in the traditional outline form, though sometimes students benefit from outlining later drafts to locate areas that need development or revision.

The following assignments are necessarily general in scope; you will probably want to adapt them to fit your needs.

Give students the opportunity to learn how to synthesize and organize information quickly by administering essay exams. Students need to learn how to take these exams, just as they learn how to write other forms--such as the lab report or an editorial. You may take time to discuss successful essay exam writing strategies. Before the exam, provide students with a sample question and discuss the characteristics of a good answer. If you would like more information on these kinds of writing assignments, see "Using Essay Exams in Your Class".

Create a scenario that requires students to take on a particular role in a situation. This gives students a specific audience, which forces them to consider carefully the rhetorical situation and make relevant choices. It also reduces the tendency for students to write only to a teacher. Scenario assignments might take any form, and they can also be effective Writing to Learn assignments (see Microthemes above). Here are a few more examples to spark your thinking:

• History: You are in the United States in 1944. You have a brother on the front lines in France. Write him a five-page letter to tell him what's going on in the U.S. Remember that your brother will want to hear about both local and national politics, as well as more domestic social and familial issues.
• Modern Art: You are an art critic for the Columbus Dispatch. Visit the Columbus Museum of Art's newest special exhibit and write a review. You may wish to examine past issues of the Dispatch to see the most commonly used formats and critical conventions.
• Agriculture: As an extension agent, you are responsible for helping clients solve problems. A farmer comes to you requesting a soil analysis to determine why his corn is not growing as it should be. He has brought a soil sample with him. Analyze the soil and write him an explanation of your findings.

Asking students to critique published works can accomplish several goals. It requires them to examine texts analytically and develop criteria for evaluation, and it helps them to question the assumed authority of a published text. Critiques can be assignments in and of themselves, or they can contribute to a larger project a student is working on. In this way, the student sees the critique as a stepping stone, a way of synthesizing several works for a project. It helps them examine and understand disciplinary conventions, for identifying such conventions is a necessary part of developing evaluative criteria. You may want to have students review something that will also be discussed in class, or you may use the review as a way of getting them to do significant reading outside of class parameters and then incorporating this reading into class. In the latter way, students can report orally on the work they critiqued, thereby giving other students a wider sense of what's going on in the field.

For example, a business class might review a variety of case studies and evaluate the management decisions made therein. In a nursing class, student nurses might examine several issues of a particular journal and report to the class about its common content, writing conventions, and applicability for the class as a whole. In a theater class, students might review a few (or several) different filmed versions of a particular play and evaluate them.

Have students write a short (1-5 pp.) paper based on their close rhetorical analysis of a journal article. They should look at the format, the organization of material, the way previous research is cited/presented, the way the writer(s) positions him- or herself, and what counts as evidence and how it is presented. You can devise other categories of analysis based on your discipline and expectations. For a model of questions to guide this analysis, call CSTW and request our handout on "Rhetorically Analyzing Scientific Articles." This assignment can be especially valuable if students are going to be writing research papers during the course, or if students will submit their own papers for publication.

Annotated bibliographies are lists of published (or manuscript) works and focused summaries thereof. Composing them helps teach several skills: how to sort through research and select appropriate citations; how to summarize and paraphrase, especially for particular, focused purposes; and how to present summarized material. Keep in mind, however, that not all students will have done annotations before and may need explicit instruction in how to do the tasks mentioned above. CSTW has handouts to help students practice and learn these skills.

Annotated bibliographies provide students an intensive opportunity to become acquainted with the literature in a particular field or on a certain topic. They can work very well in helping students work toward a larger project that requires understanding of secondary sources, or they can function as individual assignments. As with the critiques, it can be valuable to share copies of them with the entire class, especially if the course is mostly composed of majors who will be taking more courses in the area.

Having students perform interviews and report on them is one way to make assignments a bit less workaday: students can't just make one pass through the library and say they've completed their research. Talking to people is an invigorating, frustrating, and rewarding experience that can breathe life into what might otherwise seem like a dreary assignment. Like the assignments above, interviews can be integrated with other assignments.

Interviews can of course be used to develop information for the content of a traditional assignment. But there are other uses for interviews as well. One possibility is to have students interview professionals in their fields, in order to gain a wider, professional viewpoint on their future careers: a business student can interview an accountant or a technical writer; a chemistry student could interview a chemist working in an analytical development laboratory for a local pharmaceutical company.

The value of narrating personal experience in writing assignments has been much overlooked. Whether the narration is the main focus of the assignment or whether it is simply a part, it can give students a personal, more immediate kind of connection with the course material. Traditionally, students have been taught to remove themselves from their writing, and certainly some disciplines' conventions might be too rigid to allow much modification. But in many other cases, personal narrative may be more appropriate than it might seem.

Specifically, any course whose emphasis is on ethical or philosophical issues, where students are asked to examine their own positions within a wider disciplinary context, can very profitably incorporate the student's own experiences as texts. In philosophy or religious studies courses, students can relate particular experiences and approach these experiences as texts, in the same way they approach other narrated texts. In "capstone" courses, where students are asked to contextualize their academic programs in terms of their professional fields as a whole and the rest of society, students can record and examine incidents from their lives that, for instance, set them on the path to entering those fields or that speak to broad issues in the discipline. In a course examining the Politics of Composition Instruction, for example, students can write their own "literacy autobiographies" to lead them to theorize about definitions of literacy.

One benefit of adding some writing of personal stories into your courses is that they are fun to read--some "I" voice can really vitalize a dry string of research assignments.

Probably the most common writing project of all, the research or term paper is an excellent tool both for acquainting students with research and discourse conventions in a discipline and for introducing students to quantitative and qualitative research methods. One dangerous and often-made assumption about research papers, however, is that students all know how to write them. This stems from the assumption that the research paper is a universal writing format, applicable across all disciplines. However, what is called a research paper in English Literature might not look anything remotely like a research paper for Developmental Biology. Students need to learn the conventions of each new discourse community.

The research paper often mimics the kinds of writing scholars do for academic journals. In creating assignments, you may want to specify which sort of journal or publication students should aim for; doing this can give them the benefit of a particular audience and venue for their writing. You can also have students analyze journal articles rhetorically in preparation for writing a research paper themselves (see Article Analyses above). Good research assignments typically ask students to do more than simply summarize materials written, spoken, and/or published by someone else; they ask students to interpret, synthesize, compare and contrast, ask new questions, and/or draw conclusions about the materials the research is based on. When you teach research papers, encourage your students to formulate questions or topics of inquiry before going to the library or to field sources; in doing so, you can help them avoid capitulating to the opinions of those who seem to have more authority, as well as encourage them to develop their focus individually.