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Programs and Areas

First Year Writing Program

Teaching Resources: Tried and True

• All Purpose Activities
  Superman Lesson: Introduce the concept of the Evolving Thesis; complicating evidence, articulating the significance of a claim, and work on mapping an evolving thesis in a text.
• Composing Skills
  Teaching "10 on 1": Review of WA writing strategy "10 on 1".
  Generating Analytical Claims: Writing Analytically Weak & Strong Thesis Statements.
  Linking Evidence to Claims: linking evidence to claims through reading and student discussion.
  Generating Ideas for Comparative Analysis: Generating ideas for comparative analysis on a smaller scale.
• Developing Analytical Thinking
  Analytical Thinking: Discuss what is analytical thinking and why is it important and then apply analytical thinking to a reading.
  Analytical Thinking: Provides a very useful worksheet on comparting texts.
  Rhetorical Triangle / Reading Texts in Layers (Music Videos): Take the concepts of the rhetorical situation out of a writing context and into an analytical context. All you need is a chalkboard, a VCR or DVD player!
• Evolving Thesis
  Merchants of Cool and The Evolving Thesis: Introduce the concept of the "Evolving Thesis", show merchants of cool, and allow students to track the "Evolving Thesis".
  Thesis Evolution: Used with the "Evolving Thesis". Good for a review of the "Evolving Thesis".
• Grammar
  Grammar Top Ten: Top Ten Ways to Teach Grammar and Style.
  Let the Students Teach Each Other: This activity puts the burden of responsibility on your students to teach each other the “Basic Writing Errors” from Writing Analytically.
  Passive and Active Voice Activities: Helps students understand the difference between passive and active voice, and identify the passive voice in their own writing and learn how to correct it.
  The Importance of Correct Punctuation: This activity can be used to stress the importance of using correct punctuation in their writing.
  Grammar Game: This is a fun little grammar game which has a few variations.
• Group Projects
  Visual Culture: Reading Icons: Introduce students to the concept Group Project. Helps review various methods of analysis (Notice and Focus, The Method) and weak and strong theses.
  "Reading" Music: A group project prompt that allows students to share some of their culture by creating mixed CDs.
  Analyzing Online Marketing: A group lesson involving visual analysis of online marketing and packaging images.
• Ponders
  Using Ponders: Use of a Carmen discussion board helps to solve a number of rather pervasive and common issues in teaching English 110.
  Suggestions for Ponder Questions: This page contains a lot of really great suggestions for ponder questions.
• The Research Paper
  Representational Trends and the Final Research Paper: Examples of the types of cultural and representational trends that students have identified, researched, and analyzed..
  Large Group Writing Workshop on the Research Paper: A step by step guide covering how to implement a Large Group Writing Workshop on the Research Paper.
• Student Feedback
  Informal Student Feedback Form: A short Informal Student Feedback Form that can be used in the classroom.
• Style
  Creating and Understanding Transitions : Demonstrates the importance of transitions and practice writing them.
  Transition Derby: This activity emphasizes the importance of good transitions, and gives them a way start thinking about transitions in their own writing.
  Commonly Used Transitions: Contained within are some of the most commonly used transitions in the English language.
  Balderdash: This activity is based on the popular board game by the same name, and emphasizes to students the importance of style, tone, and authorial voice in their own writing. Sentence Structure Activity: This can be a useful exercise to force students out of their everyday sentence patterns.
  Slang, Cliches, and Informal Language: This activity helps your students identify informal language, and gives them an opportunity to learn how to fix it.
  Another Activity for Slang, Cliches, and Informal Language: Used in order to help students stray away from using slang/clichés/informal language.
  Tightening Your Writing: These exercises help students when their writing is wordy or “cluttered”.
  Transition Derby: This activity emphasizes the importance of good transitions, and gives them a way start thinking about transitions in their own writing.
  The All Purpose Writing Activity: This activity brings together a lot of writing skills: organization, transitions, and sentence structure.
  Throat Clearing Phrases: These few short and quick phrases help clear the throat.
  Cutting the Fat: This exercise helps teach students will be able to revise sentences that rely too heavily on the verb of “to be” by identifying and fixing expletive construction, passive voice, and static verb choice.
  Why Do Word Choices Matter?: This exercise examines words that are used often to describe the same subject, and determines how and why the word choice makes a difference in each instance.
• Thesis Writing
  Teaching the Thesis: An easy to learn game. Fun for students to write theses and also make them realize the difficulties before they sit down to write one for their own final paper.
  Possible Overheads: A few sample overheads.
  PowerPoint Presentation: Thesis Development: A powerpoint presentation on thesis development.