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EWC Faculty Resources
Help Your Students Improve Their Writing
- Guest Lecuture Guidelines
- Helping Students Avoid Plagiarism
- Teaching Students to Cite Online Sources
Designing Effective Writing Assignments
- Types of Writing Assignments
- Informal and Formal Writing Assignments
- Characteristics of Effective Writing Assignments
- Guiding Questions for Developing Assignments
- Assignment Description Checklist
- Assessing the Research and Writing Process
- Sequencing Assignments
Guiding Questions for Developing Assignments - Faculty Resources
As you develop your assignments, consider the following.
- What course objectives do you hope to advance by the writing assignment? Choose significant course objectives from your syllabus.
- What learning or critical thinking do you expect students to do? Use Bloom's Taxonomy in Assignment Design for help with this question.
- What elements of the "writing situation" should be reflected in the assignment? James Kinneavy's discussion of aims of discourse in The Writing Situation may help with this question.
- What form should the writing take? See Types of Writing Assignments for suggestions.
- How can the writing process be segmented to enable feedback or additional instruction? How will you assess the process and the final product? Take a look at the list of assessment questions, organized by writing stage, in Assessing the Research and Writing Process.
External Considerations
- How will you introduce the assignment to students?
- Does the assignment require pre-teaching of course concepts, technical vocabulary, research skills, or writing skills?
- Will Information and Library Services need to be informed of your assignment, and will you need to schedule an introduction to the library for your class?