The assignment described in this essay encourages active, holistic analysis and articulation of the distinctive features of an artist’s body of work.  In preparation for a final essay interrogating a pattern across multiple works, first-year undergraduates at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts create a style parody of, or homage to, their chosen artist’s work in a medium of their choice (which may or may not align with the artist’s).  After studying the artist’s patterns of form and content, students gain a deeper perspective on those patterns by actively distilling them into a work that reflects and/or exaggerates what they’ve observed.  The assignment engages creative and metacognitive processes, including thinking from the perspective of the artist, and gives them a tangible reference point to both consider and move beyond in their upcoming essay.

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.

In the assignment described in this essay, students write a two-page paper, on anything they’re thinking about, with the express purpose of reading it aloud to their classmates. As a low-stakes assignment (graded complete/incomplete), thought papers create a space for students to experiment and take risks with voice and subject matter. Valuing the grain of a human voice over the high-gloss finish of AI-generated text, the assignment presents opportunities to think further about the role of voice in one’s own writing, as well as the work of listening and attending to others' voices.

The sequence of exercises described here represents a version of an essay we often assign our students in the Expository Writing Program (EWP) at New York University. Borrowing the concept of “the positionality story” from Christina V. Cedillo and Phil Bratta (2019), we advocate for reconceptualizing the personal (writing about personal experience) as the positional (confronting the social, cultural, and linguistic factors that shape and differentiate one’s personal experience from another’s). While drawing on the personal to embolden a student’s voice, motivate probing analytic work, and create innovative writing communities has been a long standing practice of ours, the move to the positional is a new approach that, we find, helps  today’s NYU students become more rhetorically and culturally “attuned” to our globally and linguistically inclusive institutional writing environment (see Leonard 2014).

Lay summaries are commonly written by researchers in many disciplines to translate technical scientific concepts into language that can be understood by general audiences. In our first-year introductory biology course, we employed a write-to-learn pedagogy by incorporating a lay summary-style writing assignment that encouraged students to explain the major results of a journal article in their own words, a format we referred to as “blog-style” for our students. We chose to use this format to allow students to focus on understanding, defining and explaining key scientific terminology, without regurgitating technical jargon. Students selected and read a scientific journal article connected to a biotechnology topic at the start of the semester and were given worksheets to complete throughout the semester that guided them in the reading of their article. We also offered in-class workshops that focused on best practices for reading journal articles, how to write for a general audience, and how to avoid plagiarism. Students then composed two-page, lay style summaries highlighting some of the key findings of the articles that they read. This assignment resulted in many students producing engaging, well-written papers that allowed them to demonstrate meaningful understanding of some of the technical terminology and concepts in their articles.

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.

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 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 paper details the evolution of a course, Arts and Society, and the inception of a student-centered assignment, “Putting ‘US’ back in Museums.” By tapping into a nationwide discussion of inclusion and public spaces, this business proposal style assignment asks students to consider their own observations as museum visitors alongside research that considers community engagement, diversity and accessibility in order to identify a specific issue within a museum and to propose change. Throughout the project, students are supported by the implementation of smaller scaffolding assignments, in-class discussions, an embedded librarian and an assigned writing fellow. Furthermore, they will meet at least eight professionals in the field and visit at least four different local sites. This assignment demonstrates best practices via scaffolding, institutional support, experiential learning, and engagement with the local community.

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.

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.

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.