6 Writing Assignments (WAs)

The WAs are at the heart of the course. I call them “writing” assignments even though many involve reading and other activities that aren’t what most folks think of as writing. Together with named in-class activities, these assignments define much of your labor in the course, and so they will make up about one-half of your grade. The Course Calendar lays them all out for you. Some folks freak a little at first at the number of assignments. Most settle in once they see that doing the assignments leads them to complete bigger and bigger writing assignments AND see how they write, why they write the way they do, and what changes they want to make to write for college readers. Those assignments and activities will guide you in completing journal writing, turning in group work, and building the texts that go into your final portfolio.

You may well find that the WAs, like the assigned readings and this course overview, will require careful interpretation (and even multiple reads). They may well not be much like the assignments you are used to: often they do not offer a specific, narrow question to answer or format to follow.  I will do my best to make these assignments transparent. Each will describe

1. the assignment’s purpose
2. the specific task I am asking you to complete
3. the qualities of full responses to the assignment.

Instead of seeing these school exercises as orders to be followed, I invite you to take responsibility for making sense of the assignments, to think critically about not only what you are being asked to do but also why you are being asked to do it and what you want to do in response. And I ask that you take responsibility for how you carry out the assignments. Of course, in class discussions and one-on-one conversations, we can explore the most fruitful ways to interpret the assignments and share ideas for how to best go about fulfilling the assignments. But discussions of the assignments will be more useful if you think of the discussions as efforts to figure out the assignments, not as efforts to find out what to put in your texts or the right way of organizing your texts, or the right way to take notes or to interpret a text.

Expect some of your efforts on the WAs to be “unsuccessful.” It would be surprising, given the amount of writing you’ll be producing, if all or even most of your writings were “successful” in the sense of representing a final, polished product. As you’ll discover, the WAs will ask you to aim at writing that does not lead to the kind of standard five-paragraph essays you may be used to writing. This is because the effort to produce such papers can often restrict your thinking. One of the reasons for giving you so many assignments is to encourage you instead to experiment in your writing by challenging yourself to become a more complex and critical thinker. From what I can see, learning comes with being willing to tolerate trial and error.

The assignments can help you to complicate your reading and writing in three ways.

1. Some WAs will offer you the chance to reflect on what you have been doing in your earlier writing and to try out alternative approaches.
2. Some WAs will ask you to consider again, from different perspectives, concepts and texts you have explored in earlier assignments. Thus, later assignments give you the chance to work out more complete approaches to issues and writing strategies with which you are already familiar.
3. The portfolio of your work that you will prepare for your final assignment will give you the chance to present the culmination of the learning and skill you have achieved in you reading and writing over the course of the term.