Welcome to Locally Sourced, a UW-Madison Pressbook by the Writing Across the Curriculum program designed to support faculty, instructional staff, and graduate teaching assistants who teach Comm-B courses and sections. We hope this book will inspire you to design writing assignments, activities, and grading criteria in meaningful, inclusive, and intentional ways. If you have taught Comm-B before, perhaps you will consider modifying current assignments or adding high-impact practices such as opportunities for peer review or low-stakes writing activities into your repertoire.

As the Comm-B general education requirement states, writing (and other forms of communication) are crucial skills for students to develop in any major field of study. We hope that, in teaching Comm-B, you will discover that incorporating writing activities and assignments can be a powerful way to make your course more inclusive and accessible for students in all your courses. Research makes it clear that opportunities to engage with well-designed, carefully scaffolded, and equitably assessed writing assignments can empower all students in a course to succeed. The goal of this book is to offer you evidence-based suggestions and strategies for incorporating writing in effective and inclusive ways.

Here’s a bit about how to use this digital text:

• Within each section of this Pressbook you will find explanations and advice for implementing specific writing activities and, at the section’s end, practical and replicable examples of assignments and activities created by faculty and instructors from UW-Madison.
• The Table of Contents is on the left of each page, and you can navigate to any section in the book by using the Contents menu.
• To navigate between pages in a particular section, click on the desired page in the Contents menu, or use the arrow at the bottom right to move to the next page.

Please feel free to contact us to schedule a consultation on teaching with writing. We hope to hear from you!

Sincerely,

The WAC Team