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.

Historically, in NYU’s Expository Writing Program, we tend to use a pre-selected array of texts as a basis for major essay assignments, to allow students a variety of choices of style and subject matter to engage while maintaining control over the selection. Here I show how using one rich text as the foundation in a major first-semester-writing assignment is useful and interesting for teaching reading and maintaining an overall sense of cohesion and centeredness to the course, and I also demonstrate my process of asking about and exploring this particular practice.  My own writing process for this piece – inductive and recursive – mirrors the process I have scaffolded for my students; my own essay – driven by idea more than thesis, structured in conversation with my idea – also mirrors the kinds of prose I encourage my students to craft.  It is my hope that the culmination of the following progressive sections shows possibilities for using one foundational, rich text to teach a classroom of students to write an essay that is truly driven by inquiry rather than thesis, one that highlights the process of discovering and creating ideas and thrives in doubt.

This writing assignment, titled Metacognitive Analysis, prompts awareness of metacognition in learners early in their medical disciplines as they critically evaluate their process for making medical decisions. The Metacognitive Analysis assignment is completed by first-year graduate health profession students in a master’s level physician assistant (PA) course focused on the development of critical thinking and clinical decision-making. Throughout the semester, patient teaching cases are discussed and dissected by the students in small-group, problem-based learning sessions. In the Metacognitive Analysis assignment, students extend this learning by evaluating their own individual decision-making process in relation to concepts of intuitive and analytic reasoning.

Fully anonymous peer review enhances students’ writing and feedback abilities, encourages professionalism and kindness, and transforms the teaching dynamic. This essay describes the use of the Peerceptiv platform for fully anonymous peer review assignments in law school courses. This platform is uniquely helpful in fostering professional identity formation while helping students improve their analytical writing skills. However, implementing this peer review platform comes with challenges such as student reluctance and discomfort. With strategic communication and investment of time, these challenges can be overcome to realize the potential of this innovative approach and provide formative assessment, regardless of class size. Ultimately, scalable peer review helps students strengthen skills while developing collaborative professional identities throughout the law school curriculum.

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.

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 article introduces a flexible and adaptable Map Composition assignment to promote cartographic literacy. With applications to composition and writing across the curriculum, this assignment promotes students’ awareness of the rhetorical nature of maps, which is important as maps inform and influence public discourse on wide-ranging issues. Student work shows how composing a map can lead them toward improved rhetorical awareness, cartographic literacy, and engagement with place-based civic issues. The article acknowledges limitations of teaching maps in writing classes and concludes with discussion of how this assignment can be adapted to a range of courses to promote cartographic literacy in support of broader literacies and civic engagement.

The Inquiry Journal Facilitation is a project that helps preservice teachers develop habits of mind for engaging in critical dialogue about the situations they confront in their teaching contexts. In this project, preservice teachers compose a piece of writing that examines an idea, question, or issue that emerges from their clinical teaching site and lead an inquiry-based discussion about the ideas raised in their writing. Pairing the activity of writing with the activity of discussion creates a context for preservice teachers to create “exploratory speech” (Smagorinsky, 2013) collaboratively. In doing so, preservice teachers practice intellectual moves—framing observations, explaining those constructions, and posing questions—that are essential for teacher-learning.

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.

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.

Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic is a public writing course that was developed in response to an institutional call for a Public Pandemic Teaching Initiative in Summer 2020, which asked faculty to consider how this moment of radical disruption might inform our teaching and deepen our understanding of the relationship between writing, resilience, and response. The course provides a set of complementary, public-facing modules that offer teachers, community partners, and writers the tools to both write about and respond to writing about trauma. The resources, writing prompts, and activities draw from activities we have used in our undergraduate and graduate writing classrooms as well as our interdisciplinary research interests. Together, they support participants in addressing trauma from three perspectives: composing personal healing narratives; framing their personal inquiries within a larger research context; and positioning themselves within the larger community response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Public writing courses, such as Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic, demonstrate how interdisciplinary collaboration and accessible platforms can provide meaningful institutional responses during times of public health crises.

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 discusses a final writing assignment for “Culturally Responsive Service Learning,” a course taught during a four-week experiential education program in rural Fiji. This elective course was situated in an undergraduate teacher preparation program but included students from a wide variety of disciplines and majors. This article discusses the theoretical and cultural framework for the assignment, the pedagogical decisions that led to the final paper, the process of sharing the assignment with the community through a public event, the limitations of using a storytelling framework from another culture, and suggestions for future adaptations. In alignment with the topic, the author uses two different voices to interweave personal storytelling with academic research. The article opens and closes with vignettes that demonstrate how the class arrived at new levels of critical consciousness through engagement with the readings and learning from Indigenous community partners. The body of this article is written in a traditional academic format. Storied vignettes are italicized for clarity.

This action research assignment invites students to participate in the progress of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal #6 (SDG6) by contributing knowledge to two distinct public discourse communities: Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia and Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development. SDG6 targets access to clean water and sanitation for all by the year 2030. But, in order to accomplish this, the rate of progress must accelerate dramatically. In small groups, students research an SDG6-related topic and improve a Wikipedia article to make it neutral, balanced, and organized in accordance with Wikipedia quality assessment standards. Simultaneously, students compose an opinion paper addressing SDG6 goals and targeting the cross-disciplinary audience of Consilience: A Journal of Sustainable Development. The project raises awareness of discourse communities while students make headway on SDG6 by publicly sharing their research. The assignment is adaptable to an extensive range of subject matter suitable in both face-to-face and online teaching platforms. Students reflect on their own connections and learn to empathize with others by analyzing how lack of access to potable water and sanitation causes suffering. Action research calls on students, thinking as global citizens, to be bold in creating a new and better world—a world where access to clean water and sanitation brings justice to all.

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.

The *Othello* staging project invites introductory literature students to imagine that they are directing a new production of *Othello*. Students create a production proposal and poster that illustrate their directorial choices, using their original interpretation of the play as a guiding philosophy. This assignment successfully addresses many of the challenges associated with teaching an introductory-level, required "core" course of non-English-majors, as well as the challenges of teaching drama in general and Shakespeare in particular. Creative response assignments like this prompt can foster student engagement, mitigate student writing anxiety, and deepen student understandings of plays as living documents open to artistic interpretation.

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.

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.

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.

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.