"Analyze a Published Research Study" invites students to examine a published study's research methods to learn not only what a research report says, but also how the research was designed, carried out, and communicated. While this writing assignment was originally designed for an undergraduate course on research practices in literacy and composition, it may be used with both undergraduate and graduate students and may be appropriate for courses across the disciplines in which students study methods of scholarship. The primary goal of this assignment is to use writing as a mode of learning how to read scholarly research.

Authors in issue 3.1 of *Prompt* present ideas for teaching proof writing in math, examining scholarly writing in the classroom, and reinvigorating approaches to teaching professional writing genres.

Writing mathematical proofs is a key component of writing in the discipline in mathematics. Historically, many students have struggled in pursuing this endeavor, particularly during their early exposure to the process. To help students progress toward the goal of being able to consistently create well-written proofs, I present an incremental approach used in a course for elementary education majors who are concentrating in mathematics. This approach uses daily low-stakes writing assignments. Using this instructional technique, I found that student engagement improved and that, overall, better mathematical proofs were written. One more instructor at my institution has already adopted the same methods, and I expect more to do so.

This essay describes a project that introduces undergraduate students in a technical and professional writing course to rhetorical genre studies, context, and ethics. In this project, students (1) study examples of meeting minutes and consider their functions within specific contexts, (2) take meeting minutes of a class session, and (3) analyze their minutes to abstract larger lessons on the rhetorical, epistemological, and ethical work of technical and professional writing. This project brings students' attention to the complex decision-making processes writers face as they seek to produce useful, ethical, recognizable professional documents.

This article details an assignment sequence asking students to apply an adaptation of Swales and Feak's (2009) model of social sciences abstract writing to articles in the humanities. This model works as an exploded diagram of the article, explicitly identifying research questions, data, methods, results, interpretations, and implications. The assignment provides students, first, with a reading tool for exposing the articulated construction of academic research articles. Second, as a writing tool, it allows students to practice comprehensive synthesis; the breakdown of multi-part claims; concision and clarity; and selective quotation. Finally, it facilitates the next step in students' research process: framing new inquiry by identifying uses and limitations in prior scholarship. This assignment sequence has been used in first-year composition and upper-division WID/WAC courses in the humanities; it can be adapted for courses in social and natural sciences and for graduate courses.

Teaching rhetorical flexibility within a nonprofit environment to professionally-oriented students can be challenging because the seemingly transactional genres of nonprofit communication, such as grant applications, do not appear to invite improvisation. This genre analysis assignment from a Writing for Nonprofits course asks students to reflect on the intersections of their own values as emerging communications professionals and the rhetorical choices they made while writing in a nonprofit genre of their choice. To complete the assignment described here, students created a "personal code" that describes their professional values and used the code to write a genre analysis that examines the rhetorical choices made in a nonprofit genre. This "reflective genre analysis" allows students to recognize their own agency in the negotiation of genre and reinforces the idea that professional behavior is rhetorical and situational.

This assignment demonstrates how writing instructors can cultivate students' mētis, a flexible and adaptive way of thinking, by requiring participation in naturalistic rhetorical situations that arise outside the classroom. The assignment, developed for an undergraduate, mixed-major professional writing course, asks students to pursue external professional opportunities. The affordances of naturalistic situations and the requirements of the assignment work together, enabling students to develop three key features of mētis: vigilance, tricks, and multiplicity. Exercising mētis improves students' chances of success when they pursue opportunities in competitive industries.

This client project is a culminating assignment in an upper-level professional writing course designed to help students understand the nature of audience-based writing in an unfamiliar writing context. The specific task is for students to revise a substantial section of the university *Faculty Policies and Procedures Manual*. Students researched their audience, analyzed samples of university manuals at other higher education institutions, exercised document design strategies, and practiced syntax revision during the project, ultimately presenting a sample of their work to faculty for feedback. Employing design workshop strategies, this assignment requires students to interview faculty in order to understand multiple users' experiences of the university Faculty Policies and Procedures Manual. In addition, an essential component for student learning in this course is reflection. This reflection is centered on the rhetorical situation of using and revising genres (Devitt, 2009) in the context of a professional environment (Clark, 2005; Kain & Wardle, 2005) in order that students avoid perceiving the class as a march through memos, reports, and emails as static formats (Miller, 1984). This project engages students independently, as they are responsible for their own revisions of 30 pages, while class time is used collaboratively on learning new ways of viewing the document's potential and the genre's function.

I am delighted to share issue 2.2 of Prompt with you. Themes of genre, the value of failure, and the importance of student engagement drive this issue.

Coming from a disciplinary background in ethnomusicology, I wanted to create an assignment outside of the norm in writing studies; rather than having the students understand sound as a text to be read, I wanted them to be able to read and respond to sound with sound. The majority of students in my “Music and Sports” course were journalism or music industry students who were fulfilling an elective requirement on the way to careers in sports broadcasting or news reporting. I wanted the students to experiment and enact our departmental goals of writing ethnographically about music and culture through well-constructed and well-referenced narratives that also would result in an interactive “real world” application beyond standard response papers or blogs. To this end, students had to respond to fairly open-ended prompts by recording three minutes of audio that included three citations to class readings and three audio clips of their choosing. The students grew dramatically in their ability to choose and contextualize the sound clips as effectively as article quotes in advancing their analyses. With technological developments like recording apps and free editing software, students can use sound itself as a primary source to propel their arguments. This assignment demonstrates how instead of describing sounds, we can now weave them into spoken narratives and then allow readers to hear them to support our arguments. We can now write with music.

“The Selfie Project” is the final assignment in an upper-level undergraduate course on writing with digital and social media. The assignment intends to increase students' awareness of their everyday practices by asking them to critically analyze the act of taking pictures of themselves. Selfies have become an integral part of students' daily lives. For example, students post selfies on social media, they take selfies at parties and on vacation, and they use them to connect with their communities. Though they might seem inconsequential, selfies are rhetorically rich sites of character presentation in the world of social media: practicing their composition offers students a novel way to enhance understanding of character presentation in social media. With this assignment, students successfully brainstorm, compose, and revise rhetorical content in a genre they are already culturally familiar with.

The intention of this assignment is to use stories of refugee experience to cultivate a global perspective in the classroom. The final project of an intermediate college writing course (sophomore and junior level), this assignment asked students to research a topic related to refugee resettlement, apply ideas from course readings to that topic, and reflect on their own perspectives as readers and writers. This writing took the form of a textual analysis essay that combined primary and secondary sources grounded in library research. An emphasis on close-reading and rhetorical analysis provided students with strategies for moving between different modes of literacy (i.e. storytelling, theory, and reflection). The assignment was scaffolded throughout the semester by diverse readings that included memoir, journalist accounts, and scholarship in refugee studies. Although cultivating a global perspective with students was a central learning outcome of this assignment, the term proved difficult to define. This essay discusses how working with student writing provided some clarity on what a global perspective can mean.

To succeed beyond the writing classroom, students need creative thinking and adaptable, transferable writing and learning strategies, both of which are emphasized by a classroom approach called “postpedagogy.” Postpedagogy emphasizes experimentation and reflection as integral to composing processes, especially digital composing. One feature of postpedagogical classrooms is writing assignments that require students to make a broader range of rhetorical choices and experiment with new approaches, audiences, mediums, and/or technologies. I offer my “definitional text” assignment as an example of one such writing assignment. Though the experimentation encouraged by postpedagogical approaches may lead to initial failures and frustration, such failure can be made productive via intensive, sustained, and specific reflection on composing and learning processes.

Rooted in a hybrid, themed, first-year writing course titled Please Like Us: Selling with Social Media and drawing on the disciplines of business, marketing, and writing studies, the two sequenced assignments explored here rely upon role-playing and “role-writing” for specific outside professional audiences. A semester-long blog project serves as a jumping off point for a researched, multi-disciplinary social media marketing proposal, providing students with the chance to examine social media in both rhetorical and professional terms. The accompanying article explores these assignments in the context of “authenticity” and with an eye toward not only principles of writing pedagogy, but also the transfer of knowledge and process between academic and professional writing.

This scaffolded writing-to-learn activity incorporates a number of Writing Across the Curriculum-based suggestions that draw upon the strengths of student reflection, the PTA (prioritization, translation, and analogization) model of concentric thinking, and the benefits of a flipped-classroom approach to learning. Thus, the purpose of this article is to explain what one model for structuring a flipped classroom that purposefully integrates writing in the PTA model looks like and to provide a concrete example of a flipped-classroom activity that I have utilized in numerous introductory sociology courses.

Drawing on the work of Broad (2003), I created a Value Mapping assignment that asked graduate TAs in a composition practicum course to map the values of their assigned teaching mentors. Through analysis of syllabi, assignments, grading, and personal interviews, TAs made visual maps of their assigned mentors' teaching values and shared them with the class. Together, they discovered not only the values of the first-year writing program but also how teaching materials convey those values to students. This assignment may be adapted to other types of courses to help students see the different values that underlie their majors or professions.

In teaching technical writing for nearly 20 years, I have recognized the importance of including writing assignments focused on improving students' clarity and effectiveness at the sentence level. I present a writing assignment for STEM students ranging from freshman to graduate-level. Students first find a published abstract in their discipline and then use readability tools to analyze the abstract's style. They revise the abstract for better readability while maintaining professional tone. This assignment reinforces research skills, audience awareness, and reflection on sentence-level stylistic choices.

A major challenge in teaching is helping students integrate course concepts to understand the big picture of a field and apply those concepts in new situations. To address this challenge in a tutorial course about astrochemistry (taught by graduate students to chemistry undergraduates), we implemented a progressive writing assignment that culminated in a final presentation. In the progressive writing assignment, students chose an astrochemistry topic they found interesting to be the subject of three sequential papers, which became the basis for their presentations. The purpose of this assignment was to gradually introduce chemistry students to research areas in astronomy, which is by nature outside the general chemistry curriculum, while also providing students with regular feedback. Over the course of the assignment, students applied key themes in the course—significance of astrochemistry research, research methods, and chemistry in astronomical environments—separately to their chosen topics before explaining in the final presentation how these different aspects of astrochemistry work together. By incorporating stories and anaologies, rather than just facts, students gave presentations that were accessible to a novice audience. As a result, students explained broader impacts of astrochemistry research, rather than just focusing on results, and they entertained questions with answers that went beyond clarification of the material discussed.

The author argues reading, hearing, and then composing musical lyrics involving grammatical concerns can help college writing students to edit more effectively for a song's grammar topic. Explaining that the songs need to offer specific advice, such as how to both spot and correct the grammatical problem, the writer offers lyrical examples and provides scholarly evidence for this approach. The essay explains what Grammar Jam is, why music can work, and how to use the tactic in the classroom.

This essay describes a doctoral-level rhetoric and composition writing assignment that aims to help students transition from their identities as students to their identities as scholars. With an emphasis on academic writing as social practice, the assignment asks graduate students to analyze the intellectual moves scholars make in the context of a specific and detailed conversation in any subfield of English Studies. The essay shares the responses of two graduate students, one specializing in children's literature and one in literary and cultural studies, and argues that the process of joining any disciplinary conversation is complex and deserves explicit instruction.

The editor's introduction to this issue of Prompt.

This article introduces the debut issue of Prompt, a multidisciplinary journal focused specifically on collegiate writing assignments. This journal highlights the pedagogical process of crafting writing assignments and offers contextualized reflections on teaching writing in varied disciplines. This essay reflects on the process for developing the journal and offers a brief overview of the five essays and assignments that make up the first issue.

This historical analysis essay on the film 12 Years a Slave and several primary sources bridges earlier skills-based writing prompts with the final research project. It asks students to practice several essential writing moves that reflect the disciplinary approach of historians, without forgetting the concerns of film studies and literature scholars, and even filmmakers. Such moves include conducting careful primary source analysis and interrogation as a historian would; beginning to find sources on one's own (rather than being provided already curated materials); and formally analyzing a film in-depth, including commenting on filmmakers' techniques and how such choices impact the content that viewers witness.

One of the typical challenges facing a mathematics student when writing a proof is the need to understand the interplay of details and broader concepts. I describe a multi-step proof-writing assignment used in a mid-level course for mathematics majors that is designed to help with this challenge by forcing students to incrementally increase their engagement with the various conceptual levels of the material at hand.

The policy brief assignment in my capstone course in professional writing was designed as a community-engaged project in partnership with a nonprofit organization whose mission is to grow Reading, Pennsylvania's economy. The assignment was intended to do real work in the world: the nonprofit's director, a city council member, and an outreach manager for the city of Reading plan to use the policy briefs to convince Reading's City Council to adopt the recommended policies to enhance citizen participation and representation in local governance and to address deficiencies identified through the STAR Community Rating System(r) (STAR), the nation's leading sustainability framework and certification program (STAR 2016). I welcomed the collaboration and designed the assignment with the goal that students would experience what writing faculty always tell them: fundamental concepts in composition and rhetoric/writing studies are operational in the workplace, and understanding writing and communication rhetorically opens up possibilities for them to enter diverse and unfamiliar writing contexts. Students successfully researched, synthesized, organized, and clearly communicated information in a content area and genre new to them. They presented their policy briefs in written and electronic form to the community partners and explained their work in oral presentations. It was an exciting, nerve-wracking, and challenging endeavor, and, as I will describe, the periods of dissonance led to the best learning experiences--for students and for me.

This essay describes a digital, collaboratively designed and interconnected series of essays that were the final project for a first-year class in media and anthropology. These essays were composed using a digital, publically accessible, scholarly publishing platform that allows students to experiment architecturally with arguing related ideas through non-linear text. The result is an intricate, flexible pathway of pages. The assignment is informed by, and attempts to experimentally enact, Fèlix Guattari's concept of the assemblage, emphasizing movement and process of argument and evidence over static, reified trajectories of traditional essay composition. By examining the periphery of their own ideas, students encounter the interpretations of their classmates and discover alternate readings of key themes, which they can then fold into their own writing networks, ultimately creating a textual flow which challenges the singularity of the author and the boundaries of disciplinary thinking.

While students learn valuable skills by composing multimodal works, these assignments can also help students master traditional writing genres by defamiliarizing some of the "design choices" they make when writing. Requiring students to revise a traditional written essay into a video accomplishes two key goals in both lower level and advanced writing classes. It updates writing curricula to provide students experience with the kind of writing they will do in other classes. Furthermore, reflecting on the revision process enhances student appreciation for the importance of clear prose, careful exposition, and logical organization.