This handout includes a range of writing assignments and activities you can ask students to complete in your course in order to promote their learning. Many of these assignments can have high stakes or low stakes versions. See the “High Stakes and Low Stakes Writing Assignments” handout for moreinformation.

This guide articulates University Writing's practices for accessibility and inclusivity. We use this guide for internal training within our program.

This resource provides detailed information on how to cite and write in APA style. Writers will learn how to organize their work and develop in-text and formal reference lists according to APA.

When working on longer or more important writing projects, writers often face many of the same issues commonly discussed in connection with writer’s block: information, order, insight, and need. These, combined with the pressures we feel about now having to write texts that are not only longer but also higher stakes projects, often make projects seem overly intimidating. From the very beginning of your work on a thesis, article, dissertation, or book project, you must take steps to minimize the issues that would slow you down or prevent you from finishing.

As teachers, we ask students to reflect so that they can practice critical thinking, see connections between different learning experiences, and synthesize information with their future or professional goals. Reflective writing fosters students’ awareness of their habits of thinking and helps them to develop and solidify productive ways of approaching problems. Students experiencing labs might be able to describe what they are seeing, but they need guidance from more experienced scientific professionals to reflect on lab experiences.

This handout presents two sample writing assignments aimed at evaluating the students’ prior knowledge belonging to a particular area.

This worksheet will help you reflect and self-assess a personal statement draft to consider opportunities for revision.

These questions are meant to help you brainstorm before drafting your personal statement.Importantly, a personal statement needs to tell a clear, concise personal story. You do not just want to transfer your response to these questions to a document as a first draft. Rather, you will need to refine and explore these questions in preparation of developing a first draft. At the bottom of this document are suggestions for seeking out feedback on your drafts.

This handout helps writers create accessible Word and PDF documents with an emphasis on visibility, audibility, and mobility.

Personal Brand: the representation of your work (research, service, teaching, professional products) in the form of a coherent message about who you are, what you do, and what you value. This worksheet will help you begin developing your personal brand statement.

A says/does outline can help you understand not only what writers say but also why and how they say it. For each paragraph, begin by summarizing what the author says: What is the main point of the paragraph? Then describe what the paragraph does: What purpose does the paragraph serve in the larger argument? This tool pairs nicely with marking up the text.

You will be more productive if writing becomes an important and regular part of your routine. Rather than fitting writing in around everything else in your life, schedule your writing time just like you schedule the rest of your work.

Critical Thinking through Reflection’ focuses on evidence of critical thinking (analysis, synthesis, evaluation, creation) as it exists in within artifacts, arrangement, and reflective writing and across the ePortfolio as a whole. The following table enlists a rubric for evaluation of the aforementioned three aspects of the ePortfolio (i.e. artifacts, arrangement, and reflective writing) and details the characteristics of each aspect from a beginner to a professional level.

This handout breaks down tips for improving your descriptive writing and provides examples and explanations for each suggestion.

This handout introduces you to four principles for visual design: contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity.

Scientific posters are a tool for communicating your researchand explaining why it matters to a particular audience. What makes a scientific poster effective relies on your audience, discipline, and professional context. You’ll want to consider who is viewing your poster.

Scientific posters are a tool for communicating your researchand explaining why it matters to a particular audience. What makes a scientific poster effective relies on your audience, discipline, and professional context. You’ll want to consider who is viewing your poster.

This handout will help you decide the best way to visually represent your data.

This handout introduces the idea of plagiarism and its various types. Further, it recommends strategies to faculty on how plagiarism can be avoided by using techniques such as timely peer review, feedback, and effective paraphrasing.

This handout provides an overview of different kinds of rubrics you might want to use, as well as ways of describing performance levels. It also includes advice for developing a successful rubric.

This handout provides an overview of different kinds of rubrics you might want to use, as well as ways of describing performance levels. It also includes advice for developing a successful rubric.

During our first workshop, you learned about transparent assignment design. In brief, we discussed assignments that name the purpose (skills practiced, knowledge gained), the task (what students will do and steps to accomplish it), and the criteria for success (a checklist or rubric). During our second workshop, you learned about reflective writing, a tool for helping students make sense of their learning experience through description, connection, prediction/application, critique/analysis, and condensing for external audiences.

This brief handout provides an explanation of what dialogue is and how it is formatted and provides space for practice.

A high-impact writing assignment will target difficult concepts, sometimes called “sticky” concepts or, in technical terms, threshold concepts. Think about an especially important element of your course that is typically difficult for students to learn—but that they generally must learn in order to succeed in the course and move forward in the discipline. For example, economists might talk about opportunity cost; biologists might talk about drivers of evolution; literary critics might talk about close reading; and historians might talk about constructed historical narratives.

This handout will help you think through the process of converting an online multiple choice test into a writing assignment.

Informed by scholarship in writing studies and teaching and learning, this handout describes features faculty may want to consider when developing effective writing assignments. The principles here may be used for courses at all levels and applied to high-stakes, semester-long projects as well as low-stakes, writing-to-learn activities. Regardless of the writing task, all writing assignments should be framed around an open question or interesting problem with multiple possible answers, solutions, or interpretations — not a single predetermined answer (see Bean 2011).

This quick checklist is an easy reference as you are preparing professional emails.

This worksheet will help you consider the rhetorical situation as you draft a mock professional email.

This worksheet includes four abstracts that were accepted to the 2018 This is Research symposium. Read through each one, and use the markers at your table to underline each part of the abstract, according to the features we’ve discussed so far: use black for the introduction, blue for the relevance, red for the problem, purple for the methods, orange for the results, and green for the implications.

Below are three example reflective writing assignments from different disciplines, each fostering a different learning goal related to reflective practice.

Expressive writing involves writing down current thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, insights, gratitudes, and more. It is writing without regard for typical writing conventions, such as sentence flow or organization. This type of writing involves being in touch with the present moment, focusing on yourself.

What is expressive writing? Expressive writing involves writing down current thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, insights, gratitudes, and more. It is writing without regard for typical writing conventions, such as sentence flow or organization. This type of writing involves being in touch with the present moment, focusing on yourself.

Why use expressive writing? Research has shown that expressive writing helps to manage anxieties, reduce stress, and cope with depression or life events. This technique is helpful as it allows you to externalize your thoughts and stressors, not carrying them around. This allows individuals to separate themselves from their problems. Often times, this helps to view the environment different or solve problems.

Once you have completed a draft of your ePortfolio, this worksheet can help you get feedback from professors, mentors, supervisors, family members, or peers.

This worksheet introduces you to premise, provides a breakdown of premise components, and helps you draft your own premise.

This worksheet helps you analyze an example literature review to identify the storytelling elements being used.

This brief handout lists good habits for finishing your project and outlines tips and resources to aid you in revising your first draft.

This handout introduces you to the six Rs of reflection: reporting, responding, relating, reasoning, reconstructing, and repackaging. Bain, J., Ballantyne, R., Mills, C. & Lester, N. (2002) labeled these levels with the mnemonic “5 Rs of reflection.” We have added a sixth level to this framework to account for the way reflection moves into other genres, such as an ePortfolio or personal narrative.

Once you have a draft, this worksheet will help you peer review or self-assess your open response sections to identify potential areas for revision.

In addition to the formal written documents, Fulbright applicants have to complete three open response prompts: the abstract, host country engagement, and plans upon return. This handout provides an overview for these open responses and prompts to help you begin drafting them.