1. How to Read Like a Writer

by Mike Bunn

Author’s Overview — Learning to “read like a writer” can be a great benefit to students. As teachers of writing know, a term goes by too quickly, and there is much to cover. This chapter, however, suggests ways students can improve their interaction with text by reading like writers from the start of a course.  Students will find this chapter useful for expanding their writing strategies by helping them learn to identify key moments in texts, moments when the author uses an innovative technique, which they might employ in their own writing. Detailed steps and comments, incorporating the voices of numerous students, will assist you in teaching students how to practice the habit of reading like a writer.

Discussion Questions

1. How is “Reading Like a Writer” similar to and/or different from the way(s) you read for other classes?
2. What kinds of choices do you make as a writer that readers might identify in your written work?
3. Is there anything you notice in this essay that you might like to try in your own writing? What is that technique or strategy? When do you plan to try using it?
4. What are some of the different ways that you can learn about the context of a text before you begin reading it?

2. The Complexity of Simplicity: Invention Potentials for Writing Students

by Colin Charlton

Author’s Overview — Students struggle with getting started on writing projects. In this chapter, you will find innovative invention strategies explained and modeled, based on student experiences.  By including questions to prompt thinking as well as writing, and student examples, this chapter can help you show students how to transform their uncertainty about finding a writing topic into an opportunity to make new connections between texts, people, and ideas.

Discussion Questions

1. What are the three questions the author says are negotiated that you need to be aware of when engaging in invention activities? How do these questions move you to consider unusual perspectives? Do theses questions work for you? Could you rewrite them so they work more efficiently for your circumstances, for a particular assignment?
2. What are the six potentials the author talks about in the title? How would you define these potentials in terms practical to your own writing? Which of these would you be moved to try/ consider first?
3. The author uses sequence connectors throughout, such as this final one: … College → First Year Writing → Objects of Study → Reflection. What does this mean to you in the context of this essay? How would you juxtapose these sequences to the rest of the sections of the essay (the potentials for invention)? How could you use this sequence to inform how you approach writing in courses other than first year writing or freshman English?
4. Which of the student authors do you most relate to? Why? What, if anything, specifically moved you to inspiration, perhaps to try a similar process or seek a similar epiphany?
5. Does the author talk about college writing that you know— something that is familiar to you? Are you uncomfortable with the methods the author talks about? Why? Are you intrigued by the author’s ideas about invention? What do you want to try first in your own project—which invention strategy do you think will move you forward toward creativity and perhaps, eventually, focus?

3. Introduction to Primary Research: Observations, Surveys, and Interviews

by Dana Lynn Driscoll

Author’s Overview — Research projects where students are asked to gather first-hand data are a common occurrence in first year writing courses (FYC). However, FYC students may struggle with the ethical and practical issues of collecting, analyzing, and writing about survey results, interviews, and observations. This chapter introduces definitions of research from an interdisciplinary perspective, examines ethical considerations, and compares the research process to the writing process. The chapter concludes with information about writing from primary research, including integrating research and creating visuals. Two student examples–a nutrition observation/survey project and a agricultural and biological engineering interview project–are provided to give students concrete examples.

Discussion Questions

1. Primary research techniques show up in more places than just first year writing courses. Where else might interviews, surveys, or observations be used? Where have you seen them used?
2. The chapter provides a brief discussion of the ethical considerations of research. Can you think of any additional ethical considerations when conducting primary research? Can you think of ethical considerations unique to your own research project?
3. Primary research is most useful for first year writing students if it is based in your local community or campus. What are some current issues on your campus or in your community that could be investigated using primary research methods?
4. In groups or as a class, make a list of potential primary research topics. After each topic on the list, consider what method of inquiry (observation, interview, or survey) you would use to study the topic and answer why that method is a good choice.

4. Annoying Ways People Use Sources

by Kyle D. Stedman

Author’s Overview — The word annoying in the title of this chapter draws attention to the rhetorical nature of a writer’s choices when citing sources, emphasizing that readers may feel emotions like annoyance (or worse) when authors fail to cite in the ways expected by the audience. This chapter humorously describes poor decisions that academic writers can make when incorporating outside sources into their texts. You can help your students avoid “annoying” rhetorical behaviors with this chapter, a brief primer on citation conventions for the Modern Language Association style. Students will enjoy reading about each “annoyance,” illustrated through positive and negative examples designed to show both the most common ways that writers make these mistakes and practical ways to fix them.

Discussion Questions

1. Because so many of these guidelines depend on the writer’s purpose, publication space, and audience, it can be difficult to know when to follow them strictly and when to bend them. What are some specific writing situations where a writer is justified to bend the standards of how to incorporate sources?
2. Choose one of the annoyances. Then, look through a number of different pieces of writing from different genres and collect two examples of writers who followed your chosen guideline perfectly and two who didn’t. For each source you found, jot a sentence or two describing the context of that source and why you think its writer did or did not follow the guideline.
3. Rank the annoyances in order of most annoying to least annoying, pretending that you are a college professor. Now, rank them from the point of view of a newspaper editor, a popular blogger, and another college student. What changes did you make in your rankings?

5. Chatting Over Coffee: How to Converse with Bots to Enhance Your Humanness

by Nikki Mantyla

Author’s Overview — Many students have been told again and again that using a chatbot is cheating, and many schools have banned the use completely instead of teaching students how to be smart about doing the thing they’re likely to do anyway. This article seeks to remedy that by conveying how to chat instead of cheat. Students will learn how to decide when a bot is the right resource, how to use it to deepen their thinking and strengthen their writing process, how to give it specific prompts, how to set boundaries on what they don’t want, how to cite it, and how to savor the human qualities of their own writing voice and choices.

Discussion Questions

1. Try the prompt mentioned in the reading to have a chatbot such as ChatGPT or Gemini tell you what it notices about you as a writer based on a sample of your writing. What does the bot tell you that is similar to or different from what you already knew about your writing voice? In what ways might these insights help you strengthen your writing voice?
2. Consider a writing assignment you’re currently in the process of completing. What would be a detailed prompt (like a specific coffee order) that you could ask a chatbot to get help with the stage of writing you’re at (i.e. invention, outlining, drafting, revising)?
3. Test out your prompt from question 2. Do you get the results you expected? Do you need to modify the prompt for better results? What do you notice about working with a chatbot from this activity?
4. Practice citing your chatbot conversation by first writing the full citation and then a parenthetical citation:
   • Create a full citation: “Summary of the question you asked” prompt. Type of chatbot. Company who owns that chatbot. Version. Date.
   • Use the first few words of the full citation to create a parenthetical citation that you insert after the quote from the bot: (“Summary of the question”)
5. Based on this chapter as well as your own experience, what advice would you give other students about working with chatbots?

Teaching Resources

6. How to Write Meaningful Peer Response Praise

by Ron DePeter

Author’s Overview — Praise is an important element of peer and teacher feedback—it can, to quote Donald Daiker, “lift the hearts, as well as the pens” of student authors—but substantive praise is one of the most challenging modes of feedback to compose (112). How can writing instructors move student responders beyond standard comments such as “Great paper!” or “I liked it” or “Good details”? This chapter is a guide for students in composition classes, and aims to help them understand the importance of giving and receiving detailed, conversational praise; it presents scenarios for conceptualizing how to write praise, provides sample student writing excerpts that invite students to practice writing praise, offers and analyzes examples of different types of student-authored praise comments, and provides an array of approaches to writing praise comments.

Discussion Questions

1. Do any of the attitudes about peer response that DePeter discusses in the beginning of his essay apply to you (e.g., not wanting to “judge” others or regarding a teacher’s feedback as more important than peers’)? Where do you imagine these attitudes come from?
2. How do you think Nick (or any peer) would feel hearing the praise comments written in the Donald Murray style of “I like the way you…”? What effect would such praise have on the writer, compared to just seeing “Good” next to a passage?
3. Do you feel there is a difference between what you feel is “good writing,” and that which teachers have identified as “good?” If so, what accounts for these different expectations? What is your definition of “good writing?”
4. Can you think of ways that Nick or Andrea’s peer response praise could be even sharper, or more helpful to an author?
5. Discuss experiences you have had in other classes sharing peer response. Have they been a metaphorical “Descent,” or enjoyable journeys? What made your peer response sessions in the past work, or not work?

Teaching Resources

7. Reflective Writing and the Revision Process: What Were You Thinking?

by Sandra Giles

Author’s Overview — This essay explains to students that reflective writing involves their thinking about their own thinking. They may be asked to reflect about their audience and purpose for a piece of writing. They may write about their invention, drafting, revision, and editing processes. They may self-assess or evaluate their writing, learning, and development as writers. These activities help cement learning. They also help writers gain more insight into and control over composing and revising processes by helping them gain critical distance and by providing a mechanism for them to do the re-thinking and re-seeing that effective revision requires. The article gives examples of student reflective writing, explains how they function in a student’s learning, and gives scholarly support for why these kinds of activities are effective.

Discussion Questions

1. Define what metacognitive or reflective writing is. What are some of the prompts or “topics” for reflective writing?
2. Have you ever been asked to do this type of writing? If so, briefly discuss your experience.
3. Why does reflective writing help a student learn and develop as a better writer? How does it work?
4. Draft a Letter to the Reader for an essay you are working on right now. Analyze the letter to see what strengths or problems it uncovers regarding your essay.