Writing Teachers Gather Round

[lunabee34]

I know a lot of my flist is in academia, and zulu and I have been talking about teaching and teaching writing specifically, and I decided to host a post about teaching writing.

So, if you teach or have taught writing at any age level, what are some of the strategies you use? Specific assignments? General thoughts about writing instruction?

If you have ever been a student of writing, what are some things your teachers did that worked? Failed abysmally? General thoughts about learning/teaching writing?

Recs for books, essays, or websites also appreciated.

Please feel free to share this around.

I'll put my thoughts in comments rather than the top-level post.

Comments

Re: Writing with your students

[zulu]

We mostly do argumentative but I believe there's also a departmental research requirement as well. So that's compare-contrast and evaluative at the same time. (So-and-so said this, other person said that, my point of view is...) I think I'm going to entirely overhaul my research assignment, though. I was having the students do an annotated bibliography for articles they found themselves and...they were finding things, really interesting things even, but stuff that was going way over their heads. I think I'm going to pre-select some non-peer-reviewed articles and then see how they use them in their essays. Time to experiment.

Re: Writing with your students

[lunabee34]

I hate annotated bibliographies. Hate them. I hated doing them as a student and hate grading them as a prof, so I never assign them.

Our 1101 has a research component, but I just make their final argumentative essay a research essay; they have to have a certain number of scholarly sources to back up their ideas.

1102 is literature based, and also requires at least one essay to be a research essay. What I have done before is have something like what you're talking about. Every student has to find one scholarly article about one of the short stories we're reading; they have to link it on the communal discussion board, they have to provide the correct MLA citation for it, and they have to write a short summary of it. This way, students have a small pool of articles they can go ahead and choose from instead of starting their research from scratch.