Writing

Are We Teaching Composition All Wrong?

Students understand why Barbie is sexist, but they can’t make their case in a coherent essay

Go With the Flow: Transition Words and Phrases, by WritingHelp-Central.com

One of the most common weaknesses I see in day-to-day writing is poor logical flow from one idea or point to the next.

Bad Ideas About Writing, by Cheryl Ball and Drew Loewe

Beginning in 1998, Edge.org has asked a diverse group of scholars, intellectuals, and artists the annual Edge Question, a question designed to spark arguments about provocative ideas to be published online and collected into print volumes intended for a general public audience. Edge Questions have included such questions as “What is your dangerous idea?,” “What have you changed your mind about? Why?,” and the one that inspired this collection: “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?” That last question was the 2014 Edge Question, published in a book titled This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories that are Blocking Progress.

Composition Frequently Asked Questions Basic Writing Wiki

This useful Wiki serves as a kind of intermediary publishing platform for writing abstracts or reviews and space for partnering with full-time faculty to create conference presentations and journal submissions.

Dependent Clauses and Phrases, by KentLaw

Knowing how to distinguish a dependent clause or a phrase from an independent clause will help you to use punctuation correctly and construct proper sentences. A dependent clause or a phrase can not stand alone as a sentence. It is therefore dependent on other words being added to it to create a sentence. An independent clause, by contrast, can stand alone as a sentence, or it can be combined with one or more other clauses or phrases to form a complex sentence, through the proper use of punctuation and conjunctions.

Hassel, Holly; Editor, *Teaching English in the Two-Year College, University of Wisconsin-Marathon County. The following information was shared through the TETYC listserv in July 2018. The linked resources are a treasure trove of teaching ideas, lesson plans, and teaching strategies--

I've started doing some of this work a bit this year with a colleague of mine, Jill Stukenberg. We put together a bibliography for participants in a workshop we developed which could be useful. I'll paste below. Those that were most helpful to me as a person facilitating a workshop on WAC were Bean; Eodice, et al; and Melzer. The others are good online and text resources for instructors in disciplines across campus.

*A starting point:

*For diving in deeper *

*Writing Across the Curriculum*

  • Bean, John. *Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom*. Jossey-Bass, 2011.
  • Eodice, Michelle, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner. *The Meaningful Writing Project: Learning, Teaching, and Writing in Higher Education*. UP of Colorado, 2016.
  • Soliday, Mary. *Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Discipline*. Southern Illinois University P, 2011.
  • Melzer, Dan. *Assignments across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing*. Utah State UP, 2017.
  • Sommers, Nancy, and Laura Saltz. "The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year." *CCC* 56.1 (2004): 124-149.

*Best Practices for the Teaching of Writing*

*Peer review*

  • Armstrong, SL, Paulson, EJ (2008) Whither ‘peer review?’ Terminology matters for the writing classroom. *Teaching English in the Two-Year College* 35(4): 398–407.
  • Heinert, Jen. "Peer critique as a signature pedagogy in writing studies," Vol, 16, no. 3, 293-304.
  • Harris, Muriel. “Collaboration Is Not Collaboration Is Not Collaboration: Writing Center Tutorials vs. Peer-Response Groups.” *College Composition and Communication*, vol 43 no. 3, 1992, pp. 369–83.

*Conferencing*

*Responding to student writing*

*Assessment*


Grammar Girl here, or actually for this episode I should say, “ 'Tis I, Grammar Girl, here to help you understand when to use the words I and me.”

Motivating Basic Writers Through Self-Assessment and Goal-Setting

It has long been established that self-assessment and goal-setting are regular features of the writing process of experienced writers. It has also been demonstrated that students develop more power and control over their writing when they are encouraged to become their own evaluators. Therefore, to help beginning writers think and act more like successful writers, teachers must integrate reflection and self-assessment as core components of English writing instruction. Th is article summarizes how one Basic Writing course actively engages students in consistent formal and informal self-assessment and goal-setting activities that encourage them to develop a “writerly” mindset as they modify their behaviors to better approximate those of experienced writers.

Online Reading (& Writing!) Comprehension Lab, from Excelsior College OWL

We're the first free, online, comprehensive reading lab for college-level reading. Explore the lab to learn more about the many resources we have to offer.

Strengthening Academic Writing

Underprepared students often need assistance building writing skills and maintaining confidence in their abilities and potential. The authors share the philosophy, pedagogy, and experience of freshman developmental education and the writing center at a fou r -year, private, not -for -profit urban college. They describe high -impact educational practices that support academic success and promote metacognitive skill development and academic self-efficacy. They also provide data gathered over a five -year longitudinal study.

Together We Stand: Using Collaborative Writing in Developmental Writing Courses

This article offers an effective teaching method aimed at increasing student success in developmental writing courses by taking an active-learning approach, known here as the “class essay,” that emphasizes the entire writing process, not just the building blocks of the English language. Additionally, this article explains the benefits of collaborative writing in general, details the “class essay” approach specifically, and describes the observed results of using this method.

The University of Wisconsin Writing Across the Curriculum Resources for Instructors

A great resource with information on writing intensive criteria and courses, foundations for teaching with writing, sequencing assignments in your course, designing effective assignments and courses, coaching students to succeed with assignments, teaching multilingual writers, multimodal writing assignments and writing in online courses, conferences and peer review, responding/evaluating/grading, fostering research and inquiry, and teaching oral communication skills.

Use of Quotation Marks in MLA In-Text Citation, by Mount Holyoke College

In this class, we will be using MLA in-text citation for quotations and U.S. conventions of punctuation. This means that periods and commas are placed INSIDE quotation marks; all other punctuation marks are placed OUTSIDE. See the below examples and also the relevant sections in the MLA handbook, The Bedford Handbook, and the use of quotations in the sample papers on reserve.

Although they are each a simple horizontal line, hyphens and the various dashes have their own appearances and specific uses. The shortest and most common is the hyphen, which is used for clarifying open compounds (such as “four-armed villains,” as opposed to “four armed villains”), for separating number groups in phone and Social Security numbers, and for connecting written-out fractions like three-quarters.

Although many people call the hyphen a “dash,” dash refers to another group of horizontal lines in text. The two most common dashes are the em dash and the en dash.

The Writing Studio Program: Reconfiguring Basic Writing/Freshman Composition

In many recent discussions of basic writing, concerned teachers and administrators pursue questions about academic and student culture, writing environments and contexts-questions which betray attitudes quite different from the gatekeeping mission of assessment which gave birth to many freshman writing courses and which has primarily sustained the basic writing "class culture." Research over the past decade has increasingly helped us see academic writing and writing instruction from the perspective of students and to understand their needs and institutional culture as reflections of each other.