This document provides teaching notes to readings included in the Model Calendar and Course Readings website. Readings are noted as either being available in the E100 Course Reader or in the E100 Course Readings Box folder as a PDF. A Google Doc version of this document can be found here.

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Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a novelist whose TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story” is among the most viewed of all time. In this “talk” Adichie provides a brief literacy narrative—a story about how she came to read and write—but uses this narrative as a way to examine how story can often limit one’s understanding of the world around us if we focus too narrowly on single stories rather than seeing the many stories that may be told. The stories she read as a child with British and American characters and settings suggested to her that these were the only stories to be told. However, as she begins to read literature by African writers, she could see herself and her community and understood that she could tell her own stories that reflected her imagination and experience. Stories or narratives in this sense are important because they provide opportunities to challenge what may seem to be an understanding of the world that centers or values a certain kind of experience and marginalizes others.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Use this essay/talk to have students begin to think about their positionality as writers
• Consider what Adichie means by “story” and how story functions
• Have students consider the tension between stories of dominant/mainstream culture and stories that may challenge these dominant/mainstream narratives. For example, what’s the accepted, mainstream story of the American Dream? What are the realities that may tell a different story?
• Have students brainstorm a list of dominant/mainstream cultural narratives. These could even be a list of slogans or ideas/concepts that structure our thinking: “All men are created equal”; “The American Dream”; “The Land of Opportunity”
• Have students unpack and work through the meaning and tensions with these cultural narratives
• You may want to revisit this piece when you read the Nobel Lecture by Toni Morrison.

“Approaches to Rhetoric, Writing, and Revision in English 100.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

An important introduction to English 100, this reading provides students with a groundwork for the course’s main concepts, questions, methods, sequences, and approaches for how English 100 instructors teach writing. Students should engage this reading early on in the course during their first week to understand what a rhetorical approach to writing can mean. In addition, students are introduced to key features of any English 100 classroom such as writing workshops and the revision process, which are fundamental to any student’s success in a writing classroom.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Within the first week of class, students should read this selection to help create a common, shared dialogue for how to approach rhetoric and writing in English 100. Consider posing the questions, “What do you know about rhetoric at this moment?” or “What do you think of when you hear the word rhetoric?” to students both before and after reading to build a working definition of rhetoric that you can return to throughout the course.
• Encourage students to reflect on their own writerly and revision habits at the beginning of the course, what they find productive about those habits, and how they might strive to adapt those habits by the end of the course. Part of the work of learning how to write is experimenting with your own habits of writing, and this reading can help students to acknowledge their own writing methods early on.
• Probe what writing is and where we find it. This reading cites the work of digital and multimodal writing as important places where writing is happening around us. Students can create a writing log where they chart every time they write in a day and where that writing happens to expand their definitions of what “counts” as writing.

Babin, Monique, Carol Burnell, Susan Pesznecker, Nicole Rosevear, and Jaime Wood. “Developing Relationships Between Ideas.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

This essay offers a bit of a more detailed treatment of transitions than Kepka’s “Transitions and Organization.” The authors focus on why transitions are important, describe a variety of scenarios where one might use sentence-level transitions (to show similarity, contrast, cause and effect, additional support, and to exemplify) and transitions between sections and paragraphs (to sign-post, to look forward and backward). Babin et al. then offer guidance on how one might evaluate transitions. In Sequences 1, 2, and 3, this reading would help support the process of revision.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• This essay ends with an exercise encouraging students to put their knowledge of transitions to practice. You could assign this for homework or incorporate it into an in-class activity.

Babin, Monique, Carol Burnell, Susan Pesznecker, Nicole Rosevear, and Jaime Wood. “Patterns of Organization and Methods of Development.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

Babin et al. discuss a variety of organization/development patterns: general to specific, specific to general, cause & effect, problem & solution, chronological, compare & contrast. This essay would work well to transition between the prewriting and drafting stages of Sequences 1, 2, or 3.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• The authors include a couple of different exercises within the reading that you could ask students to complete for homework or as part of an in-class activity.
• In this essay, there are links to several different articles that exemplify the organizational pattern/development method the authors are discussing. You could ask students to skim those readings in order to reverse-outline them and/or talk in greater detail about the rhetorical impact of various organization/development styles.
• This reading could also pair well with a lesson on essay structures – e.g., 5 paragraph, narrative, Classical Western, Rogerian, Stasis theory, etc.

Babin, Monique, Carol Burnell, Susan Pesznecker, Nicole Rosevear, and Jaime Wood. “Reverse Outlining.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

This practical piece walks the reader through the rationale behind reverse outlining. The authors provide a step-by-step guide to the basic process, an excerpt from a sample reverse outline, and then list and describe specific questions one might address while working with the results of the reverse-outlining process. This essay would be ideal as an assigned reading during the revision process of Sequence 1, 2, or 3 writing projects. You could also use this essay during the drafting stage of any writing project, to supplement a discussion about organization.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Encourage students to reference this reading during workshop as a way to guide their peer-review processes.
• This reading could pair well with Babin et al.’s “Patterns of Organization and Methods of Development” and/or a lesson on essay structures – e.g., 5 paragraph, narrative, Classical Western, Rogerian, Stasis theory, etc.
• To enrich discussions about organization, design a homework assignment or in-class activity where students reverse-outline a reading of your choice.
• Point students to this Reverse Outline handout published by the Writing Center.

Babin, Monique, Carol Burnell, Susan Pesznecker, Nicole Rosevear, and Jaime Wood. “Strategies For Getting Started.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

This fairly straightforward and short reading serves as a helpful resource for describing the tenets of a variety of prewriting/invention techniques: clustering, listing, outlining, freewriting, looping, and asking questions. Several of these techniques are supplemented with helpful visual representations of the practice. This would be a good essay to assign alongside the beginning stages of any writing assignment. You could also point students to this reading throughout the semester to try out different invention strategies for various in-class writing activities.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• The section on “asking questions” could pair well with a lesson on Stasis theory as an invention tool.

Blankenship, Christopher. “Establishing Tone In Your Writing.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

Blankenship uses examples from film to illustrate the meaning of tone, before transitioning to a focus on examples of how to manipulate tone in writing: through word choice, sentence structure (via active/passive voice and complexity), and perspective. He discusses tone as a rhetorical choice for effective communication. This reading would work well to support revision processes throughout the various Sequence projects, and the author’s treatment of perspective could effectively open discussion on standards for appropriate student/instructor emailing at the beginning of the term as well.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Have students do an activity where they have to change the tone or effect of several sentences by altering the word choice. Put limits on the number of words they can add per sentence.
• Have students workshop a few sentences in their drafts in which they feel stuck on phrasing, tone, or word choice.

Blankenship, Christopher. “Writing Is Recursive.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

Blankenship emphasizes the necessity of a recursive writing process in order to develop into an experienced writer. He covers the basic components of invention, research, drafting, revising, and editing, before providing an example from his own writing and publication process to show students how these steps do not typically occur in a linear fashion. The essay also includes a helpful visual of linear vs. recursive models of the writing process. You can use this reading in Sequence 1 to introduce the ever-important concept that writing as a process, and reference back to it throughout the semester as you see fit.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Encourage students to track/map out their own writing process (either in real time, or reflexively), and include highlights in their writer’s memos.
• This essay’s focus on recursively engaging in research throughout the writing process represents a good opportunity to discuss the ways in which we engage in research in our everyday lives–even though we might not think about it that way. Ask your students to reflect on and discuss the various social media feeds they regularly view and how that seemingly mundane process might inform an idea for a writing project at any stage of the process.
• Let students in on your own writing/research/publishing process. How have you come to ideas for writing projects in the past (what are your invention strategies)? What sorts of things have made you come back to the drawing board?

Bogle, Christie. “Dash That Oxford Comma! Prestige and Stigma in Academic Writing.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

This interesting and provocative essay is about non-standard Englishes and power dynamics in writing pedagogy. Bogle first establishes the nature of grammar as culturally constructed and provides historical origins of arbitrary grammar rules, before forwarding a grammatical goal of being understood instead of “right,” reframing errors as “varieties of speech/writing,” and linking English “scuffles” across boundaries of class/race/economic status to classism and racism. She then presents the CCCC “Student’s Rights to their Own Language”(SRTOL) statement as a best practice doctrine for writing instructors, offers some questions about the practicality of the statement, and ultimately provokes further thought about how students might understand the links between language use and social justice in an English classroom. You can use this essay alongside a discussion about rhetorical awareness and tone in Sequence 2, or at any point in the semester where you might want to complicate ideas about “good” and “bad” grammar.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• This is a great place to integrate some more critical sources and lessons/discussions about power dynamics inherent to writing pedagogy. You could pair this reading with some of the sources from Bogle’s works cited (e.g., the “SRTOL” statement itself, Pinker’s youtube videos on the myth of Standard English), George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” the work of Asao Inoue (available via the WAC Clearinghouse), Vershawn Ashanti Young’s Should Writers Use They Own English?, Anjali Pattanayak’s “There is One Correct Way of Writing and Speaking” or Steven Alvarez’s “Official American English is Best” (the last two essays are available here).

Christiansen, Roy. “Story As Rhetorical: We Can’t Escape Story No Matter How Hard We Try.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

In this essay, Christiansen argues for an understanding of storytelling as rigorous, rhetorical, and as a mode of analysis. To do this, he uses personal examples, in addition to two main external sources: Newkirk as evidence for claims about argument, and Gawande as an example of effective argument within a narrative structure. This essay could be helpful to open up conversations about narrative/storytelling/autoethnography in Sequence 1. In addition, it could work in Sequences 2 and 3 to reinforce that students can still use narrative even amid other genres, and/or serve as a helpful model of an author who is self-reflexive about research processes.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Could be fruitfully paired with (excerpts from) the sources cited here (Newkirk, Gawande), or other thematic sources exploring/utilizing narrative as argument.
• Talk with your students about Christiansen’s personal evidence. The personal example provided uses an “A” grade for a paper injected with personal narrative as evidence for autobiography as argument (is this enough context? Does this reinforce a particular understanding of grades?).
• The Gawande piece referenced here is from The New Yorker–perhaps also supplement with an excerpt from a peer-reviewed article that exemplifies scholarly autoethnography/argument (e.g. Melanie Yergeau’s “Significant Disturbance: On Theorists Who Theorize Theory of Mind,” Vyshali Manivannan’s “What we See When we Digitize Pain,” Victor Villanueva’s “Personally Speaking: Experience as Evidence in Academic Discourse,” or another piece that models the type of writing you want your students to produce).

Das Bender, Gita. “Critical Thinking in College Writing: From the Personal to the Academic.”

Available here in the Box folder or at the Writing Spaces website

In this essay Das Bender provides various critical thinking strategies to demonstrate how academic writing begins with our own personal experiences. Reading attentively and responding thoughtfully to a text is the starting point of critical thinking. After listing and explaining 5 critical thinking strategies, the author uses a sample student essay to demonstrate how to use critical thinking to draft a textual analysis or other genres of “academic writing.”

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Use the critical thinking strategies described by Das Bender to help students practice inquiry, observation, and reflection. This is also a good text to revisit during weeks 6-10 as students begin working with research and informative writing.
• Attentive reading by asking questions regarding the text- freewriting activity
• Listing important ideas about the text- possible small group activity
• Noticing key terms & summarizing important quotes- helpful especially for more difficult and longer texts
• Writing a personal response- good reflection activity
• Making an academic connection- this can be useful as you transition from narrative to informative writing

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

In this essay, Dirk provides a nice balance between discussing the importance of genre features and encouraging students to break formulaic rules and conventions to meet the demands of a particular rhetorical situation. To accomplish this, he uses a variety of examples illustrating genre conventions, including country music lyrics, the author’s own process of writing the essay, The Onion headlines, and a ransom note scenario. This essay could be fruitfully used to ground a discussion of genre within Sequence 1, 2, or 3.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Utilize the discussion questions included at the end for homework or an in-class activity.
• Would pair well with other pieces about rhetorical analysis/awareness (Caroll, Kepka’s “Critical Reading”, etc.)
• Dirk cites several academic articles that could also be excerpted and included as a supplemental reading here

Dustin Edwards and Enrique Paz, “Only Geniuses Can Be Writers” (from Bad Ideas about Writing)
Available in the Bad Ideas about Writing textbook
[to come]

Guptill, Amy. “What Does the Professor Want? Understanding the Assignment.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

Framed around a discussion of navigating instructor expectations, the main takeaway of this essay is ultimately about the importance of critical thinking in college. Guptill starts out by emphasizing the rhetorical strategies of writing with audience and purpose in mind. She offers a variety of reasons why prompts may not contain a ton of information, and then offers concrete strategies for decoding writing assignments: students should identify key verbs, put the assignment in context, freewrite, and lastly ask for clarification–the “right” way (supplemented with a chart of potentially annoying questions). The author discusses the value of rubrics in this process before moving into her argument that displaying critical thinking is a primary goal of the majority of college-level writing assignments. It might be helpful to assign this reading at the beginning of the semester, to open up conversations about how labor-intensive it is to assess papers, and establish expectations for your particular approach to assignment prompts.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Encourage students to think/pair/share about their past experiences navigating various instructor’s prompts. What are their best/worst experiences with a prompt? What are the characteristics of a prompt that sets students up for success?
• There are several sources in the works cited you might excerpt and pair with this reading (e.g., Elbow, Hjortshoj).

Hjortshoj, Keith. “Footstools and Furniture: Variations of Form and Flow in College Writing.”

Available here in the Box folder

This text is a great piece to read at the beginning of your English 100 class in the first sequence to get your students thinking about the transition between high school and college writing, and as a reflection on their own journey as writers and users of language. To begin, Hjortshoj unpacks the five-paragraph essay, which represents the more simplistic, straightforward type of writing taught in high school classes. In addition, Hjortshoj underscores the different types of genres that students are likely to encounter in college, while emphasizing what pieces of the formula will be useful to students, and what additional insight (beyond the formula) students will have to gain in order to be successful in college writing. One element to keep in mind is that the descriptions of what constitutes “good writing” as Hjortshoj points out, is often subjective and determinant upon the rhetorical purpose, the genre, the course, and the essay objectives. This point is particularly important for beginning college writers—the notion that good writing is not uniform but rather dependent upon context and purpose. In addition to seeing it on the syllabus early in the semester I can imagine returning to this piece at the end of the course as students transition into more research based writing in order to refresh themselves on research conventions to both embrace and avoid.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Consider including this piece within the first week (or two weeks) of the course. In addition to analyzing its main principles and concepts, it might be useful to pair this essay with a reflection piece for students to get them thinking about the types of writing experiences that they have had up until this point in their schooling. For example, you might have students write a short assignment or a free write alongside of this piece about their positive and negative writing experiences and/or specific individual person goal setting for the course.
• This essay could be used as a “best practices” for writing in the course, once students have had a chance to acclimate to the course overview and procedures.

Encouraging reflection is a really important part of this course—reflecting on where students have been as writers, reflecting on their writing in workshops and in class, and reflecting on where they would like to go as writers and thinkers in college and beyond. This is a very organized and clear-cut piece of writing to help begin that process of reflection early on in the course.

Hopes, An Ode to Madison’s Lake Monster
Available here in the Box folder or at the Edge Effects website
[to come]

Jordan, June. “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You And the Future Life of Willie Jordan.”

Available here in the Box folder

Published in 1985/1988, this essay remains relevant for its attention to the politics of language, the rhetorical power of Black English, and the exigencies of state violence and police brutality. Set in two classes, “In Search of the Invisible Black Woman” and “The Art of Black English,” taught by the author, June Jordan explores the politics of language and the power of Black English in culture. Surprised that her class of mostly Black students reacted negatively to Alice Walker’s version of Black English in The Color Purple, Jordan sees an opportunity to engage her class in thinking about contemporary Black English and the function of language in the present-day. This leads to the creation of a course that takes up Black English specifically as artistic and rhetorical expression. Jordan and her class develop rules that govern the use and expression of Black English. The relationship between June Jordan and her student, Willie Jordan, is another central narrative in this essay, illustrating the power of ideas as a way to engage students and to provide them with opportunities to express themselves. Jordan’s use of her class to engage students in primary research about language offers an example of qualitative and ethnographic research. Students themselves serve as the researchers who collect data and use this empirical data to develop theories about how language works.

These theories are put to use when students are faced with a rhetorical exigency: the need to respond to the murder of Willie Jordan’s brother by police. Here we see an act of collective writing, the rhetorical power of language, and the enduring structural oppression of white supremacy as the class statement is unheard by those in power. However, the essay concludes with Willie Jordan’s own writing where he connects the system Apartheid of South Africa with the police violence of the US.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Connect this essay to the earlier essays by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and from the start of the semester, as well as to the Nobel speech by Toni Morrison.
  • How are language, narrative, and story connected here?
  • While making similar arguments—Who gets to tell stories? How are those stories told?—the essays by Young, Adichie, Morrison, and Jordan take different rhetorical approaches. Have students unpack the rhetorical strategies here and discuss the effect of these different strategies.
• Consider the essay as an example of qualitative research and as a model for students designing their own rhetorical analysis projects.
• Have students do a rhetorical analysis of the two texts shared in this essay: the statement against police violence and the essay by Willie Jordan. What are the rhetorical strategies used in these two texts? How do the theories of Black language use inform these two texts?

Kepka, Jenn. “Critical Reading.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

Kepka frames critical reading as a way to identify the rhetorical features of a variety of media in order to evaluate credibility and make meaning. To accomplish this, she offers a checklist of questions to ask when reading critically. The author encourages students to consider the original source of a given material, that source’s impact on the piece, funding sources (and their implications), primary and secondary audience, purpose, and evidence in order to critically read. As many of the considerations included are also relevant to finding information for a works cited page, this reading would work well in Sequences 2 and 3 alongside discussions about citation/credibility of sources/information literacy/fake news.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Revisit the process of assessing rhetorical situations Caroll describes alongside this critical reading checklist. Where is there overlap? Where do critical reading and rhetorical analysis processes diverge?
• Kepka uses Beyonce’s Lemonade to illustrate the importance of finding the original source of a particular video. Design an in-class activity where students have to find the original source of videos that work well with your particular course theme. Alternatively, to underscore the importance of citation, provide students with a citation and have them locate the video source.
• Use newspapers, websites, or magazines. Look at their means of identifying with an audience and how this can be analyzed; contrast with the process of data-mining for facts.
• Compare writers’ differing responses to the same problem or issue. Practice analyzing claims based on qualitative or quantitative research: what an individual piece of evidence can show and when claims need to be qualified (limited).
• See these suggestions for assignments/activities on critical reading and information literacy.

Kepka, Jenn. “Providing Good Feedback.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

Kepka identifies the main steps of providing feedback as restating, praising, and criticizing. She focuses on what will be helpful to the writer, and provides a variety of easily-referenceable bulleted tips. This essay would work well as preparation for your first writing workshop in Sequence 1, and/or as a piece to re/visit for each workshop.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Pair with Kepka’s “Receiving Feedback” to get a sense of how effective workshop and peer-review is a reciprocal process.
• Encourage your students to reflect on and discuss past experiences with sharing writing and giving feedback.
• Review your class guidelines for workshop, or create them together in a document you can return to throughout the semester.
• Practice workshop with emphasis on listening and sharing. You might adapt this activity using one of your own papers from a past English class.
• Open up a conversation about what your students can expect from your feedback. At what points in the writing process will they receive feedback, and what kinds?

Kepka, Jenn. “Receiving Feedback.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

This brief piece underscores the benefit of building trust and collaborating with peers throughout the writing process. Kepka ends with insight on why students shouldn’t take negative feedback too personally. This essay would work well as preparation for your first writing workshop in Sequence 1, and/or as a piece to re/visit for each workshop.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Pair with Kepka’s “Providing Good Feedback” to get a sense of how effective workshop and peer-review is a reciprocal process.
• Kepka doesn’t include specific examples or tips in this essay–encourage your students to reflect on and discuss past experiences with sharing writing and receiving feedback.
• Review your class guidelines for workshop, or create them together in a document you can return to throughout the semester.
• Practice workshop with emphasis on listening and sharing. You might adapt this activity using one of your own papers from a past English class.
• Open up a conversation about how you expect your students to deal with feedback in the revision process (both your own, and their peer-to-peer feedback). When can they expect to receive feedback, and what kind?

Kepka, Jenn. “Transitions and Organization.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

This brief piece emphasizes the importance of transitions in orienting your reader. Kepka specifically discusses how transitions work at the level of essays, paragraphs, and sentences. In Sequences 1, 2, and 3, this reading would help support the process of revision.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• The author provides a couple of links to resources with lists of comparison words at the end. Encourage your students to explore those resources and incorporate transitions into their drafts.

Kepka, Jenn. “What is Revision?”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

In this essay, Kepka defines revision as re-seeing, and responds to three reasons that we “hate” revision: that it is time consuming, hard, and yields disappointing results. The author provides logical responses to these challenges: plan ahead, read as an outsider, and don’t expect perfection. Take advantage of this reading during the revision stage of Sequences 1, 2, or 3.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Since this piece largely emphasizes overcoming big mental obstacles to revision, be sure to pair with readings and/or discussions that offer specific strategies for revising as well (e.g., Kepka’s “Transitions and Organization,” Babin et al.’s “Developing Relationships between Ideas” or “Reverse Outlining,” etc.).
• Encourage students to reflect on and discuss their affective orientation to revision. To what extent can they relate to Kepka’s three reasons for hating revision? How does reading this piece impact the way they feel about revision?

Branson Koenig, What I Found in Standing Rock
Available here in the Box folder or at the Players Tribune website
[to come]

Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.”

Available here in the Box folder

Perennially popular in English 100, this essay can be implemented early on in your course while the ideas from the essay can and often do carry throughout. In this essay, Lamott shares her own insecurities with writing and the methods she’s cultivated to help her keep focus when writing. Lamott foregrounds the idea that writers often need to write their way into ideas which requires more than one draft. Further, writers should consider different goals among the various drafts (i.e. getting ideas on paper vs. polishing) while taking note of the different strategies Lamott uses for invention. This essay can also be very helpful for those taking a writing about writing approach to English 100, as it is deeply reflective about this writer’s practice.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Have students reflect on their writing practices before reading the essay. After reading, have them reflect again in light of the depth Lamott offers about her own writing practice. Students can create a metaphor for their writing practice or the various stages of drafting like Lamott does to try and make sense of how to focus their purpose throughout the stages of writing.
• Have a large group discussion about what students love about writing and what they hate about writing, what they find easy about writing and what they find hard about writing. Students are often surprised to hear how others perceive the difficulties of writing, breaking the stereotype that writing has to happen in isolation.

Lima, Natalie. “Snowbound”

Available here in the Box folder and at the Brevity website

Lima describes her experience going from her Latinx upbringing to attending the college of her dreams. Throughout her story she takes pride in her accomplishment, in coming from el barrio yet still making it to a “fancy school.” As she makes this transition, she comes to realize that despite her hard work and effort to fit in with her peers, she is still seen as being different with her peers even expressing their shock to finding out she’s “super smart.”

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Use this text to help students understand story as rhetorical as they prepare for Writing Project one.
• Have students work in small groups to identify which concept or concepts Lima is focusing on. What lines from her story demonstrate this? Students should focus on areas where the author uses descriptive language, detail, and other strategies of a “good story.”
• Freewriting activity: Have students take 5 minutes to write a story about their transition from their hometown to college. Who was/is part of their story? What did they feel? What thoughts did they experience? Be as descriptive as possible.
• Discussion question: What is Lima’s message and how does she present this effectively? Provide textual evidence.
• Reflection/Revision: Have students reflect on narrative writing and the importance and difference of showing vs telling. How does Lima demonstrate this in her text? What part of their WP1, can students revise to show rather than tell?

Lockett, Alexandria. “The Traditional Research Paper Is Best” (from Bad Ideas about Writing)
Available in the Bad Ideas about Writing textbook
[to come]

Mantyla, Nikki. “Memorability: 6 Keys for Success.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

Mantyla provides an opening anecdote about a particularly memorable bit in a Jerry Seinfeld standup show, before synthesizing the insights of the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. According to authors Chip and Dan Heath, memorable ideas are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Story-based (for an acronym of SUCCES), and Mantyla breaks these tenets down in the context of the introductory Seinfeld standup bit before making connections to student writers. This essay would work well in Sequence 1 to enrich discussions of the rhetorical situation, appeals, and rhetorical dimensions of narrative. You could also return to these tenets as appropriate throughout the semester.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Ask students to apply the SUCCES tenets to various rhetorical artifacts, memorable and not. Students could look at a favorite book, their narrative draft, a political or advertising campaign, or something else. Do all these tenets ring true to them? Are there other tenets that make these artifacts memorable (or not) to individual students?
• The focus on a comedy bit makes this essay potentially great for assignments geared at humor writing, public-audience content marketing and multimodal composition.

Mantyla, Nikki. “Movies Explain the World (Of Writing).”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

Mantyla analyzes rhetorical strategies of cinema to improve understanding of the following writing concepts: ideas, organization (here she includes a helpful storytelling chart describing sample intro, conflict, complications, epiphany, climax, and resolution for various genres), voice (viewpoint, personality, and tone), word choice (texture), sentence fluency (flow and building on ideas), and conventions (design, punctuation, clarity, and appeal). Many of the cinematic examples can get fairly abstract for our contexts, so the author also provides some illustrative writing samples from non-cinema sources.

Though the emphasis on cinema/storytelling organization may lend itself to a Sequence 1 narrative project, this piece is not aimed at a particular type of writing assignment, and all of these writing concepts could be potentially relevant to a variety of rhetorical situations throughout Sequences 2 and 3 as well. You could also enrich discussions of information literacy and the rhetorical nature of argument in Sequence 2 by using Mantyla’s discussion of a basic argument structure (claim, reason, evidence) not being enough depending on audience values.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Model Mantyla’s approach in this piece to design a customized lesson plan that uses video clips relevant to your course theme in order to enact some of these same lessons about writing concepts.

Toni Morrison, Nobel Talk
Available here in the Box folder
[to come]

Murray, Donald. “The Maker’s Eye: Revising Your Own Manuscripts.”

Available here in the Box folder

Murray’s essay teaches students how to become critics of their own work. With a focus on the drafting process, his discussion offers a commentary on the dual identity a student must hold as both writer and critic, striving for students to assess their work critically across the multiple drafts. Instead of tearing apart our work, Murray encourages writers to think constructively about what works in an essay and what doesn’t. He focuses his tips around themes like assessing information, audience, form, and dimension, among others. This essay can be very useful for students to read before introducing writing workshops and the methods used for peer review.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• This essay can be useful before discussing peer review and the role of the critic. After reading the essay, have students come to a shared agreement about what makes a good peer reviewer. After establishing these common beliefs, discuss how to read first for content and to understand and second to respond.

Noble, Safiya. “Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls.”

Available here in the Box folder and at the Time website

See “Exploring Algorithmic Bias” at CORA (Community of Online Research Assignments)
Algorithms dictate much of what we see online – whether we’re searching for something in google or scanning through our social media feeds. Algorithms are not neutral. This doesn’t mean they aren’t useful tools for research, but it helps to know their limitations and biases.
According to Safiya Umoja Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, “Search results reflect the values and norms of the search company’s commercial partners and advertisers and often reflect our lowest and most demeaning beliefs, because these ideas circulate so freely and so often that they are normalized and extremely profitable.” The article “Google has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls”
4-Minute video of Noble discussing her research on misrepresentation.

Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

To ensure clear meaning in writing, Orwell argues for composing with concrete images and simple language in place of abstract jargon and “ready-made phrases”, and provides a variety of examples of what he calls “bad” modern writing (be sure to note that this piece was written in 1946). He goes into detail on the negative repercussions of using dying metaphors, operators, pretentious diction, and meaningless words before discussing the way these language practices are wielded in politics to “make lies sound truthful.” You could place this reading in Sequence 1 to talk about the importance of concrete imagery in narrative, or to supplement a discussion of fake news/information literacy in Sequence 2. You could also use this reading to debunk notions of academic/jargon-filled writing as good writing and underscore the importance of rhetorical analysis: perhaps especially useful here is Orwell’s discussion of floating signifiers (words that have no universally agreed upon meaning) and how they can be intentionally used to appeal to a wide range of audiences with conflicting definitions/interpretations of the message.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• This essay could be useful to start a variety of conversations about the changing nature of the English language and the way those changes are tied to political rhetoric, thought, and power.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Lessons for Losing.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

In this essay, Pratt offers a brief meditation on “linguistic vulnerability:” the myriad ways language makes us vulnerable, but also the way languages themselves are vulnerable. This piece was mostly inspired by a 2014 keynote Pratt attended about the Cree language given by Cree Indian Tomson Highway. Ultimately, the author draws connections between losing the traditional ecological knowledge embedded in indigenous languages and “the environmental catastrophe of capitalism.” This essay could be used for a variety of purposes throughout the semester. Students could analyze the essay to find rhetorical strategies for writing about large 21st-century problems, for structure and strategies in relation to Sequence 3 (looking at source use or metaphors such as “imaginative quarantine”), and for considering ways of making an argument that embed narrative and personal experience of knowledge-making. The essay could also be used in Sequence 2 as an example of writing to inform that uses narrative.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• You can use this reading to spark a variety of discussions about dominant/non-dominant knowledge paradigms, multilingualism, language loss, language, and power.
• To extend a discussion about the topic of indigenous languages and traditional ecological knowledge in particular, you could assign this alongside some of the sources Pratt cites (e.g., Highway’s “The Place of Indigenous Voice in the Twenty-First Century” or the United Nation’s Endangered Languages website), Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (available as a free ebook via the Library), or excerpts from the two wonderful books The Tree of Meaning and Ecology of the Spoken Word, etc.
• Consider engaging with local efforts to preserve indigenous language (https://www.hoocak.org/) and traditional knowledge.

Reid, Shelley E. “Ten Ways To Think About Writing: Metaphoric Musings for College Writing Students.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

In this essay, Reid begins and ends by debunking the notion that writing is governed by a rigid set of unchanging rules in order to argue for writing as rhetorical–i.e., always dependent on the situation and context. The remaining eight points introduce ideas about writing through relatable metaphors in order to shed new light on a variety of commonly-held “rules” about writing: showing vs. telling, incorporating details, primary audience vs. secondary audiences, thesis statements, balancing argument and examples, paragraph length, annotating readings, and essay exam/timed writing strategies. This essay would be appropriate at any point in the semester, but might be most ideal in Sequence 1 when framing writing as rhetorical and teaching about narrative writing strategies. It could also be broken up into smaller segments and/or returned to as needed throughout the term; e.g., you could revisit the section about arguments and examples when drafting Sequence 3.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Utilize the discussion questions included at the end for homework or an in-class activity.
• To illustrate the “Show and Telepaths” idea, you could create an assignment that incorporates multimodal practice: encourage students to “pre-write” in Sequence 1 by recording an oral story, and then transcribe the recording to get a first draft.
• Adapt the “Little Green Ball” exercise Reid describes to an in-class activity aimed at underscoring the importance of specific details in writing. This could also connect to a lesson on principles of effective peer review feedback.

Remigio Ortega, Guadalupe “The Environmental Injustices of Forced Migration”

Available here at the Edge Effects website

In this essay, the author makes an argument regarding environmental injustices impacting Mexican indigenous communities, in this case, the Mixtec and how has greatly influenced the forced migration of this group in recent years. Using personal narrative and online sources as evidence, the author creates an informed essay that starts from the personal and continues by making connections to others.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Use the questions for Short Assignment 4: Analysis Essay and have students practice analyzing this essay in a discussion board.
• Use this text as an example to help students use their own experiences (from sequence 1) to focus on a topic that matters to them (for sequence 2).
• Use the reading strategies from Reading Games and have students practice reading rhetorically. You can have students work in small groups (discussion board). Use what students come up with as a guide to continue class discussion research and rhetorical analysis.

Roberts-Miller, Patricia. “Rhetoric is Synonymous with Empty Speech”

Available here in the Box folder and in the Bad Ideas about Writing textbook

Patricia Roberts-Miller is formerly Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas, Austin. She maintains a blog that considers rhetoric in contemporary culture (https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com).

This short essay takes up the popular misconception of rhetoric in its pejorative usage in contemporary culture though this negative attribute has a long history, dating back to classical Greece when rhetoric as a practice of persuasive speech was sometimes cast in opposition to the discovery of Truth. As Miller describes the Greek origins of rhetoric, she points to the different and sometimes contradictory understanding and definitions of rhetoric. She does seem to favor Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric as “a discipline and a skill that enables you to see the available means of persuasion” that could help one discover Truth by analyzing arguments or developing a system of deliberation. To analyze an argument is to understand what appeals are being used, how it is arranged and organized, what the arguments for or against might be, and how style or language may shape one’s understanding and reception.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Ask students to generate a list of what they think “rhetoric” is or how they have heard it used
• Use Roberts-Miller’s essay to develop a working definition of rhetoric
• Have students find examples of “good” or “bad” rhetoric—rhetoric that is persuasive toward developing understanding/discovering Truth (whatever that is) vs. rhetoric that is attempting to manipulate opinion or an outcome through “negative” appeals.
• Have students think about what it means to use rhetoric as a means for analysis and deliberation vs. using rhetoric as a means for manipulating words and meanings.

Rodriguez, Leave Yourself Out of Your Writing (from Bad Ideas about Writing)
Available in the Bad Ideas about Writing textbook
[to come]

Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

Rosenberg encourages students to identify a reading’s intended audience and the reason it was assigned (thereby making reading a social process), and discusses a variety of things to focus on while reading to find a piece’s argument (i.e., the basics of skimming: title, abstract, intro, section subheadings, conclusion). This essay differs from Caroll’s piece and Kepka’s “Critical Reading” in that it has more of a focus on working through and retaining information from assigned scholarly readings, rather than working toward rhetorical analysis or evaluating a source one might come across on a social media feed. In Sequences 2 and 3, the essay could work to demystify the process of scholarly research.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Utilize the discussion questions included at the end for homework or an in-class activity.
• If you get the sense that students might be struggling with particular readings you are assigning, it could be helpful to apply Rosenberg’s advice to a reading as an in-class activity.
• Encourage students to think/pair/share about their past experiences reading for classes. Open up a dialogue with students about assigned readings in your class: what are the various purposes you have for assigning reading? How should they approach texts? What about recommended readings?
• Utilize the discussion questions included at the end for homework or an in-class activity.

Stanford, Marlena and Justin Jory. “So You Wanna be an Engineer, a Welder, a Teacher? Academic Disciplines and Professional Literacies.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

This essay emphasizes the long-term importance of the critical reading and writing skills acquired in college, across all future careers and disciplines. This essay’s emphasis on the big picture and forward-looking tone might work nicely to open or close the semester. It could be useful in Sequence 1 to help students think through their professional goals and how to best work towards them in the context of English 100. At the end of the semester, you might offer it as an example of reflection.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Encourage your students to break down what the authors mean by “savviness” in this essay. Are there particular strategies for building this type of savviness to leverage future professional opportunities?
• You could also use this reading to open up a conversation about the various discourse communities students belong to and code-switching/code-meshing among those communities.
• This essay ends with a video interview that shows professional literacies in action through a conversation with Michelle, a “Renaissance woman” and computer science major. You could design a multimodal interview assignment that uses this video as a model.

Stedman, Kyle. “Annoying Ways People Use Sources.”

Available here in the E100 Course Reader

Through a variety of metaphors and student samples, Stedman describes and offers advice on fixing the “annoying” problems of dropped quotes, starting/ending paragraphs with quotations, using too many quotes in a row, failure to grammatically integrate quotes, failure to match works cited to parenthetical, and unclear connection between cited source and source information. This essay would work well in the drafting stage of Sequences 2 and 3, when students are working on integrating researched source material into their essays. It would also complement a lesson on citation style.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Utilize the discussion questions included at the end for homework or an in-class activity.
• Could pair with something like “sandwich quotation project,” or another exercise designed to provide positive source integration guidelines and allow students the opportunity to practice them. (Note: this particular worksheet does not include instruction or practice on citation.)
• Use this reading to open up a dialogue about the framing of “annoying” source use. Are there other reasons, besides avoiding potentially annoying your reader, that you might want to use sources effectively? How does the word “annoying” impact this essay’s tone?

Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue.”

Available here in the Box folder

Tan’s essay is powerful for building a greater awareness for different variations of “standard” English(es). By deconstructing the concept of “standard,” Tan underscores the perceived binary between standard and non-standard uses of English. In drawing upon her own background, Tan shares a narrative that reveals the power dynamics rooted in standard English use and how those ideas circulate politically, globally, and culturally. This essay also offers students a starting point to consider how language impacts our worldview and can be helpful as a model for the Sequence 1 narrative assignment.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Have students freewrite a definition of standard English. Describe a situation when you may have used standard or non-standard English. Where were you? Who were you with? Did anyone comment on your language use? How and why was it contextually relevant?
• Use the rhetorical situation to understand purpose, context, and audience. What argument is Tan attempting to make?
• Have a larger group discussion about how accent and language use affect perception and identity.

Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English?”

Available here in the Box folder and at the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies site

Young’s essay is an important contribution to conversations about “academic writing,” correctness, power, and bias. Young responds to Stanley Fish, who argues for the teaching of “standard language” in order to protect the status quo, and so students with “non-standard” dialects are not left “vulnerable to prejudice.” Young argues that this encourages “code switching,” and what we should be encouraging is code-meshing.

While the power of this essay is in the specificity of African American language practices, it also raises broader questions about language and power and how language may often function as a proxy to make judgements about social class, regional identity, race, indigeneity, and ethnicity, national identity, or other identity categories where language serves to draw distinctions and mark insider/outsider status.

Additional Teaching Tips & Ideas

• Encourage students to review “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!” from the Conference on College Composition & Communication (CCCC), July 2020 alongside this essay
• The essay by June Jordan is scheduled later in the calendar but there’s a clear connection between the two pieces. You may want to read the Jordan piece for yourself to think about how the Young piece can set up what you might address later with Jordan.
• Possible reading/discussion questions for students:
  While reviewing and annotating this essay, think about the following questions, jotting notes in the margins:
  • What is a dialect? What dialect does Young write this piece in?
  • What is “code meshing”?
  • How is it different from the idea of “code switching,” and why is this difference meaningful?
  • In what ways do you “code switch” and “code mesh?”
  • Do you think a main function of college classrooms should be to teach “standard english?”
  • When have you faced bias or discrimination or injury because of the way you talked, wrote, or used language? The bias or discrimination may have been in slight ways or in more overt ways. For example, how did you feel if you were corrected for word choice or grammar, or criticized for writing like you text?