Some of the original Writing Spaces essays included additional teaching resources at the end in addition to the Discussion Questions. Those overviews and activity ideas have been reproduced here (in the order they appear in the text) to keep the essays themselves clutter-free for students.

To skip down to the section you want, use the Contents menu to hit the + sign next to this appendix, which will expand the links to main headings.

We Write Because We Care

“We Write Because We Care: Developing Your Writerly Identity” is best used in an introductory lesson to first year college writing students, or in conjunction with a reflective writing task, such as a portfolio introduction.

The chapter explores what it means to be a writer, both in and out of the classroom, and looks at the benefits of writing, ultimately inviting students to think of themselves as writers by constructing what we call a “writerly identity.” We proposed this chapter when we realized that most writing textbooks and resources—Writing Spaces among them—lack much consideration of the writing that we do outside of the classroom, and often fail to invite students to take that first, radical step of calling themselves “real” writers.

With that in mind, this chapter could be paired with a class activity in which students reflect on their prior experience with and knowledge of writing. We find that students, especially first year students, often benefit from a great deal of encouragement to find the confidence to challenge themselves to even think of themselves as writers. In fact, as Taylor reminded us during our collaboration, one thing that Glenn said in a class has stuck with her: anyone can be a writer. To achieve that goal of helping students consider who they are as writers, we suggest pairing this chapter with other Writing Spaces chapters that encourage students to think about purpose, identity, and community, especially Sarah Allen’s “The Inspired Writer Vs. The Real Writer,” E. Shelley Reid’s “Ten Ways To Think About Writing: Metaphoric Musings For College Students,” Quentin Vieregge’s “Exigency: What Makes My Message Indispensable to My Reader,” or Sarah P. Alvarez, Amy J. Wan, and Eunjeong Lee’s “Workin’ Languages: Who We Are Matters in Our Writing.”

Our chapter begins with an introduction that addresses a widely shared concern: what does it mean to truly write? The answer we propose is both simple (just write!) and complex (writing is connected to personal identity and community). But we argue that students can count all of the composing they do as “real” writing. Diaristic journaling, creative writing, therapeutic writing, researched academic essays—all of it counts as “real writing” in our book. So, a natural place for students to enter into this conversation is with the question: are we correct? Does any and all composing count as “real” writing? Even texting? What about TikTok? If so, what does this mean for the work students do in their first-year composition courses?

Our next section discusses the personal benefits of writing. Taylor grapples with the question “So what?” and concludes that every student gains knowledge, skills, and a better understanding of the self when writing. This leads into one of the most important traits that we believe writing can teach: resilience. Students face challenges in the classroom and in their personal lives that require perseverance, and the acts of writing and revision are tangible activities that help instill this practice. Sydney takes up this theme in the second section of our chapter. This section could be paired with instructional activities related to growth mindset and resilience. Or, students might be invited to speak back to us by identifying times in which writing did not teach resilience.

We conclude with Alison’s discussion of socially engaged, community-situated writing. This section of the chapter might assist with introducing a community-oriented or service-learning writing unit, or it might open a conversation in which students discuss how they could apply class concepts to the writing and communication they already do in the communities they belong to. Glenn has seen great success in student engagement when asking his own students to identify and describe complex, ongoing problems or issues that their communities face and using those problems and issues to generate writing and research projects. Responding to these concepts could motivate students to use their writerly identity to engage with their own communities, too.

Finally, all three sections of our chapter tie back to the notion of writerly identity. The most productive use of this chapter that we can imagine is one in which students think hard about who they currently are as writers while identifying possibilities for the writers they want to become.

The Inspired Writer vs The Real Writer

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Storytelling, Narration and the “Who I Am” Story

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I Need You to Say “I”

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Workin’ Languages

This essay was written to invite students, educators, and writing community members to become more conscientious of the power of laboring language, and the work required to move within and against the norms of academic writing. Our goal is to help students recognize the value in bringing themselves into these spaces and to provide strategies that students can use to rethink their own relationships with writing. Instructors can use this essay to help students develop awareness of the assumptions behind what we learn as constituting “academic language” or “academic writing” and to write about topics that have greater relevance to their lived experiences, as they also centralize their communities’ voices and their own.

Questions and Strategies for Teachers

A strategy that will not be immediately visible to students is the necessity of educators to rethink listening/reading practices when it comes to assessment, particularly with regard to racialization and language bias. The discussion about appropriateness from Flores and Rosa that we outline in the essay has direct implications for how educators assess student writing. How do we resist responding to student writing in a way that can reinforce, either inadvertently or directly, what has been constructed as appropriate in academic settings? How can we frame responses in a way that helps them build and navigate expectations that do not diminish them as writers?

Assignments and activities can begin with thinking about students as “language architects” and build on the navigations with language that they are already doing in their everyday lives. These can include:

• Assignments where students are remediating and remixing, giving them the opportunity to communicate in a variety of modes and media (Gonzales).
• Making space in class design for students to practice and develop metacognition about their writing and linguistic choices and make connections between what they do in and out of the classroom. We often include guided writing in order to describe and provide a vocabulary for these processes and give students the opportunity to practice them. We also assign reflective writing at the end of a formal assignment to allow students to articulate the practices that work best for them.
  • Literacy narrative assignments, in this regard, can be a good place to encourage students to reflect on their experiences and relationships with different languages and literacies, while providing us, instructors, with an opportunity to better understand and begin conversations about “appropriate” language and ideologies that sustain such thinking.
• Writing assignments that build on students’ existing knowledge and authority about language use. For example, a project that asks students to examine the role of writing in their communities or to study their own writing ecologies creates an opportunity for students to connect their own experiences to scholarly concepts in literacy and writing studies.

Course design should actively work against deficit models and help students grow their identities as writers and language architects. Assignments and teacher feedback on student writing should address students as writers and frame all aspects of writing in terms of choice, context, and power, rather than right or wrong answers.

• Classroom discussions can also invite students to actively discuss their experience with assessment and create a rubric or feedback points collaboratively, and these collaboratively built rubric or feedback points can be used during their peer review and teacher feedback practice.
• The question of assessment of one’s language and racialization can be also taken as a discussion point or even a writing assignment based on a reading that reflects different manifestations of linguistic racism and the consequences outside the school context such as in housing, healthcare, employment, and finance.

Assigning readings from multilingual authors who reflect on or demonstrate their own movements in and across languages, including Englishes, is one way to show students how published authors cultivate (and do) the kind of writing that you’re now asking them to do.

Tiffany Martínez, “Academia Love Me Back”

Jamila Lyiscott, “Three Ways to Speak English”

Suresh Canagarajah (ed.), Transnational Literacy Autobiographies as Translingual Writing.

Denice Frohman, “Accents” 

Sandra Cisneros, “Only Daughter”

Aja Y. Martinez, “A Personal Reflection on Chican@ Language and Identity in the US-Mexico Borderlands: The English Language Hydra as Past and Present Imperialism.” In Why English? Confronting the Hydra (pp. 211-219). Multilingual Matters.

Silas House, Reading from his novel Southernmost

Ocean Vuong, On Being: A Life Worthy of our Breath: Interview

Changing Your Mindset About Revision

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What Are We Being Graded On?

Overview

Writing teachers know that grading is fraught with questions about what writing is in the first place. This essay takes the position that students should be aware of this complexity so that they can redefine the grading of writing as not the application of static standards but instead something that changes from one situation to the next. In the big picture, this understanding of grading helps students understand more about writing itself. The essay also gives students practical tips on how to interpret grading standards, and offers some new ways to think about how their writing is graded.

To do so, this essay relies on an illustrative anecdote from my own teaching where a failure to define clear standards led to an unfair grading situation. It then moves to contextualize that example within the notion of situational writing, and uses James Paul Gee’s theory of Discourse to explain how students may be marked as outsiders when writing in college.

Teaching Strategies

Because of its multiple purposes (its practical advice and its broader theoretical basis), this essay can be helpful at various points in the semester. The essay may help in the beginning, when students are just acclimating to college and are unsure of what will be expected of them—this essay might give them a useful framework for interpreting the many assignments that will come their way.

It also might be a helpful essay to give out in conjunction with the first writing assignment of the semester. It can help students read the assignment sheet or rubric closely, and you can invite the class to construct definitions of certain words (“clear,” “original,” “well-organized”) in an attempt to build consensus around the standards for an assignment. One method may be to assign students to investigate particular components of your rubric in small groups, and allowing groups to present to each other about what they think constitutes success in each of these categories, which invites you to enter a productive conversation with your students about your own expectations.

If assigning this essay early in the semester, it might be worth bringing the feedback log to class as an in-class assignment. Students could keep the feedback log privately in a writing notebook, documenting the responses that you or their peers had to the choices that they made. You could also assign the feedback log as small-group work, where students can discuss what they learned from the feedback, or come up with some new strategies for achieving their goals.

This essay also may fit near the end of the semester, when students are working on high-stakes final projects in your class (or in other classes) and may want to know how to navigate expectations. You might ask students to compare different evaluative terms across different assignments in your class or in other classes that they have taken so that they can practice identifying these slippery terms in the future.

This piece may be helpful for a teacher revising their own syllabi or rubrics. Some teachers may rely on the abstract terms that are mentioned in this piece (like organization, or purpose) and doing a deep dive on how those words can get picked up by students could help a teacher clarify how they are using those words in their materials. It also presents an opportunity to consider the role of surface-level features in grading—there isn’t a problem with showing students discourse-specific language, but this piece offers a framework for reflecting on the relationship between those features and course grades.

What Is Rhetoric?

In graduate school, I started to collect definitions of rhetoric. I wasn’t systematic about it, nor did I have a particular reason for doing so outside of the fact that I had observed a lot of definitions for this term. I found around twenty at first, then I had fifty, then a hundred. My list kept growing until one day I realized these definitions had pedagogical value. Firstyear writing students and others new to the study of rhetoric are often given watered-down definitions that sometimes manage to not only make rhetoric sound vague and uninteresting but also tedious—something for pedants. Indeed, my skin crawls every time I see rhetoric “quizzes” that ask students to identify equally watered-down ideas like logos, ethos, and pathos. So, I decided to introduce students to rhetoric not by simplifying it but by presenting it in all its complexity from the jump.

I didn’t want to give students a definition of rhetoric, I wanted to give them all the definitions. I wanted them to mix up these definitions, get confused, try them out, make their own. Simply dumping pages of definitions into the laps of students isn’t helpful, however, which is how the idea for this “choose your own adventure” essay developed. What better way to introduce students to rhetoric than by giving them the opportunity to be persuaded by multiple definitions while also being guided by their own interests? After all, as I say in the chapter, what rhetoric is depends on the person doing the looking.

What makes this essay different from more conventional introductory essays is that it provides information while also inviting readers to participate in the text’s own performance as a text. That is, instructors can use this essay to illustrate how rhetoric is an abstract art with material effects. Or is it a material science with abstract effects? As one can see, the definitions we choose to explain what rhetoric is and does naturally constrain how we imagine its scope and utility. But that’s how rhetoric works.

Backpacks vs. Briefcases

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Writing with Force and Flair

This essay on the use of rhetorical figures is ideally taught as part of a general approach to writing, and writing in college contexts, as a means for exploring attitudes, expectations, and presumed restrictions that students (and, often, teachers) may bring to the composition classroom. It is intended to start conversation and spark interest in experimenting with the resources of stylistic figuration.

Students will typically know a handful of rhetorical figures by name (alliteration, onomatopoeia) based on exposure to literary devices in previous English (literature) classes. But they are not likely to think of rhetorical figures as tools they can use in their writing. This chapter encourages exactly that, but unless students are given permission, encouragement even, from their instructor, they are unlikely to follow up on this invitation.

A challenge in teaching this essay is anchoring it to exercises in language exploration and play, as suggested in the section “Go Figure” and below. A second challenge is supplementing a reading of the chapter together with further discussion and examples. Figurative language is everywhere, from puns and sound-based features of spoken and written prose to punctuation effects in digital environments. Indeed, there are likely new figures.

A final challenge is one this author has wrestled with personally with his students. How much Greek and Roman nomenclature is too much? There is no question that learning a catalog of rhetorical figures is overwhelming and arguably beside the point of the essay. What’s more important is to teach patterns and options rather than assimilate a list of strange-sounding names. At the same time, it’s useful to recognize these established moves have names—and a long lineage. So long as students know they won’t be tested on their recall of specific figures, it’s useful to call the figures by their names when exploring their features and functions.

Exigency

Discussing exigency can help students to not simply think about the “so what” of their writing, but also to consider and analyze the prompt more carefully. I’ve found that students go through a layered understanding of a prompt, at first understanding the basic concept and then looking more carefully at the prompt’s specific requirements. But what makes their papers far more effective is if they can take ownership of the prompt—in other words, if they can consider a way of making it more than simply an assignment, but an opportunity for them to address an issue they are passionate about to a specific audience. To help them develop this sense of audience and purpose, a discussion of exigency can be beneficial. This is one reason to talk about exigency at the beginning of the writing project. The discussion about it will differ depending on how narrowly their purpose and audience is being defined by the writing prompt, but either way, the beginning of the project is the first and probably best place to discuss exigency.

It can also be helpful to discuss exigency when students are writing their introductory paragraphs, concluding paragraphs, or as they are revising their drafts to craft a more compelling argument. These three points in the composition process are what I think of as global points, where students have an opportunity to look at the writing assignment holistically. As a reader—in and out of the classroom—the introduction and conclusion are often where I find exigent moments, and I tell students this, perhaps bringing in examples for them to review and discuss. As a writer, it’s often in the middle or at the end of the writing process that I can better grasp the exigency of an argument for both myself and my readers, and this can be a point of discussion in class as well.

As my chapter asserts, asking students to think in terms of author and reader personas may also help lead to discussions on exigency. Asking students to think of personas invites them to consider what agenda or values correspond with that persona and how those considerations can help writers establish connections with their readers. Finally, exigency isn’t just connected to global issues like persona, audience, and purpose; it can also be thought of in terms of templates and well-worn rhetorical moves. Showing students rhetorical patterns connected to exigency, such as how writers explain a “gap in the research,” can help make it clear to students how they can articulate exigency at the sentence or passage level.

Elaborate Rhetorics

This essay introduces students to rhetoric as both an applied and productive art, then encourages them to reflect on a definition of rhetoric that accounts for both of these functions. The premise is that having a working definition of rhetoric helps students understand that it involves more than just persuasion or, worse, lying, and instead provides the generative principles for elaborating a subject (invention) and contextualizing it in situations that matter. A rich definition is generative; that is, it aids in the invention and discovery of new knowledge. In this case, that knowledge is about rhetoric, how and why it works (or not), and what writers should know if they hope to make it work for them.

At least since Plato in Phaedrus and Gorgias, we’ve known that writers need more than just the recipe rhetorics provided by handbooks, the prescriptive rules and procedures for producing good writing. Knowledge about rhetoric is often equated with such rules and procedures. This essay suggests, however, that knowledge about rhetoric should include how and why it achieves its effects, how to put it to use to answer questions about what to write and how to write it, as well as what these choices reveal, hide, or ignore. What can our writing do? What difference can it make? Why does answering these questions even matter? In the end, rhetoric is a much more interesting and complex concept than we’re led to believe. Because we think with concepts, not just about them, a healthy appreciation for rhetoric as an art for elaborating or exploiting ambiguity to foster identification helps writers discover what to say and how to say it to achieve their goals.

I encourage students at all levels to develop their own definition of rhetoric, one that includes terms that help them see and explain how writing works across a broad range of media, contexts, and purposes. The rhetorical knowledge they generate can serve them well when faced with unfamiliar situations or genres. They learn to ask smart questions about these situations that can in turn lead to strategies for addressing them without having to rely on what they remember reading in a handbook. A rich definition of rhetoric can act as transferable knowledge and thus transcends the particulars of any given situation.

This sort of rhetorical inquiry can be the cornerstone in courses that value writing about writing (WAW); that teach writers to reflect on and represent identities of privilege, race, gender, class, disability, ethnicity, sexual orientation (the nature and presence/absence of identity, identification, and division); and that encourage students to research and write about applied rhetorics of social justice, activism, and social change.

Understanding Visual Rhetoric

This essay is intended as an overview of what visual rhetoric is and how it functions alongside other rhetorical strategies that students may encounter in their composition courses. This essay could work well in a unit introducing students to definitions of “rhetoric” so that students can continue to complicate their understanding of rhetoric beyond alphabetic text. This chapter may also be useful to introduce a unit on multimodal composition, especially when students are starting to look at examples of model multimodal texts and understanding the role that visuals may play in those texts. Students may have varying degrees of abilities to describe or name the effects that visuals may have on an audience, and this reading is intended to help students articulate the rhetorical work that visuals do while also giving them some vocabulary to name the basic elements of a visual. This chapter focuses primarily on the analysis of visuals rather than on the composition of visuals, so bear in mind that this chapter does not include tool suggestions or any “how-to” tips on creating visuals. This chapter also does not cover best practices on attributing images appropriately (via Creative Commons licensing, for example) though a conversation around visual rhetoric for multimodal composing should orient students to these best practices so that students understand how to use and incorporate images legally and ethically into their work.

In this chapter, I bring in examples that are accessible to a diverse student populace. That said, it may be worth engaging in class conversation about the ways in which certain visuals may have different effects on different audiences, as particular pieces of iconography or certain photographs may be understood differently by audiences with various cultural backgrounds or experiences. When selecting images for students to choose or analyze, bringing in historical or cultural context is useful since that information may shape students’ abilities to understand the rhetorical purpose and situation for particular visuals.

Here I offer several in-class activities that I regularly use in line with the conversations offered in the textbook chapter to supplement what the chapter introduces.

“Finding Your Way In”

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Everything’s Biased

Building on students’ natural tendencies to recognize bias, this chapter might fit into a critical reading or research unit. I have found that if students can identify relevant instances of bias as they read, they become not only better at choosing high-quality sources for their writing projects, but also more aware of how their own biases might impact their approach to writing topics.

For claims of author bias that may more accurately describe students’ own strong feelings about a topic, the discussion of context may help identify where tensions could occur between readers and writers. For students using the word bias to describe any non-neutral material, a review of genre may prompt them to differentiate among actual biases, academic arguments, and accepted features of some genres.

Understanding Discourse Communities

This essay can be taught in conjunction with teaching students about the concept of genre and could be paired with Kerry Dirk’s essay “Navigating Genres” in Writing Spaces, volume 1. I find that it works best to scaffold the concept of discourse community by moving students from reflecting on the formulaic writing they have learned in the past, like the five-paragraph theme or the Shaffer method, to introducing them to the concept of genre and how genres are not formulas or formats but forms of social action, and then to helping students understand that genres usually operate within discourse communities. Most of my students are unfamiliar with the concept of discourse community, and I find that it is helpful to relate this concept to discourse communities students are already members of, like online gaming groups, college clubs, or jobs students are working or have worked. I sometimes teach the concept of discourse community as part of a research project where students investigate the genres and communication conventions of a discourse community they want to join or are already a member of. In this project students conduct primary and secondary research and rhetorically analyze examples of the primary genres of the discourse community. The primary research might involve doing an interview or interviews with discourse community members, conducting a survey of discourse community members, or reflecting on participant-observer research.

Inevitably, some students have trouble differentiating between a discourse community and a group of people who share similar characteristics. Students may assert that “college students” or “Facebook users” or “teenage women” are a discourse community. It is useful to apply Swales’ criteria to broader groups that students imagine are discourse communities and then try to narrow down these groups until students have hit upon an actual discourse community (for example, narrowing from “Facebook users” to the Black Lives Matter Sacramento Facebook group). In the essay, I tried to address this issue with specific examples of groups that Swales would not classify as a discourse community.

Teaching students about academic discourse communities is a challenging task. Researchers have found that there are broad expectations for writing that seem to hold true across academic discourse communities, such as the ability to make logical arguments and support those arguments with credible evidence, the ability to use academic vocabulary and write in a formal style, and the ability to carefully edit for grammar, syntax, and citation format. But research has also shown that not only do different academic fields have vastly different definitions of how arguments are made, what counts as evidence, and what genres, styles, and formats are valued, but even similar types of courses within the same discipline may have very different discourse community expectations depending on the instructor, department, and institution. In teaching students about the concept of discourse community, I want students to leave my class understanding that: a) there is no such thing as a formula or set of rules for “academic discourse”; b) each course in each field of study they take in college will require them to write in the context of a different set of discourse community expectations; and c) discourse communities can both pass down community knowledge to new members and sometimes marginalize or silence members. What I hope students take away from reading this essay is a more rhetorically sophisticated and flexible sense of the community contexts of the writing they do both in and outside of school.

What Can I Add to Discourse Communities?

This essay can be used when teaching students about the concept of discourse community and is appropriate when discussing the ways that discourse communities communicate their goals and values through language expectations, especially via written genres. It might be read alongside Cristina Sánchez-Martín’s essay “Beyond Language Difference in Writing: Investigating Complex and Equitable Language Practices” or Mara Lee Grayson’s “Writing toward Racial Literacy,” both in Writing Spaces 4 (2022). This essay may also be read as a follow up to Kerry Dirk’s text “Navigating Genres” in Writing Spaces 1 and/or Dan Melzer’s essay “Understanding Discourse Communities” in Writing Spaces 3.

The claims in this text regarding the characteristics of translanguaging, code-meshing and language as negotiation are presented as companion and counterpoint to the discourse community characteristic of lexis or specialized language. As students explore discourse communities, including academic disciplines or majors, and as they notice how language expectations establish or uphold goals, values, and beliefs, they can turn to investigating how translanguaging or code-meshing appears or might be part of negotiating discourse community expectations. Students might analyze: 1) the extent to which a specific discourse community values monolingual and/or multilingual language practices; 2) the potentialities of translingualism and/or code-meshing as tools to challenge the dominant language practices of the discourse communities in which they are (or want to be) members; 3) the possible risks and benefits of using these practices in relationship to their membership in a given discourse community. In addition to the questions for discussion for students shared below, instructors might consider specific questions in the context of this essay for their own teaching, such as:

• How can writing instructors consider concepts like monolingualism, Whiteness and/or White language supremacy, in our teaching of writing, or of discourse community as a concept?
• How can instructors explore or allow translingual and/or code-meshing practices in students’ language work (talk or text) as a viable and visible way to promote linguistic justice?

Writing Counterstories

This essay works really well in a first year composition course where students compose using a range of rhetorical modes and incorporate a variety of rhetorical strategies when writing. Counterstories work as independent assignments or can be embedded within other genres of writing. For instance, students can be assigned to write a stock story that identifies a myth perpetuated by the dominant culture in which they live. An example of a myth mentioned in this chapter: “Multilingual individuals have one dominant language and are therefore less proficient in their other languages.” As a follow-up or independent assignment, students are then tasked to write a counterstory that challenges or responds to the stock story.

To incorporate multimodal pedagogical practices or for educators who do not want to create a high stakes writing assignment focused on counterstories, first year writing faculty can also have students create podcasts, word clouds, or visual images in the form of a digital counterstory. This is why there are both high and low stake activities provided, and why counterstories as a pedagogical technique work so well when educators are tasked with helping students learn how to compose using a variety of different rhetorical modes and genres in a first year writing course. For example, if writing about an environmental issue, providing a personal account of how you were directly impacted is just as (if not more) valuable than risk assessment data. If desiring policy change, I would argue both expert and personal, anecdotal evidence equally contribute to the conversation. With this in mind, counterstories can be embedded within a genre, in this case a report or a grant proposal, that seeks policy change.

Counterstories help multilingual learners find their voice as writers by situating themselves in the broader context of their lived realities. By using counterstories as a pedagogical technique in the composition classroom, educators bridge the teacher-student divide because students know that their diverse backgrounds and unique experiences matter. Students also feel more comfortable and gain ownership of their educational experiences. Counterstories encourage students to be more receptive to listening to others, help them understand their unique positionalities in relation to others such as their peers, and have the potential to open the door to larger conversations about social change. Teaching students how to craft counterstories and for what purposes is the first step in the process towards transformative pedagogy that enacts social change.

Looking for Trouble

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On the Other Hand

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Walk, Talk, Cook, Eat

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How to Read Like a Writer

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The Complexity of Simplicity

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Introduction to Primary Research

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Annoying Ways People Use Sources

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Chatting Over Coffee

This essay works best if students are pushed to experiment with working with AI to immediately apply these concepts, which could be done during class as an activity or as part of an assignment. The essay refers to some of the activities I’ve done with my classes that are described in greater detail below.

How to Writer Meaningful Peer Response Praise

Instructors could assign this essay in a first-year or upper-level writing course or workshop, during the early part of a semester when students are practicing peer feedback. The essay is in some sense an indirect sequel to Straub’s “Response—Really Responding—To Other Students’ Writing,” looking more in-depth at one specific mode of peer response. It is recommended that students have opportunities to practice writing feedback— perhaps on one or more sample essays that the instructor has collected from previous students. Ideally, students should practice writing each mode of commentary (for example, 1–2 sessions writing praise, 1–2 sessions writing questions/advice, 1–2 sessions combining several modes) before diving into small group or whole class workshops. Ideally, the instructor can give some feedback or grades on the practice feedback, letting the students know how they are doing and how they might improve (e.g., write more comments, make comments more specific, etc.). After each peer feedback practice session, and in the “real” workshops with classmates, students can reflect in their journal/class discussion on how they feel they are coming along as responders, as well as how they feel about the comments received. Such meta-writings are essential threads that facilitate the students’ growth as readers and responders.

Reflective Writing and the Revision Process

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Navigating Genres

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Make Your “Move”

Rhetorical moves analysis is an adaptable strategy for analyzing, producing, and transforming genres. In this chapter, we walk students through an inductive process that makes visible the ways language choices and writing strategies like organization or structure are connected to the social action of a given genre. Moves analysis is thus a teaching strategy that can help demystify how writing works. Students do not need to have in-depth knowledge of genre theory to conduct a moves analysis, but it will be important for them to understand the concept of genre as social action. This chapter will work well paired with Kerry Dirk’s “Understanding Genres” in Writing Spaces, volume 1, and/or Dan Melzer’s “Understanding Discourse Communities” in [this text]. Connections can also be made to Mike Bunn’s “How to Read Like a Writer” in [this text].

In a sense, conducting a moves analysis in a writing class is similar to what writers at all levels do all the time: gather some samples of work we find effective, try to figure out what specifically makes the samples effective, and then do those things (or transform them) in our own writing. Moves analysis is a flexible strategy that can be introduced when students begin reading a new genre or during their writing process. Christine likes to introduce moves analysis with short familiar genres (like the student absence email example in this chapter), and then return to moves analysis throughout a course when students approach a new genre. Madelyn uses moves analysis to help students identify obligatory, common, optional, and rare genre features as a way of collaboratively negotiating assignment guidelines and expectations, and identified moves become a part of the assessment criteria for student work in a given genre. Brad likes to use moves analysis after students have already written a first draft. After conducting the moves analysis in small groups and identifying some of the obligatory, common, and unusual moves as a class, students can then go back to their draft and make choices based on the analysis.

One of the biggest challenges in facilitating moves analysis is selecting sample texts for analysis. The goal is to identify a narrow enough genre that the texts will be relatively similar, but also flexible enough to show variation. For example, in the student absence emails, we are clearly able to see variation across individual texts, but there are also common moves. If our sample set were broadened to also include faculty absence emails, we would probably start to identify slightly different patterns with moves. Some other shorter examples we’ve used to introduce moves analysis in class include wedding invitations, thank you notes, mission statements, obituaries, and protest signs, among others. If asking students to select their own samples, it will be important to emphasize the difference between a modality (email) and a genre (student absence email).

We also need to acknowledge the concern that moves analysis can reinscribe a prescriptivism or focus on correctness that the field’s pedagogical focus on genre seeks to avoid. However, it’s important to recognize that the textual and discursive borrowing that emerges from moves analysis can provide students with effective rhetorical strategies and an entry point to discuss and critique discourses. Focusing discussion on how moves help to achieve an intended action and why particular moves are effective can also help students see the moves as conventions, not rules. The instructor should select a range of effective samples that demonstrate variation, and should identify outliers to raise for discussion. If students look at a range of examples, they are very likely to find variation; therefore, moves analysis can actually help highlight variation within a genre and show how writers have options to achieve their aims. Students can also be encouraged to use moves analysis to bend or remix a genre and compare the effects (Tardy). Like many pedagogical strategies, moves analysis can be a tool for reproducing, critiquing, and/or transforming hegemonic writing practices.

Resources and Samples for Moves Analysis

The Statement of Need excerpts provided in the chapter are from sample grant proposals posted to Candid Learning (https://learning.candid.org), a resource site for nonprofit organizations formerly known as GrantSpace. Candid Learning requires registration, but it is free and has a wealth of resources. The three samples shared in this chapter can be found on the Candid Learning sample proposal page. Some of these proposals even include feedback from the funder describing why the proposal is effective.

We have also used the WPA/CompPile bibliographies for annotated bibliographies. The Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP) includes successful student writing in a variety of genres by upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. Former student work can also make for excellent (and varied) samples for moves analysis.

For further discussion on carrying out moves analysis activities, see chapter 2 of Sunny Hyon’s Introducing Genre and English for Specific Purposes and chapter 4 of Christine M. Tardy’s Genre-Based Writing: What Every ESL Teacher Needs to Know.

Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking)

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Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writings

This essay is useful for faculty teaching the research-based essays that are frequently the concentration in a second semester composition course in a two-term first year writing sequence. Instructors who encourage a personal connection to the research topic will find this essay helpful in guiding students as to when and how they might use their personal narratives in their academic research essays.

The questions below are designed to stimulate discussion and to move students from thinking academically about this genre to delving into their own lives for experiences they are inspired to research and learn more.

Often the attitude towards personal narrative, held by teachers and students alike, is that it is a beginning genre and an ice breaker that is designed as a stepping stone to real or more important ways of writing. This essay instead subscribes to the theory that personal narrative is, as Gian Pagnucci says, “if not instinctive, then at the very least quintessentially human” (41). My experience working with students on this kind of essay is that they are eager to both tell their own stories and to research the issues that inform those stories.

Essay Resources

If you have a favorite example of a well-mixed narrative research essay, by all means, use it. If you are using a book with good examples, you might assign one as companion reading to “Warp and Weft.” I also recommend many essays published as creative nonfiction, especially those from The Creative Nonfiction Foundation, at creativenonfiction.org. One of my favorites is “Rachel at Work: Enclosed, A Mother’s Report” by Jane Bernstein, published in Creative Nonfiction and anthologized in their collection True Stories, Well Told.

Why Blog?

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Punctuation’s Rhetorical Effects

Punctuation, along with grammar, has long been conceived of in Composition and Writing Studies as a Lower Order Concern. It is not unusual for college and university students to complete two semesters of first year writing without attending to punctuation in any meaningful way. Primarily this oversight—if it can be called that—is a result of the disciplinary privileging of process over product. We all know that knowledge of how to use semicolons and commas effectively is negligible if a writer doesn’t have something worth punctuating in the first place. Hence we spend what precious little class time we have with our students focusing on Higher Order Concerns: developing a thesis or claim, writing with a central purpose for a target audience, organizing ideas and information, drafting and revising. We know that punctuation matters—after all, when we ourselves write essays and reports and emails and syllabi, we’re generally pretty meticulous about how we use it. But as teachers, we don’t have the time to cover the exhaustive number of standard usage expectations, the “rules” governing punctuation, that we’ve learned over time. That’s why so many of us supplement our primary textbooks with writing handbooks (or link to online sites like Purdue Owl), which more often than not are used as a “reference” for students to consult on their own, usually during the editing stage of final drafts.

This essay offers an approach to punctuation that is not based on “rules.” It doesn’t tell students how to use punctuation correctly. Instead, it encourages them to become explicitly aware of punctuation as they read by seeing and hearing it, and ultimately understanding how it’s employed for what purposes. Standard usage expectations or “rules” are just one way of learning punctuation; reading with an awareness of how those marks (, : “ ? ; b ‘ i – ) operate in standard written English across multiple genres is a significant first step to learning punctuation—and many of us, I think, have learned usage in this manner. Yes, we need to know certain usage rules, but these can often be discerned (and sometimes implicitly learned) from reading with an awareness of punctuation as a textual feature that shapes phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Writing handbooks, online tutorials and guides are not the only way for students to become familiar with punctuation usage.

I introduce punctuation in my FYW courses early in the semester. I don’t discuss it solely in terms of editing and proofreading final drafts for the sake of correctness. Instead, I point out that it is a material and rhetorical element in the texts they read and plays a role in their reception of those texts. As shown in my essay, I distinguish between punctuation usage that is “required” (apostrophes to show contractions or possession, question marks for questions, periods to end sentences) and usage that is more flexible and oftentimes rhetorical (parentheses or em dashes, italics or bold, ellipses). I introduce students to the strategy of explicit reading, which I associate in my chapter, following Charles Moran and Mike Bunn, with “reading like a writer” (RLW). I bring up punctuation throughout the course, when appropriate, and often in relation to Higher Order Concerns like purpose, context, and especially audience. For example, when reading an essay—like a Writing Spaces chapter—I’ll ask students to choose a particular paragraph where the author makes a salient point or just says something memorable. After discussing that point in relation to the essay’s purpose, I’ll ask them to consider how that point or memorable statement is conveyed. This leads inevitably to the text of that paragraph and the sentences, words, and—yes—punctuation marks that compose it. Sometimes that punctuation supports an “aural” representation of an author’s voice (like my use of two em dashes around the word “yes” in the previous sentence), which provides an occasion to consider how audience awareness informs certain choices the author makes during the writing process that are sometimes supported punctuationally.

I have emphasized multimodal reading strategies—reading as “seeing” and “hearing” especially—for some years now. (I don’t use the term multimodal in my chapter; I use the more common term “sensory.”) I believe that this style of reading, because it makes students conscious of how language functions as writing, helps them develop as writers. While I don’t eschew “rules,” “guidelines,” and “best practices,” I believe that one of the best ways to learn how to write is to read with an awareness of writing—to read like a writer. With the exception of some text messages perhaps, punctuation is something we encounter every time we read across all genres. Because we tend to read for information and ideas, however, punctuation tends to slip out of sight. The 20th century thinker Theodor Adorno called punctuation “inconspicuous.” What I try to do is have it visually and aurally register with the eyes and ears of readers so that it is less inconspicuous. I believe that being mindful of, first, the material existence of punctuation in writing, and second, of its effective employment will help students use it with confidence and facility in their own writing.

“I Passed First-Year Writing—What Now?”

Thank you for reading—and potentially teaching—this chapter! This chapter is meant to help students consider how they will adapt the strategies that they learned in composition when they enter discipline-specific courses in their major. As an administrator in a WAC program, I really hope that students are asked to write in meaningful ways beyond their general education writing courses. Research in writing across the curriculum, writing in the disciplines, and career success identify the ability to communicate effectively as integral for professional preparation. This chapter is meant to resist the assumption that the completion of their general education writing courses means students are done learning about writing. Moreover, it encourages students to critically think about how they can take more agency in writing transfer and anticipate that writing in their disciplinary courses will likely have less scaffolding and support than they experienced in composition courses.

This chapter opens with a scenario describing a student who experienced success in composition but could not transfer the skills they learned to a biology scientific poster assignment. Then, it explains how key rhetorical concepts can be applied in a writing in the disciplines setting. After, it gives students some tips they can use to guide their writing in these new contexts. It ends by revisiting the scenario and asking students how they might advise the student featured in this story. The conclusion reminds readers the work of learning writing never ends.

I encourage you to use this chapter alongside other WAC/WID activities, such as researching genres and writing situations common to students’ professional and disciplinary communities or speaking with experts in their future fields about writing. In my own composition course, I ask students to complete a genre analysis of a genre that is used often within their future professions. Then, after analyzing the genre and researching a topic relevant to professional conversations in their discipline, they compose the genre for the first time. I would ask students to read this chapter after that final project alongside a reflective activity that asks them to imagine their future writing tasks and articulate how their writing strategies can help them complete these tasks. The discussion questions below can facilitate this reflective process.

An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing

This chapter can be used by instructors who integrate various types of multimodal composing assignments into their curriculum because it offers students an introduction to multimodal composing and strategies to consider when asked to create a multimodal text. As a composition teacher who has taught multimodal projects since 2014, I have found that some students want to jump right in to creating their multimodal text while others do not know how to begin. To counteract this issue, I use a process-based strategy that includes discussion, practice, and production when teaching multimodal assignments. This chapter reflects that process in that it is split into two sections. The first section provides a conceptual overview of multimodality and its importance in college writing classrooms and the second half offers five strategies instructors can use to help students create a multimodal text.

This chapter can be read as a whole or broken into sections; however, I think it is most appropriate to read each major section separately. I find it is easier to begin a multimodal assignment by asking students to read the first section of the chapter to frame discussions of key terms associated with multimodal composing, the modes of communication, and the importance of multimodality. This section also provides examples (drawn from outside sources as well as from my students’ work), which I use as a basis for activities that ask students to respond to the chapter examples and then find their own. I have provided discussion questions and inclass activities that I have used to help students understand the concept of multimodality.

I assign the second section of the chapter after the initial introduction to key terms and multimodality. The second section includes three pre-drafting and two drafting strategies I have used successfully in my courses. The length of the project affects the way I utilize the second section of the chapter. For example, when I assign a semester-long multimodal project in an upper-level composition course, students are given a mini-project for each of the pre-drafting phases that helps them create a culminating multimodal text. In my first-year writing courses, I assign a four-week multimodal project, and I simply ask students to read the second half of the chapter and complete complementary in-class activities.

However, I can envision instances where the strategies could be addressed individually and/or rearranged. The second half of the chapter is meant to help students begin constructing a multimodal text, and provides a rough template for setting up a multimodal project unit for the instructor. By no means am I suggesting that the considerations listed here are inclusive of all possible ways of integrating a multimodal project; instead, I wanted to share these best practices with interested instructors to decrease the workload of creating a new project curriculum from scratch.

Beyond Black on White

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Worth a Thousand Words

Over the past few decades, visual forms of communication have increasingly been recognized as a central component of technical communication practice. More specifically, we no longer think of visuals as just ‘aids’ that simply illustrate or otherwise merely support the written content in a document. Rather, visual communication is its own powerful semiotic mode that works with other modes—writing, speaking, gesturing—to convey particular meanings. At the same time, visuals also construct and communicate ideas independently from these other modes. Indeed, we often encounter visuals that we have never seen before—the lead photograph in an online news story, a catchy YouTube video advertising the latest iPhone, a picture a friend just posted to social media—that we immediately understand because we are familiar with the context. And because we are unconsciously drawing from our own cultural knowledge to create that meaning.

Given the ubiquity and importance of visual communication, this essay can be taught alongside instruction in the major genres in technical and professional communication—reports, proposals, instructions, descriptions, definitions. Today, all of these documents are likely to use visuals to convey concepts and information. This chapter explains to students how several commonly-used visual forms work and provide strategies for taking a rhetorically informed approach in their composing practices. The main take-away then for students reading this chapter is to attend to creating visuals with the same level of effort and thought that they give to their writing. More specifically, students should assess the rhetorical situation. That is, they should carefully consider the audience for the visual, how the audience will use it to make decisions and take actions, and the interpretive context in which it will be viewed. Engaging in such rhetorical decision-making will help students determine how they can create visuals that will be effective and persuasive in meeting the information needs of their readers.

Thinking Across Modes and Media (and Baking Cake)

This essay introduces students to the concepts of integration and juxtaposition within digital media composition, framed using theory from Bump Halbritter, Robert E. Horn, and Corrine A. Kratz. In the chapter, I use the metaphor of cake baking to get students to start thinking of texts such as videos, podcasts, or webtexts as composed of various pieces of media that authors can change, combine, and control for rhetorical effect. This essay would be most useful within a unit in a writing course where students have to both analyze and compose digital media texts, as integration and juxtaposition can be used for analysis and for invention or revision. Students might do a rhetorical analysis activity first, for example, using integration and juxtaposition as a framework. Then, students could compose their own texts that use integration and juxtaposition and reflect on how and why they used the techniques and for what ends.

The chapter offers two examples of effective uses of integration and juxtaposition that come from a student-authored video, “A College Collage” by undergraduate student Evan Kennedy. The examples emphasize using the techniques across various modes that include visuals, sounds, and words. I highly recommend that students view and listen to the example video “A College Collage” in its entirety in order to fully engage with the analysis of the examples in the chapter. “A College Collage” by Evan Kennedy can be found online here.

Strategies for Analyzing and Composing Data Stories

This essay introduces data storytelling in the context of multimodal composing. I assign it to students when I introduce multimodality because data storytelling plays a central role in multimodal genres ranging from infographics and white papers to social media posts. That said, the chapter could also be beneficial to help students learning to write about data they have collected through their own surveys or interviews. Without explicit instruction in the use of data, students often struggle to both analyze the use of data in multimodal texts as well as to use data effectively and ethically in their own multimodal texts. Multimodal composition pedagogy prepares students to discuss multimodal texts in terms of different types of media and modes of communication. While this vocabulary helps students to analyze the data stories they encounter and to plan their own data stories, it is not fully sufficient. Students need additional vocabulary to understand the strategies available for working with data. In this essay, I share a checklist of critical questions students can use to analyze the use of data in multimodal texts and apply the checklist to the analysis of a sample data story. I also introduce students to the data storytelling composing process and model this process by demonstrating how I worked through it to produce a data story.

This chapter focuses on introducing strategies for reading and composing data stories, and it does not go into detail about design principles or modes of communication. Consequently, it is best to combine this chapter with additional readings that discuss multimodal composing more generally and the vocabulary of page design. In my own courses, I also provide more information to students about specific graph types to help them make informed choices, and I spend time in class showing them how to use free online programs for composing multimodal texts such as Canva, Piktochart, and Adobe Illustrator.

The Rhetorical Possibilities of Accessibility

This essay is intended as a basic introduction of accessibility and what starting points students can take in becoming more accessible writers and project creators. In my experience, few, if any, students have learned about accessibility and their role in it before reaching college, so my providing information about alt text, headings and styles, and presentation scripts merely lays a foundation. Next steps for continuing this conversation about accessibility can include (but aren’t limited to) serif versus sans serif fonts, using color contrast, blending smart design choices with accessibility, and accessible social media practices, including capitalizing each word in multiword hashtags and creating captions for video posts.

Given that accessibility is applicable to all forms of document creation, this essay could work well as early reading in a course. If assigned early, students have the opportunity to practice this awareness and related skills with each project they create over the course of the semester. With accessibility’s relatedness to multiple ways of reading a text and representing information, this essay would also work well in conjunction to other readings and conversations on multimodality (Price 96). The beauty of accessibility is its limitless creativity and universality, so this conversation could really fit anywhere in a course, but for maximum effectiveness, I recommend using it near the beginning of the semester.

As a final note, I talk quite a bit about equity at the end of the essay and it may be worth having a conversation with students about how equity is not synonymous with equality and the differences between the two terms.

“Not So Fast”

User-centered design helps people create better products and technical documents. Starting product designs and the writing process with a focus on users helps ensure that you will meet their needs with your finished product. Consider these ideas when implementing user-centered design:

• Prioritize the needs of users over the ideas of the designer or writer.
• Learn information about user goals, context of use, emotions, vocabulary, and challenges.
• Conduct user research using methods like contextual inquiry, interviews, focus groups, and surveys to learn about your users.
• Remember that user-centered design is an iterative process that involves users from the beginning of design and throughout the design process.

While user-centered design research can be complex and time-consuming, students can take on basic user-centered design projects and processes in the technical writing classroom. For instance, they may conduct interviews or a short survey about why users need a particular document that they are assigned to write. They might observe users complete work using a technical document (or without one, to find out how a document might help users complete their tasks). They might complete iterative document design projects that involve bringing in potential users at several stages of the writing process to help guide revision. Additionally, students might conduct user research and write a report about their findings as a written deliverable in the class.