Argument
Assignment Sequence: WR 120
These assignments and assignment templates are meant to offer new Writing Program instructors an easily adaptable overview of the WR 120 assignment sequence. They refer to sources using the BEAM/BEAT framework, which we recommend but do not require you to introduce to your students in WR 120. Opportunities to specify your course material and alternative […]
Synthesis Paper in WR 112
In WR 112, students will write a formal, argument-driven synthesis essay bringing together three texts. (Consult the sidebar here for notes on some texts that faculty use successfully in WR 112.) Scaffold the assignment with a series of reading journals, summaries, claim-writing workshops, and other pre-writing assignments as you see fit, and walk students through a […]
Argument-Driven Paper in WR 112
At the beginning of WR 112, students need to write a formal, argument-driven academic essay on one of the short, anthologized essays that have been assigned. (Consult the sidebar here for notes on the essays currently used in WR 112.) Scaffold the assignment with a series of reading journals, summaries, claim-writing workshops, and other pre-writing […]
Argument-Driven Paper in WR 111
At the end of WR 111, students need to write a formal, argument-driven academic essay on the longer work (novel or memoir) that has been assigned. (Consult the sidebar here for the current list of longer works used in WR 111.) For this assignment, students should be mainly focused on thematic analysis, rather than primarily […]
Critical Conversations
In this activity, students work in pairs to create and stage critical interview-style conversations about their research and perform them in front of their classmates. This assignment works especially well near the end of a WR 151 class. Objectives To engage in a vital conversation about our course topic and your research interests; to converse […]
Teaching with Student Journals in WR 111 or WR 112
In this activity, students will examine and analyze prize-winning papers written in WR 111 or WR 112 (or the equivalent) and published in the WR Journal. You might consider doing a shorter, more focused version of this activity in WR 111 when introducing key features of the academic essay, and a longer, more expansive, student-driven […]
Strategies for Engaging with Critics
In this exercise, students practice engaging with critics (argument and theory sources in the BEAM/BEAT framework). The templates provided scaffold students’ responses to the critics before students need to engage more deeply with critics in an essay. This exercise can be done individually or in pairs. Objective To use templates to practice different strategies for […]
Dork Short Oral Presentations
“Dork Shorts” are a form of presentation popularized by researchers in the Digital Humanities. They combine a formal structure (a specific number of slides) with a short time limit that keeps things light and allows the audience to learn a lot in short period of time. They’re sometimes also called “Lightning Talks.” Guide to Oral/Signed […]
Inner Critic
In the first half of this reflective activity, students give voice to negative self-beliefs in the form of an uncensored personal letter from their imagined “Inner Critic” to themselves, listing their shortcomings, expressing anxieties, and identifying the perceived consequences of failure. Some instructors assign the first letter at the start of the semester, while others […]
Framing a Conceptual Problem
This handout (inspired by the Little Red Schoolhouse approach) explains how to frame a conceptual problem in a paper’s introduction. Students may use this handout to consider the discrete rhetorical moves an introduction involves, especially when creating research problems of their own in WR 15x. Objective To help students reflect on the key elements of framing a […]