Claim
Argument-Driven Paper in WR 112
At the beginning of WR 112, students need to write a formal, argument-driven academic essay on one of the short, anthologized essays that have been assigned. (Consult the sidebar here for notes on the essays currently used in WR 112.) Scaffold the assignment with a series of reading journals, summaries, claim-writing workshops, and other pre-writing […]
Dork Short Oral Presentations
“Dork Shorts” are a form of presentation popularized by researchers in the Digital Humanities. They combine a formal structure (a specific number of slides) with a short time limit that keeps things light and allows the audience to learn a lot in short period of time. They’re sometimes also called “Lightning Talks.” Guide to Oral/Signed […]
Framing a Conceptual Problem
This handout (inspired by the Little Red Schoolhouse approach) explains how to frame a conceptual problem in a paper’s introduction. Students may use this handout to consider the discrete rhetorical moves an introduction involves, especially when creating research problems of their own in WR 15x. Objective To help students reflect on the key elements of framing a […]
Elevator Story
This assignment is especially effective if you assign it just after students write abstracts. Comparing the four parts of an abstract to the four parts of an elevator story (also known as an elevator speech or elevator pitch) helps students to identify the consistencies and differences between the genres and their audience’s expectations. Guide to […]
Developing Key Terms
All good arguments draw their strength from strong textual evidence and analysis. This exercise has two parts. In the first, which can be done for homework, students select passages from shared readings, closely analyze them, and then examone their responses for key terms. In the second, which is an in-class exercise, they use key terms […]
Debates
Each Flipped Learning Module (FLM) is a set of short videos and online activities that can be used (in whole or in part) to free up class time from content delivery for greater student interaction. At the end of the module, students are asked to fill out a brief survey, in which we adopt the […]
Research as Forming a New Question
Our Essential Lessons are a sequence of lessons that form the backbone of the Writing Program curriculum, illustrating what we want all students to learn across our program’s diverse course topics. Students often believe that the most important thing about writing a research paper is having a strong thesis and therefore try to produce that […]
Standard Rhetorical Moves of Introductions
Our Essential Lessons are a sequence of lessons that form the backbone of the Writing Program curriculum, illustrating what we want all students to learn across our program’s diverse course topics. Most students know that they should include a thesis statement in the introduction to an academic essay, but they may not know that academic […]
Argument-Driven Comparative Analysis (ELL)
Our Essential Lessons are a sequence of lessons that form the backbone of the Writing Program curriculum, illustrating what we want all students to learn across our program’s diverse course topics. Bringing two texts into conversation with one another is a key aspect of WR 112, and a significant challenge to students, who might be […]
Formulating Questions and Claims Based on Observations
In this exercise/activity, students work on their own and in groups to generate and evaluate questions and claims based on their observations or notes from an outside-of-class learning experience. Objective To turn students’ observations into claims and questions; to evaluate stronger and weaker questions/claims; to plan for an essay using students’ own observations as a […]