WAC Clearinghouse Teaching Exchange

Written for faculty across the disciplines who are interested in integrating writing into their courses, this webtext offers an accessible and thorough introduction to "formal" and "informal" writing assignments, and it explains how faculty can use each type of writing assignment to facilitate critical thinking. Also, it provides useful examples of formal and informal assignments.

Written for faculty across the disciplines who are looking to understand and teach students about the role of revision in the writing process, this webtext provides an accessible and thoughtful overview of both "global" and "local" revision strategies. Also provided are practical activities for facilitating each type of revision.

Written for faculty across the disciplines who are grappling with the challenges of grading and responding to student writing, this webtext offers an accessible and thorough introduction to grading and responding to both formal and informal writing assignments. This text offers a productive balance between theory and practice, as it offers rationales behind grading and responding as well as practical strategies. Also, it provides a useful collection of grading rubrics that emphasize various instructional goals and objectives.

This webtext, which was published in 2000 in the Academic.Writing Teaching Exchange, explores using problem solving computer games like Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? to involve intermediate and advanced second language learners in reading, listening, researching, and decision making exercises – all of which can provide challenging, interesting, and meaningful contexts for improving second-language writing skills.

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This article provides a framework for adding writing to a course. It includes advice for the research paper, writing in the disciplines, and writing to learn, as well as general advice for responding to student writing. The article, originally published in the Academic.Writing Teaching Exchange, can be viewed by following the URL above.

This essay, originally published in 2000 in the Academic.Writing Teaching Exchange, addresses teacher's questions about computer-mediated instruction. The original article can be found at http://wac.colostate.edu/aw/teaching/haefner2000.htm. The article is reprinted in its entirety on this site.

A chapter from Jeff Galin and Joan Latchlaw's edited collection, The Dialogic Classroom: Teachers Integrating Computer Technology, Pedagogy, and Research (Urbana: NCTE, 1998). Students in most writing classes produce papers for which the primary audience is the teacher and the primary purpose is to pass the course. Yet our study of rhetoric tells us that citizens need to be prepared to write for a wide variety of audiences in a wide variety of contexts. Further, students writing researched papers often go no further than the books and journals in their own school library to gather source material. With the proliferation of the Internet, more and more students have access to what Howard Rheingold calls a "living database" of people grouped into virtual communities with similar interests. By first monitoring discussion groups on the network, analyzing the audience and discourse conventions used in these groups, then posting messages to the discussions, students can gain experience writing for real audiences spanning the globe. Using the network in this manner allows them to become better writers in a real-world communication context.