Assignment Sheets

Compose detailed instructions for a writing assignment that takes into account the needs of native speakers and non-native speakers of English.

One assignment you create should foreground a “wild” genre and the other should foreground a multimodal artifact/performance. You should envision each assignment (and its components) as spanning between two and four weeks of your course.

As you develop these instructions, please use as a model Appendix B of the article we read earlier in the semester:

Wolfe, J., Olson, B., & Wilder, L. (2014). Knowing What we Know about Writing in the Disciplines: A New Approach to Teaching for Transfer in FYC. WAC Journal, 25, 42–77. (link to entire article)

You should include each of the sections that appear in the model, regardless of the project you’re assigning. The instructions should be addressed to the students in your course and, therefore, should address the reader as “you.”

Orienting Annotation

Preface your instructions with an orienting annotation (written for a fellow teacher, ~150 words or longer) that provides the following information

  • When you plan to use this assignment in your course (e.g., first third, second third, third third)
  • Texts students will have read that they might use in one or more of the following ways: background, exhibit, argument, and methods. Please explain especially how you will have incorporated “methods” texts* into the course up to this point. In other words, what sources (including rhetoric texts) will they have encountered that will enable them to “model [their] own approach to inquiry, writing, or argument.”
  • Aside from the model text (Appendix B) what reading or readings from our course had the most impact on you as you developed assignment? Why?

Refer to the first-year writing assignment checklist for further details.

*So, if you’re having students develop a script and make a brief video, a methods text might be a documentary you observe with an eye toward technique. That same video, though, might serve as an argument or background text if students choose to make their video in response to themes forwarded in the documentary.