WAC: English and Writing
Class Versus Professor / Class Versus Class Team Assignments
Give the class a task, such as: revising a sentence, writing a short passage (a thesis or a topic sentence, a few sentences of analysis), formatting a document, putting a source into a Work Cited or Reference page format. Have the class work in teams, or against the professor, to see who can write the best revision of a sentence, who can write the strongest thesis or topic sentence, who can be the first team to correctly format their document/cite their source. This exercise works really well in a computer classroom.
One way to encourage students to think about how they use language in different ways is to ask them to analyze a social media account. This assignment works especially well with Twitter accounts by someone with local or national fame. For example, students might examine how a local business uses Twitter to communicate, and whether or not it's effective. This assignment often prompts rich discussions of grammar, slang, and acronyms. (A fun in-class assignment is to rewrite tweets for grammatical correctness and then talk about whether or not the tweet is still effective.)
