Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments
39 articlesAugust 2025
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Abstract
This progression of assignments from Advanced Writing and Research for Artists, a seminar for Tisch School of the Arts students, presents a model for professors seeking to incorporate multimodal composition into their pedagogy. Culminating in a video essay, students explore films, television series, documentaries, stand-up comedy, interviews, TED Talks, and blog posts representing a multiplicity of perspectives related to a chosen controversy. After sharing their initial impressions in a vlog pitch, students dive into the research process with a comprehensive annotated bibliography of the most thought-provoking and challenging videos and articles they encounter online. Throughout the process, they keep a viewing journal, a bullet-point catalogue of gut reactions and thoughts that emerge while watching the narrative art that will ultimately form the basis of their arguments. The final video essay allows students to highlight the individual nature of spectatorship and to commit to the ongoing and evolving process of situated thinking. This article examines how the playful integration of audio and visual components in a video essay can foster authentic student thinking, present a holistic sense of the student, increase attention to academic integrity, and dissuade the use of AI-writing tools.
February 2025
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Abstract
This essay introduces a circulation analysis assignment, blending together insights from multimodal composition, remix/assemblage pedagogy, and circulation studies to encourage writing transfer. The assignment asks students to document the origins and evolution of a cultural meme (as coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins) as it is adapted for different rhetorical situations, modeled for students in the titular documentary film Feels Good Man. By completing this analysis, presenting it in multimodal contexts, and reflecting upon how they adapted that presentation for their audience, students begin to develop the metacognitive, cross-contextual thinking necessary for successful writing transfer.
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This article describes a seven-week project in which writing students design digitally mediated, play-based activities (card games, board games, pop-up books, or similar) to encourage children to experience a sense of environmental enchantment: an attentive, empathetic connection with the more-than-human world. The project emerged after students in several writing courses lamented modern life’s quickening pace and a corresponding loss of pleasurable nature experience. The project gives students space to practice—and to practice encouraging in others—slower, more attentive ecological relations while strengthening media production skills aimed at non-academic audiences. In doing so, students produce projects that, in the words of virologist Jonas Salk, practice being “good ancestors” to future generations.
July 2024
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Abstract
First-year law students often struggle with the transition from writing as an undergraduate to writing as a lawyer. Incorporating poetry into the first-year legal writing curriculum may assist students in making that transition. The close, active reading poetry requires is a strong scaffold to the critical reading lawyers must undertake. In addition, poetry aptly models how language can create an emotional impact, which is akin to how effective lawyers use language to tell a compelling story on their client's behalf. This Assignment has students read and analyze Gwendolyn Brooks's poem “Boy Breaking Glass,” and then imagine the protagonist of the poem was being criminally prosecuted for his act of vandalism and write the story of the case from both the defense side and the prosecution side. The Assignment enables students to appreciate how a text (or a set of facts giving rise to a legal dispute) can give rise to varied interpretations, and how language and storytelling techniques can be used persuasively.
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Abstract
This article details an assignment that provides students opportunities to develop critical thinking skills native to the process of what it means to “think like a lawyer.” By asking students to map and compose a narrative about a contested public issue that describes the issue’s various dimensions (social, cultural, political, legal, economic) and how they interact to animate the issue as a matter of public concern, the assignment invites students to reimagine their roles as authors and see themselves as having the capacity to assemble and set a problem for analysis and deliberation rather than accept a problem as pre-structured. While completing the assignment, students witness firsthand the constitutive nature of the structure of legal discourse and the intra-operations of the distinct facets of legal critical thinking. Through explaining the assignment’s design and rationale, this article demonstrates how writing assignments that emphasize problem setting prepares students well to navigate the transition to law school and ultimately begin laying the grounds for successful professional careers.
February 2024
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Abstract
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.
July 2023
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Abstract
The pandemic of 2020 forced many instructors to reevaluate their teaching and assessment practices. Assignments and assessments designed for face-to-face classes were quickly adapted to go online. Faculty-to-student relationships built through classroom interactions were transformed by the mediation of online platforms. At the time, the co-authors of this article were teaching different psychology courses at different institutions. However, we had similar concerns about the validity of our assessments in an unmonitored online environment and about maintaining personal connections with our students. We used the summer of 2020 to reimagine how our courses could be adapted to this new environment while satisfying specific learning goals, including demonstrating the ability to apply content knowledge and communicating scientific information through writing. To meet these challenges, we implemented a variation on authentic assessments. We replaced our exams with an assignment where students created artifacts of various forms to demonstrate what they had learned and how it connected to their future careers, personal interests, or real-world problems. They also had to include a written description for a non-expert audience to demonstrate their ability to explain their artifacts. This manuscript presents our rationale, requirements, assignments, grading rubrics, student feedback, and reflections on our experiences.
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Abstract
This article details a collaborative editing assignment that asks students to analyze and assess editorial contributions made to Wikipedia. This project not only provides students an opportunity to apply their understanding of grammar and style concepts to real-world editing situations, it also calls students' attention to the underlying ideological biases and rhetorical impact of subtle language choices used in specific Wikipedia articles. In explaining the rationale behind this assignment and discussing several student samples, this article demonstrates how designing writing assignments around the collaborative, multi-authored nature of Wikipedia can highlight the influence of cultural circumstances on both sentence-level stylistic choices and broader developmental editorial practices.
February 2023
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Abstract
This article describes a Pitch Assignment, designed by two journalists turned faculty, to increase support and self-efficacy for writing majors enrolled at a minority-serving institution (MSI). Pedagogical theory to support pitching processes and development is substantially undertheorized. Much of the extant literature focuses on academic writing and editing for undergraduate research; this article extends that discussion by focusing on the needs of underrepresented students seeking careers in nonacademic fields. Those needs include opportunities for increasing confidence and skill for such nonacademic work as freelance writing for newspapers and magazines. For this assignment, students write a pitch for a preview or review feature they will write later in the course. This assignment scaffolds how to analyze, prepare, and successfully pitch to target publications of students’ choosing while developing a sense of self-efficacy that will transfer into future professional writing contexts. The authors conclude by reflecting on how this assignment might be approached differently by other instructors and how support for diversity might be offered in other ways.
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Abstract
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.
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Abstract
The Field Guide to Lost Futures is a collaborative digital humanities assignment created for an upper-year English and cultural studies seminar. The course engaged with the expansive and complex topic of the Anthropocene, from a humanities and specifically cultural studies perspective. To focus student’s engagements with the many catastrophes associated with the Anthropocene, the assignment asked them to profile a single, concrete example of loss related to ongoing environmental crises in a brief contribution to the Field Guide website. Designed with the isolation and dispersal of students due to COVID-19 virtual learning, the Field Guide assignment brought students together in a collective project without the pressures of group work. The assignment was organized as a portfolio of four low-stakes activities that led to the final Field Guide entry. The scaffolded design and experiential nature of the assignment emphasized the multi-stage nature of writing and revision, as well as editorial considerations unique to writing for an online audience.
August 2022
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Abstract
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.
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Abstract
This article shares an assignment that has been successfully implemented in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) macroeconomic courses available to major and non-major undergraduate students enrolled in the City University of New York (CUNY) Kingsborough Community College. While the outcome at the end of the semester is a paper of about three pages, the steps designed to assist students with completing it are important because they provide a detailed research and investigation guide. The assignment is composed of a series of scaffolded tasks that engage students in data collection, data analysis, and interpretation using economic theory of the subject area, presentation of the actual findings compared to predictions of economic theory, and investigation and interpretation for convergence and/or divergence from the economic theory. This assignment is based on prior research on the benefits of assigning writing in economics courses and aims to achieve the outcomes described by the structure of cognitive process dimension of the revised Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom et al., 1956; Krathwohl, 2002).
January 2022
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Abstract
This research assignment asks preservice undergraduate secondary education teachers in an applied grammar class to engage in a two-prong research project: a multimodal, interactive “poster” and a research paper that together explore the pedagogical possibilities for engaging with World Englishes in middle and high school classrooms. The prompt invites students to consider social justice and equity at the level of language. The assignment draws on both antiracist and queer pedagogies and examines the relationships among language, power, and resistance to linguistic oppression in the classroom. As students work through the assignment, they enact real-life stories of historical and contemporary figures from around the world who were forced to speak a colonizer’s language and resisted linguistic oppression. They then read articles focusing on Black Language, Indigenous languages, and World Englishes, which serve as touchstones for their own research. Although designed for a grammar pedagogy class, the assignment can be modified for multiple disciplines; at the end of the article, I provide several examples of how teachers outside English might modify the assignment for their own disciplinary contexts.
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Abstract
Social justice goals are usually sought in civic or community settings in which stakeholders represent competing frameworks about what is just, good, and true. Modeling for students a way to identify these competing frameworks, and then intervene in deliberations to achieve just ends, is the focus of our assignment sequence. We examine civic deliberations over removing racist public symbols in this assignment for first-year students enrolled in linked rhetoric and philosophy courses. We read broadly in theories of public memory and civic identity, examine in depth one community’s deliberation, and reflect on public symbols in our home communities. The final joint assignment asks students to identify the principles that should guide deliberations about contested public symbols. We found that the assemblage of ideas that the students select from these pre-drafting activities shapes what they think is possible in the work of social justice; in other words, their own standpoint enables and limits what they see in the assemblage of ideas, sometimes limiting the arc of social justice insights and solutions, and sometimes unleashing it. For this reason, reflective writing is a necessary entwined process, one that can develop better awareness of how students’ epistemic norms shape their ability to imagine social justice ends. To most fully realize social justice knowledge, students must not stay bound within the contours of particular deliberations, or inward reflection. Instead, assignments must enlarge the context, asking students to make bigger inquiries into history, context, and relations of domination.
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Abstract
Students are often told that social justice is both the ideal and the reality to which they should be striving, and contributing to, as scholars and as citizens. However, they are often not given the space-and the challenge-to grapple with what social justice means to, and for, them. This paper shares the design of an upper level sociological theory assignment, Socialization as an Investigation of Social Justice Response Papers, that aims to do just that. The course units and theoretical texts are detailed, along with the response paper scaffold assignments, with special emphasis on a structured peer review process aligned with the assignment rubric. Now, having taught the course eight times to date, memorable student contributions to the course, along with an excerpt from the most memorable student response paper, are shared with the aim of inspiring faculty modification, particularly in the Social Sciences.
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Abstract
This makerspace-based assignment is designed to cultivate students' literate agency and their awareness of semiotic resources in two-year college contexts. The maker movement in education has been predominantly studied in business, science, and engineering fields and in four-year colleges. Networking translingual and transmodal scholarship and the maker movement, I devised a makerspace-based writing assignment as a scaffolding project to support students' analysis on their digital practices in the corequisite developmental writing courses and the composition courses in a community college. Although students' responses varied, I argue that this assignment can benefit two-year college students and offer social implications in multiple ways: it can promote students' access to the emerging trend of the maker movement and DIY fabrication culture; it encourages students to employ their multilingual and multimodal resources with an awareness of their changing literate ecologies; it can help them build their literate agency and transfer the maker mindset to other rhetorical environments such as their workplace or discipline-specific writing situations.
July 2021
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Abstract
This article describes a technical writing assignment that requires students to use Minecraft to design and document interactive learning environments. In this project, students balance a critical awareness of this game's technical features with a rhetorical understanding of how those features impact the audience’s experiences and actions. This article demonstrates how video game-based writing projects can help students understand the role of an audience's agency in technical communication.
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This article describes and reflects on experiences teaching students to compose a “Writing Process Photo Essay” in the context of an upper-division college writing course that satisfies a campus-wide writing requirement. As the culmination of a quarter-long student inquiry into their own writing processes, this multimodal assignment asks students to combine text and images to help them reflect on the environments, tools, habits and routines that surround their writing activity. This assignment takes its inspiration from calls for renewed scholarly attention to material and embodied aspects of writing process. In the end, this assignment creates opportunities for students to recognize, reflect, and reimagine their own writing activity in school contexts and beyond.
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Abstract
This article describes a major assignment in an undergraduate editing course in the Writing and Rhetoric major at St. Edward’s University. The DEE-CR (Describe, Evaluate, Edit, Communicate, Reflect) project assignment is an individual assignment that asks students to find a particular non-fiction text that would benefit from the attention of an adept editor, to describe and contextualize it, to evaluate it, to edit it, to practice communicating edits to an author, and finally to reflect on lessons learned. I will describe the assignment’s design and purposes, reflect on some outcomes and challenges, and close by offering advice to readers of Prompt who might consider adapting the assignment for their courses.
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Abstract
In an undergraduate biochemistry and molecular biology lab course, students designed their own final assignment to communicate their laboratory work to non-disciplinary audiences. A “meta-assignment” guided them as they proposed the content, form, and process requirements. Students strove to develop unique ideas, and all successfully completed their self-assigned projects. Providing students in this class with the freedom, responsibility, and appropriate scaffolding to build their own projects and learning experiences allowed them to interact with their discipline in new ways and enhanced their abilities to design and plan their work, communicate scientific ideas to nonscientists, and think creatively.
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Abstract
This Instagram “Weekly Writing” assignment is a social-media-based, low-stakes, and longitudinal approach to teaching and experimenting with multimodal composition. Students create an account for the purposes of the class and follow each other. They post three times per week, sometimes freely and sometimes in response to a prompt or challenge. Together, we use the platform and its rich multimodal resources to consider how in-the-moment multimodal composing can spur invention, place the writer in the perpetual position of noticing, and create an archive of experience that holistically communicates beyond the author’s original intention. This article discusses the pedagogical rationale for this approach, along with the issues to consider before adopting and adapting this practice.
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Abstract
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.
January 2021
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Abstract
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.
September 2020
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Abstract
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.
January 2020
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Abstract
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.
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Abstract
The following collaborative project is designed to encourage students to investigate how rhetoric functions in everyday locations. Specifically, this assignment prompts students to document, analyze, and present the physical design and makeup of "privately owned public spaces" (POPS), a unique categorization of community spaces that is promoted as simultaneously private and public. The benefits of completing this assignment are multifaceted: students are given the opportunity to experience learning beyond the confines of the classroom, and students are able to practice rhetorical analysis on physical locations, thereby learning how rhetoric functions beyond written or verbal discourse and attuning them to the social contexts of public spaces.
August 2019
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Abstract
English majors generally are adept at literary criticism but tend to have less experience in conducting empirical research that draws on both qualitative and quantitative methods and engages human participants. To introduce those methods to students and to satisfy a university requirement for quantitative instruction applied to the discipline, I developed a course called Approaches to Research in English Studies. The students complete individual IRB-approved projects that result in a research report, a poster, and a lightning talk. Before undertaking the individual projects, the students engage in a whole-class research project that models the process, and this latter assignment is described here in this essay.
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Breaking Away from the Traditional Lab Report: A Technical Email as a Writing Assignment in an Engineering Laboratory Course ↗
Abstract
Engineering laboratory courses often contain laboratory reports as writing assignments to be used as an assessment and grading tool for the course. While laboratory report writing is a useful skill, this article discusses an assignment which was used as an alternative to a traditional laboratory report within a dynamic systems laboratory course. This writing assignment is framed within the context of a hypothetical scenario involving a supervisor requesting a laboratory experiment to compare the effectiveness of two different designs for controlling the speed of a gearbox unit. Performance goals are specified by the ``customer'' so that students have a reference with which to frame their responses. Despite the shortened length of the writing assignment, students are forced to apply critical thinking and use evidence from their experiments to answer the posed question with a clear conclusion.
January 2019
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Abstract
"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.
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Abstract
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.
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"The One Who Knows the Tricks Wins the Day": Cultivating Mētis in an Undergraduate, Mixed-major Professional Writing Course ↗
Abstract
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.
June 2018
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Abstract
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.
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Abstract
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.
February 2018
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Abstract
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.
December 2016
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Abstract
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.
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Abstract
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.
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Imagining the Essay as Digital Assemblage: Collaborative Student Experiments with Writing in Scalar ↗
Abstract
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.
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Abstract
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.