Tips and Tactics

Getting Started

• Have your students fill out a brief questionnaire at the beginning of the term. Among other questions, ask about their views on writing, e.g., what are your greatest strengths and most glaring weaknesses as a writer?
• Make your expectations clear. Students appreciate it when your expectations are transparent. Note that it's not enough to state your expectations once, on the syllabus, and leave it at that. Students need to hear often what you expect from them. They also appreciate understanding the aims of specific assignments and the reasons for particular course readings. Don't take it for granted that they understand your methods and aims.
• Consider preparing a short document on the elements of paper organization that you consider most essential. Although you could instead just point your students to a respected handbook, giving them your own document allows them to focus on the issues that you consider most important.
• Start by assigning a brief (1-2 page) piece of writing, e.g., a personal observation or a response to a short reading. Then assign two or three expository papers before assigning the longer, more substantial papers. The first paper will give you an idea of how your students write. The next two or three papers will give your students practice in academic writing.
• Don't be afraid to have your students work on more than one paper at a time. They could be working on the final version of a paper at the same time as they are writing the initial draft of another paper.

Handling Course Readings

• Limit your course readings so that students can think more deeply on a few texts. Remember: they'll be spending considerable time writing and revising. If you require too much reading, your students won't have time to write their papers.
• To distribute readings that the students don't purchase, scan them to a PDF file (many on-campus copiers, including the one in the Writing Program office can do this for you) and then put the PDF onto your Blackboard site. It's free, it saves trees, and if a student does want a hardcopy of the reading it's at his or her own expense.

Commenting on Student Papers

• When writing end comments, don't actually write them by hand onto each student's paper. Instead, create a document on your laptop containing the end comments for each student. Start each student's end comments on a new page. Advantages:

  • Most of us can type faster than we can write by hand.
  • No crossouts!
  • Unless you are a calligrapher, typed text will be more legible than your handwriting.
  • When you have the same, or similar, comments to make to several students, you can copy and paste.
  • If a thought about a paper you read earlier strikes you while reading a later paper, you can easily go back and modify the end comment of the earlier paper, with the student being none the wiser.

   

• If students submit their papers as electronic Word documents, use Word's "Track Changes" feature to type in margin comments. Another option when you have an electronic copy is to insert your comments directly into the text but highlight them in a different color.

• If you find yourself making the same small-scale comments repeatedly (for example, if your student writes "try and" instead of "try to"), consider making a list of your usage rules, numbering them, and giving the students a copy. That way, when a student makes one of these errors, you don't have to write that "'try' takes the infinitive"; instead you can just write "rule 14." Include your own pet peeves in the list. In the list of rules you hand out, you'll probably want to include some elaboration with each rule, but you should make yourself a numbered list of the rules without the elaborations so that it's easy for you to look up each rule number.

Getting Support

• If you want to talk about any aspect of teaching writing—from syllabus and assignment design to teaching style—contact either Christiane Donahue, Director of the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, or Karen Gocsik, Executive Director of the Writing and Rhetoric Program.
• Attend our professional development workshops, held in DCAL. For our current schedule, please see Workshops and Other Events.
• Use a Writing Assistant. For more information see About the Writing Support Services and contact Stephanie Boone Director of Student Writing Support.
• Recommend that your students visit RWIT, the Student Center for Research Writing and Information Technology.