Designing Effective Writing Assignments

Writing offers so many important challenges to students, that it's natural to want to incorporate it into all kinds of University courses.  Once you've made the decision to use writing in a class, the question of what kinds of assignments to use becomes very important.  During the spring semester of 2002, the Writing Across the Curriculum Committee held this workshop, which included Viterbo faculty members from Nursing/Dietetics, Education, Fine Arts, Social Work, and English.  The materials below were distributed.  They are drawn from the University of Wisconsin's 2002 Sourcebook for Faculty and TAs Teaching Communication-B & Writing Intensive Courses and reprinted with permission.

Suggestions for Designing Effective Writing Assignments

Kristen Jamsen, University of Wisconsin

Good writing assignments promote effective communication and critical thinking by helping students to both learn course content and practice disciplinary strategies for question-asking, analysis, and argumentation.  To ensure that your writing assignments are effective in promoting these outcomes, you may want to consider some of the following suggestions for assignment design and presentation.

1.  Be clear about your pedagogical goals and design assignments to meet those goals

• Continually share your pedagogical goals for the course and for writing assignments with students

• Sequence writing assignments to build on developing writing skills (i.e., from summaries to critiques to proposals to arguments)

2.  Put the assignment in writing, making sure to explain the following:

• the writing task (what you want them to do)

• the audience

• the format (length, resources to be used, manuscript details, etc.)

• steps in the process (due dates for proposals, bibliographies, drafts or peer workshops)

• criteria for evaluation

3.  Discuss the assignment in class

• Discuss how to read and interpret writing assignments

• Ask students how they plan to approach the assignment, and clarify any misinterpretations

• Create time for student questions

• Show model papers with positive and/or negative qualities

• Do a “norming” session, in which students evaluate a variety of sample essays

• Try writing the assignment yourself and share your process and product with students

4.  Provide opportunities for students to approach writing as a process

• Provide students with opportunities for feedback and revision with proposals and drafts

• Have students work together in peer review groups, presenting their work and asking each other questions

• Hold brief individual conferences in your office

• Recommend tutoring sessions in the Learning Center

• have students give class presentations on their work-in-progress

5.  When evaluating their work, respond to student writers in effective and constructive ways that promote learning

• Respond to early drafts; evaluate final drafts

• Remember that you’re responding to a writer, not just to a paper

• Use the terminology you’ve established in your class to respond to student drafts

• Resist the urge to comment on everything; research shows that writers are overwhelmed by feedback that is too extensive

• Set a few specific goals for student improvement

• Ask students to hand in early drafts (the ones with your comments) along with final drafts, so that you can respond to revisions

• Have students turn in self-evaluating cover letters with drafts and final papers

• Save copies of papers that illustrate important qualities of the assignment (either positively or negatively)