Digital Design Guide

Here is an end-of-semester assignment to give students some ideas about how to modify the digital e-portfolio for organization, design, and aesthetics. Students choose from among the possibilities, guided by their own digital composing knowledge. The guide pushes the idea that the students are authors who should be actively engaged in how their work is presented to their audience. The key is to get them to think of their portfolio as a cohesive text, like a digital book about the course that they have written. Their readers want to be invited in, entertained, emotionally moved, and dramatically educated by their “book.”

Along with the design guide, I show them samples from former students or random samples from the digication directory. I also schedule a visit from the digication e-tern to show them how to do the fancy stuff.

It should be noted that this design guide is aimed at a course where students were asked to develop a process portfolio that includes all of their work from the semester. Such a portfolio emphasizes the writing process learning objective of English 101/201 by including drafts, pre-writing, peer edits etc.

Here’s the guide:

e-portfolio revision assignment

Toulmin Materials

If you teach the Toulmin rhetorical model of argumentation as part of your ENG 201 course, take a look at these materials.  These are clear enough with good examples that you could even assign the link as a reading for a 201 course.

 

The Toulmin Method

When learning written argument, it is always helpful to observe how others argue effectively or ineffectively. The Toulmin method, based on the work of philosopher Stephen Toulmin, is one way of analyzing a text that we read, with an eye toward responding to that particular argument (as in a writing assignment that asks us to respond) and, ultimately, toward analyzing and improving the arguments we ourselves make.

https://writing.colostate.edu/guides/guide.cfm?guideid=58

 

 

 

Recent New York Times article highlighting the excellent teaching of our own Katherine Arnoldi!

 

 

 

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Inquiry, Research, and Nonfiction at its Finest

 

 

Contrafibularity

Do you have a couple students who are choosing fancy words when direct simple words will do.  Show them this.

C is for Contrafibularity

The Writing Process of Academic Writers

 

Academics Discuss Writing

This video features professors talking about their own writing processes. The speakers are from different disciplines and so this works well as a text for ENG 201.  Students can hear how professional academic writers talk about their own work.  A useful model for reflection as well.   The footage is on the dull side–all talking heads talking–but a few of the speakers are animated enough to carry their segments.

The Function of Language in Law School

I came across a fascinating issue of the American Bar Foundation newsletter, Researching Law. It describes the research done by Elizabeth Mertz into the function of language in law schools. I think it would be useful for our faculty to take a look at it.

Here’s the link to the pdf: http://www.americanbarfoundation.org/uploads/cms/documents/rl-fall07.pdf

http://www.americanbarfoundation.org/uploads/cms/documents/rl-fall07.pdf

Chris Suggs

Genre Descriptions

The North Dakota Writing Center has created a list of genres, school and “real world,” with links to web resources for each.  So, for example, if you are assigning creative non-fiction or a literacy narrative or a social science primary research project, students can click on links to multiple sources that discuss the genre and give models.  Check it out.

https://www.ndsu.edu/cfwriters/genres/

What Is “Academic” Writing?

by L. Lennie Irvin

I will be launching my Spring ENG 101 course with this article.  Would probably work for 201 as well.  Sample from the piece under the link.

http://www.parlorpress.com/pdf/irvin–what-is-academic-writing.pdf

“Most people as they start college have wildly strange ideas about what they are doing when they write an essay, or worse—they have no clear idea at all. I freely admit my own past as a clueless freshman writer, and it’s out of this sympathy as well as twenty years of teaching college writing that I hope to provide you with something useful. So grab a cup of coffee or a diet coke, find a comfortable chair with good light, and let’s explore together this activity of academic writing you’ll be asked to do in college.”

confused writer photo above from: http://www.makealivingwriting.com/figure-best-paying-freelance-writing-niche/