Resources for Teaching Writing
This series of pages was designed to support faculty teaching Writing Skills courses as well as those teaching courses where writing is central to learning. While each page can serve as a guide for a specific stage in the lifecycle of a course—beginning with planning your reading list and ending with grading your students’ papers—take whichever tips or tools feel most pertinent to your class based on your own experience teaching writing. In other words, dip in and out as you like, and reach out to the Writing Center with any questions.
Reading to Write
One of the goals of a Writing Skills course is to help students become more sophisticated writers. The best way to support them on this journey is to provide a reading list full of sophisticated writing. Read more…
Writing to Learn
Writing Skills classes will benefit from a scaffolded approach in which the course progresses with short, low-stakes writing assignments that build to a full paper assignment. Read more…
Effective Essay Prompts
Good writing prompts start with a clear answer to the question: why do we ask students to write? The answer may change depending on the type of class you’re teaching, but certainly one goal for faculty teaching Writing Skills classes is to help students become more sophisticated writers. Read more…
Writing Groups and Workshops
Many Writing Skills classes benefit from taking a page from the creative writing class structure. Read more…
Providing Feedback on Drafts
Faculty comments on student drafts are central to teaching a Writing Skills course. You are able to reinforce and revisit techniques and strategies you’ve introduced in class, but now specifically tailored to the student’s work. Read more…
Criteria for Reviewing Student Writing
Through a series of workshops and assessments of student writing starting in the summer of 2021, the Writing Center partnered with faculty to build a set of criteria to clarify the language set forth in the catalog about the goals of Writing Skills courses. Read more…