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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

In an effort to teach law students to “think like a lawyer” and develop their professional identities, attention has turned to helping students self-regulate their learning. To encourage self-regulated learning among her first-year law students, one of us (Tanner) adapted a self-regulated learning prompt developed by the other (Roderick) to assign The Legal Writing Manual—a capstone project in her first-year legal writing course, which tasks students with instructing others in processes and practices for composing legal memoranda and appellate briefs. Each student’s manual is built upon previous analytical and self-reflective work carried out in a first-year legal writing course. The experience of articulating instructions for legal writing encourages students to self-regulate their learning by re-thinking knowledge and practices for legal writing.

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.

“Breaking the Rules” is a legal research and writing assignment that I crafted for students completing their first year of law school. The assignment honors new students’ desire for skills that will allow them to effectively challenge the status quo of settled but discriminatory legal rules. Part I of this article is an essay that contextualizes and explains the assignment; Part II provides the assignment itself.

Integrating theoretical concepts into practical applications is crucial, especially in specialized fields like art conservation science. Bridging this gap between chemistry pedagogy and practical application is essential in developing students' skills in applicable contexts. This article aims to introduce a novel pedagogical methodology for enhancing learning in chemistry. This strategic assignment focuses on conserving cultural heritage artifacts, emphasizing the practical application of chemistry concepts. The article seeks to explore the potential benefits of this approach and provide insights into how to implement such assignments in general chemistry courses. The assignment requires students to select and analyze artwork of cultural significance while applying central chemistry concepts from the course curriculum to the conservation process. The students will then prepare written reports following a pre-established template. The student reports will serve as a valuable educational resource for future students. This approach creates a conducive environment for immersive learning by showcasing the practical application of course concepts within art conservation science. From the assignment, students demonstrated a nuanced understanding of chemistry's integral role in preserving cultural heritage, acknowledging the interplay between environmental conditions, material properties, and their impact on artifact longevity. They appreciated the necessity of chemical analysis in determining artifact composition, guiding the development of tailored conservation methodologies. Notably, students recognized the value of these preservation efforts in maintaining historical authenticity, serving as educational tools, and bolstering cultural pride.

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.

In this paper, we present a science writing assignment in which students focus on targeting specific audiences when writing about a socioscientific issue as well as participate in a peer review process. This assignment helps students consider inclusive science communication in their writing, focusing on engaging unique audiences about the intersections of science and social justice. Students are introduced to evidence-based tools for formulating communication for unique audiences as well as for assessment of writing quality. This assignment is novel in that it helps students think about inclusion issues in STEM, science writing, and peer review, all of which are key disciplinary skills that are not always included in STEM courses. While this assignment was piloted in chemistry and environmental engineering courses, this assignment could easily be modified for other disciplines.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 article describes an undergraduate health sciences course where students propose a community-level intervention that addresses a local health disparity. Students use community planning principles and health equity concepts as a final project in their 8-week online community-engaged course. The student-proposed project engages a community in health education or promotion-program planning and allows for faculty assessment of pedagogical decisions. A curricular commitment to health equity enhances the capacity and competency of learners to address the structural inequities that fuel pervasive health disparities among socially disadvantaged populations. Ethnocultural empathy or racial/ethnic perspective taking is used as a measurable competency. The final paper requires students to describe how the perspectives of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) have shaped their proposed community intervention. They are also asked to offer recommendations on how to best mitigate the racial bias that may show up in community-based interventions.

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 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.

While online learning and community engagement are not necessarily adversarial, this article explores the tensions between the two and how an online rhetoric course adapted place-based pedagogy to explore the idea of belonging. The assignment described here leverages online learning while sponsoring community engagement. The assignment invites students to learn about and participate in social justice action that, while accomplished virtually by way of Web 2.0 technologies and spaces, still connects students to the places that are significant to them. Such an approach is inherently invested in place-based pedagogy that frames social justice as abstract and complex issues that not only affect nation-states, but that also have tangible implications for privileged and marginalized groups in local communities (Flynn et al., 2010).

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 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.

This assignment deploys place-based pedagogy in a basic writing course, and enacts it through first-person research in the form of a walking tour of a university campus. Students first read and discuss two texts about their campus: an article analyzing campus architecture and a philosophical treatise about the campus park. Students then marshal evidence gathered through a walking tour to argue with one of these texts. In addition to bolstering students’ confidence for contesting claims advanced by authorities, this assignment encourages students and teachers alike to cultivate a more deliberate awareness of their surroundings. Because this assignment is meant to be grounded in a specific locale, instructors adapting this prompt are encouraged to seek out texts addressing their own institutional settings.

"Analyzing a Memoir of Disability" is a semester-long project that promotes learning about disability and culture through group reading and writing about a single memoir. Students in an Introduction to Rehabilitation and Human Services course completed a textual analysis by using a memoir and course textbook to contextualize one another. Writing was framed as a collaborative, multi-step process that cycles through writing, discussing, and writing again. Students were required to regularly integrate course concepts with their assigned memoir readings to prepare for their in-class book club meetings. The project culminated in a formal group paper of 5-7 pages. Despite some logistical challenges, the project was well received, highlighted by many students as their favorite part of the course, and appeared to ignite a passion for reading, writing, and the material under study in many students.

Authors in issue 4.1 of *Prompt* share a notably diverse group of writing assignments from various disciplines.

Writing assignments in any mathematics course always present several challenges, particularly in lower-level classes where the students are not expecting to write more than a few words at a time. Developed based on strategies from several sources, the two small writing assignments included in this paper represent a gentle introduction to the writing of mathematics and can be utilized in a variety of low-to-middle level courses in a mathematics major.

Mathematical induction has some notoriety as a difficult mathematical proof technique, especially for beginning students. In this note, I describe a writing assignment in which students are asked to develop, describe in detail, critique, defend, and finally extend their own analogies for mathematical induction. By putting the work of explanation into the students' hands, this assignment requires them to engage in detail with the necessary parts of an inductive proof. Students select their subject for the analogy, allowing them to connect abstract mathematics to their lived experiences. The process of peer review helps students recognize and remedy several of the most common errors in writing an inductive proof. All of this takes place in the context of a creative assignment, outside the work of writing formal inductive proofs.

Authors in issue 3.2 of _Prompt_ share writing assignments developed for engineering, math, and English courses.

In creating and presenting a collaborative dramatic presentation of a literary text, composition students bring "The Yellow Wallpaper" to life through close reading, literary analysis and synthesis, recursive multi-modal writing, and group performance. This assignment fosters the development of transferrable reading, writing, and creative thinking skills within an active learning environment.

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.

"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.

Writing mathematical proofs is a key component of writing in the discipline in mathematics. Historically, many students have struggled in pursuing this endeavor, particularly during their early exposure to the process. To help students progress toward the goal of being able to consistently create well-written proofs, I present an incremental approach used in a course for elementary education majors who are concentrating in mathematics. This approach uses daily low-stakes writing assignments. Using this instructional technique, I found that student engagement improved and that, overall, better mathematical proofs were written. One more instructor at my institution has already adopted the same methods, and I expect more to do so.

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.

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.

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.

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.