Goucher Instructors' On-line Writing Assignment Bank

Special Collections and Archives Research for Freshman Composition: Second-semester freshmen, or even 104 students, can be given training to handle documents and objects from the Julia Rogers Library's Archives (mostly alumni and faculty materials) and Special Collections (rare books and papers), and a wide range of possible writing assignments can be developed to help them describe what they have found, give it historical context, and generally make it useful to future researchers.  A link is included to a similar freshman composition project at East Carolina University.

Product Purchase Recommendation: Second-semester freshmen or above, as long as they have basic library research skills; teaches use of multiple sources to acquire an authoritative evaluative insight, as well as the limitations of commercially available expert judgment; can be adapted to upper-division courses for literary analysis, choice of competing resources, etc.  (Arnie Sanders)

Error Log: A strategy for teaching students to become responsible for control of their typical grammar and spelling errors.  (Susan Garrett)

Exploratory Essay: Students at any level who are reading frequent out-of-class assignments and need to be taught how to focus their memories of the text for class conversation and later writing.  (Lee Gould)

Close Reading--An Introduction:   An in-class exercise for students in introductory courses who are just beginning to learn to read difficult texts carefully.  (Lee Gould)

Collaborative Reading Responses:  If students to write short responses to assigned reading before class, these three plans for writing collaborative reading responses will bring small groups of students to discuss the readings together before they write, and each plan reduces the total number of documents the teacher sees, which reduces "paper load." (Arnie Sanders)

The 20-Word Limit Paper: A strategy for teaching students about the limits of their vocabularies and the power of words.   (Laura Orem)

How to Write for the Natural Sciences: A combined description of typical genres of science writing (lab reports, data records, scientific articles, etc.) and a "cookbook" guide to the composing process which is required by the scientific article's form and laboratory procedures. If you are assigning only portions of one of these genres (e.g., Introduction and Methods), you can excerpt those portions of the assignment.  (Arnie Sanders with Esther Gibbs and Janet Shambaugh)

Jargon, Terms of Art, Method, and Membership in Scholarly Communities:  An exercise that leads to production of a dictionary specific to majors students are trying to join (or just inspecting).  Most students think of disciplines only in terms of the body of "facts" they represent, rather than as systems for reliably producing logically valid and accurate kinds of knowing.  (Arnie Sanders) 

Web-Site Authority Testing: An exercise using an artist's "spoof" medical center web site to examine what makes a web-based source seem authoritative.  Useful for helping students discover not only what web-based sources do, but in classroom conversation, they can be led to rediscover what print media strategies impress them and why that, too, may sometimes be deceptive. (Arnie Sanders)