This article describes a gamified technical writing assignment inspired by the Hunt a Killer board games. Students solve a fictional mystery by analyzing AI-generated technical documents as an introduction to the most common deliverables and genres in the field and practice of Technical and Professional Communication. Grounded in research on gamification and AI, this activity fosters experiential learning by situating technical writing genres as both structured and dynamic tools. By combining genre analysis with collaborative problem-solving, the assignment offers a novel approach to teaching genre in technical writing, emphasizing flexibility and critical thinking.

This essay shares a WAW reflection assignment that supports the development of writing knowledge for tax memos and for the accounting profession; it is taught in an undergraduate tax class for accounting students. Students develop an external tax memo and, following submission of that assignment, they write about their own writing in their completed memo. The emphasis on the WAW reflection is paragraphing, as this aspect of writing is highly valued in accounting and especially needed for an effective tax memo. Accounting education has long called for more writing-emphasis instruction in accounting courses, and this assignment answers that call.

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.

The reflective essay introduces the culminating project from a specific iteration of Perspectives on the Humanities, the second universally required composition course at NYU Shanghai. For this project, students investigate a self-selected term of sociocultural significance that defies smooth migration across linguistic boundaries, especially between English and Chinese. Students can convey their research and insights through one of three genres: a “traditional” argumentative essay, an extended note, or a historical narrative. Inspired in part by Raymond Williams, this assignment aims to enhance students' rhetorical, linguistic, and cultural awareness by navigating the complexities of language and genre in a globalized context.

As questions of social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion have come into greater focus in the field of technical and professional communication (TPC), we have developed an assignment sequence in our TPC courses centered on these issues. This assignment sequence reframes our units on workplace communication and correspondence and asks students to practice a variety of genres in addressing and creating cases of intercultural miscommunication, insensitivity, and ignorance in the workplace. We have adopted a case study pedagogy for this assignment in an effort to preempt the resistance that can sometimes accompany discussions of social justice in courses where social justice is not traditionally addressed. We have found that this approach makes the instruction more authentic, provides students with realistic workplace situations in which to practice professional correspondence, and highlights the existence and reality of social issues in the contemporary workplace.

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.

This assignment, designed for a graduate certificate program in rhetoric and composition, asks students to create a writing prompt for an audience of their choice and to accompany it with a reflective letter written to a stakeholder of their choice. To prepare, students first read scholarship on college writing assignments: what kinds students perceive as meaningful, what kinds are most typical, and what kinds are encouraged in a writing-across-the-curriculum approach. They then consider what elements of this research they can bring into their own context, both in terms of teaching (via the prompt) and in terms of sharing their learning with a relevant stakeholder (via the reflective letter, usually written to an administrator, a colleague, or a student). By allowing students to expressly connect course content to their own contexts in two genres, this assignment enacts features of the scholarship students read. While personalizing learning is valuable in any context, it is especially so in a graduate certificate program, because this increasingly common site of instruction serves students with diverse educational and professional histories and future goals.

This assignment challenges students in an English Language Arts teacher education program to compose a proleptic autobiography—a genre of writing that transforms the customary retrospective autobiographical essay assignment as a way to encourage students to envision and create their future professional selves. The goal of the assignment is to support students’ development of realistic expectations of their imminent careers as educators and to foster a deeper appreciation of diverse learners. Composing such an imaginative narrative can help students develop stronger professional dispositions as they consider aspects of their future careers such as work/life balance, economic concerns, developing confidence, and providing support and encouragement to their students.

This article describes and reflects on a collaborative, in-class activity that asks students in a business writing course to analyze the intersection of language, values, and social justice through a rhetorical analysis of corporate mission statements. The activity looks at how mission statements, as a genre, work to construct an ethos of civic engagement targeting a specific audience. Students reflect on values embedded in mission statements and compare these values with corporate action. Students then work in groups to create their own mission statements that direct their research and teamwork for their other, collaborative course projects. I offer this activity focused on mission statements as a concrete way to discuss social justice, values, and civic engagement in a business writing course; specifically, students explore how language impacts social justice and structural (in)equality.

This essay reflects on a three-part assignment in which students plan, design, and reflect on a text-based videogame. Created originally for a composition course focused on rhetoric and videogames, the assignment lends itself to teaching about the writing process, especially invention and revision, teaching procedural rhetorics, and teaching technical communication concepts such as iterative design and usability. This essay is coauthored by the instructor with two students who took the course in different semesters, highlighting the collaborative nature of even solo-authored game design, as well as how making games can help students take up rhetorical concerns in other genres.

Scientists and writing studies scholars agree that students need to be able to repurpose scientific knowledge across audiences, goals, and genres. This article offers a much-needed, practical example of an assignment that allows students to work towards these goals. Working collaboratively, a faculty member from biology, a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) administrator, and an Encyclopedia of Alabama (EOA) editor redesigned a conservation biology course assignment around communication with multiple audiences. The assignment required students to produce a webpage about a rare species in Alabama that fulfills the technical, scientific writing component of the course and then repurpose that webpage into an entry for EOA aimed at a non-expert audience. We elaborate on the context in which the repackaging assignment developed, explain how it fits with student learning outcomes in biology, and share themes we noticed in students' reflections on the practice of repurposing their writing.

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.

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.

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 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.

“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 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.

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.