The aphorism analysis assignment asks students in a first-year writing (FYW) course to respond critically to a microtext about writing. We argue that the brevity and content of these texts makes them especially well suited to help students work towards the goals of a FYW course, as well as to develop more general critical thinking skills.

This article looks at the practice of having first-year writing students write abstracts to prepare for drafting a research essay. Abstract writing grounds students at a moment when they may be struggling to identify a clear context for their object of analysis. The assignment asks them to read and critique sample abstracts, sourced from journals and their peers, and then write one of their own using the research assembled from an annotated bibliography. Through sharing the abstracts, students notice opportunities for expanding claims, applying evidence, and clarifying argument in their essays. In this way, the assignment enables students to develop more confidence in their ideas; it also sharpens their genre awareness, as they recognize how abstracts service both readers and writers during the research process.

In this project, students examine their previous definitions and associations with writing-related vocabulary and investigate the complexity of this terminology by interviewing other writers about their writing processes. The “Good Writing” Analysis is an argumentative paper that asks students to investigate a writing term and then argue for its significance to the writing process. As their evidence for this essay, students interview three people they consider to be good writers about how each writer uses or understands the chosen term as part of their writing process. This assignment is used in a first-year writing course which uses a Writing about Writing-based curriculum, but this assignment could easily be used in any unit that asks students to investigate the writing process. By completing this assignment, students broaden their definitions of writing vocabulary and its impact on good writing, they gain experience in conducting and coding interviews, and they develop metacognitive awareness of themselves as writers and researchers.

This low-stakes assignment invites students in an online corequisite first-year writing course to explore the archives of a local historic African American newspaper as an alternative to more conventional research-based writing tasks. This course is taught at a large public community college with a predominantly white student population in Louisville, Kentucky. For this activity, students first are introduced to the concept of archives through a reading and a video. Next, they are invited to freely explore the digitized newspaper archive, choose one article that captures their interest to read in full and sharing a short summary of it along with a reflection on their experience of navigating the digital archive on a discussion board. Finally, each student is asked to respond to at least two classmates, looking for harmonies and tensions between their and their classmates’ summarized articles and experiences in the archive. The local focus of this assignment encourages students to see research as personal and quite literally close to home, while the focus on reflection and response encourages students to work collaboratively to overcome challenges when navigating difficult digital sources. In an online writing classroom, which can often be an isolating and unfamiliar space, particularly for the historically underserved populations most likely to be in a developmental writing course, this assignment encourages students to embrace their roles as researchers in community with other researchers.

This assignment asks first-year writing students to collaboratively create a tabletop game design that would expose players to possible future developments of climate change. The multimodal component is accompanied by a series of writing, research, and communication assignments that are scaffolded to guide students through the iterative process of composing. As students explore alternative formats to make a persuasive argument, they gain a more nuanced understanding of their topic, hone critical thinking skills, and practice addressing different audiences. The final project includes a research paper and a formal project proposal. The author argues in favor of the affordances of game-based pedagogies in a writing and technical communication classroom.

This essay describes a project in which graduate students who teach college writing and are enrolled in a composition practicum for first-year graduate student instructors (GSIs) reflect on their own practice of responding to student writing. To complete the project, students first write feedback in response to one of their first-year writing students’ writing projects, then (with student identifiers removed) the GSI annotates or otherwise analyzes their own feedback by answering reflection questions about their approach, what they admire about their written comments, and how they might revise their approach moving forward. This project helps writing instructors engage with assessment as reflective praxis, particularly in first-year writing contexts where instructors—in this case, GSIs—may be new to the practice of responding to student writing.

Article analysis assignments are common in First Year Writing. This paper argues that animated GIFs are an effective bridge between informal and formal literacies and encourage students to engage in the more critical elements of the genre. This article helps instructors to incorporate low-tech and low stakes multimodal elements into their assignment cycles.

College students struggle with synthesis assignments, often producing serial summaries of texts (for example, Aitchison & Lee, 2006; Bloom, 1956). Graphic organizers visualize the connections between information in multiple texts (for example, Daher & Kiewra, 2016; Hall & Strangman, 2008). This essay introduces the Mapping the Conversation exercise as such a graphic organizer and discusses its set-up and execution. The exercise challenges students’ critical thinking and actively engages them in the writing process, ultimately aiding students in producing complex and concise syntheses. The exercise was originally developed for a first-year writing course but can be adapted for advanced writers and courses across all majors.

Learning management systems (LMSs) are a common software many higher education institutions rely on to facilitate online, hybrid, and web-enhanced courses. However, while our students use the LMS for online learning, less often do they study the LMS as a cultural artifact that shapes how learning happens. This assignment prepares first-year writing students to disrupt the perceived neutrality of LMSs. Students study the LMS and grapple with issues related to technology, power dynamics, audience, and purpose that are foundational to their reading and writing of other texts. Before engaging in this project, students practice conducting rhetorical analysis and inquiry research that prepare them for the kinds of thinking and questioning required for the final LMS project. The final project for the course is a three-part LMS project that culminates in a digital presentation.

This paper discusses a first-year writing research prospectus prompt designed to support first-year undergraduate students transitioning from high school writing—which often focuses on summary and synthesis—to college-level writing. In college, “research papers” often require knowledge production: developing research questions that address gaps in existing scholarship. My prospectus prompt offers a scaffolded structure for writers embarking on such college-level projects, and it also offers a tool to facilitate writing transfer, with the goal of enabling students to develop major research projects independently in other classes. It does so in two ways. First, it labels the components of major research projects (e.g. objects of study, research questions about those objects of study, and the theoretical frameworks used to analyze objects of study). Second, it provides a process for approaching research projects, including showing students how to develop research questions and how to move beyond summarizing and synthesizing other scholars.

This research assignment invites students in a first-year writing preparation course to explore topics of social justice through protest art. The course is taught at a small, private liberal arts college in a course for “emerging writers.” I have taught this assignment at a predominantly White institution (PWI), in a course where the majority of students are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). Students choose a work of protest art from the campus library special collections, frame the social justice issue it addresses in a local context using local sources, and then write an essay that puts that research in conversation with their own story. Finally, linking public history to civic engagement, students create their own protest art as a community call to action. The multimodal, local, and personal nature of this writing assignment creates opportunities for students to see the connections between their emerging identities as writers and civic actors. This assignment can create space for students to use their multilingual identities to speak back to the structural inequality within our institution, developing confidence in their own voices to call for meaningful change.

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.

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.

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.