In addition to the guidelines offered above, here are some additional guidelines that will help WIP faculty and teaching assistants design successful writing assignments.
The key questions to ask from the start: What are my learning goals in this course? How can I use writing assignments to achieve them? What are the kinds and forms of writing that are essential in my discipline?
Recognize the different purposes of different kinds of writing tasks—writing to learn and writing to present learning tasks, or in the words of composition scholar Peter Elbow, the difference between “low stakes” and “high stakes” writing.
The simple distinction asks instructors to think about “how much a piece of writing matters or counts” in a particular situation and how it contributes to the learning process. Low stakes writing assignments aim “to get students to think, learn, and understand more of the course material” without penalizing them for making errors that would count in high stakes writing situations. Often informal, low stakes assignments are described and judged differently from high stakes writing, which is the end result of the writing process. High stakes writing, whichpresents learning more formally, is evaluated more formally.
Students benefit from both low stakes and high stakes writing assignments. Writing process pedagogy says that students’ high stakes writing will improve 1) if we assign low stakes writing and allow it to be revised before demanding high stakes writing, and 2) if we are involved in the process of helping students produce high stakes writing. Effective WIP assignments provide opportunities for writing to discover, capture, record, or respond informally and opportunities to elaborate, revise, and refine work into a more formal product.
If the writing assignment is a high stakes one, stage the assignment, building in several opportunities for helpful feedback, conferencing, and revision.
For example, require that the student first submit planning materials—such as a working thesis, a tentative outline of major points, or an annotated bibliography; later, require the student to submit a rough draft to which you and the WIP TA will respond with useful strategies for revision—global, at first; a second—and even third—draft will allow you to respond to more local concerns, such as grammar, punctuation, and usage issues, before the student hands in the final product.
Teach discipline-specific models, formats, conventions.
Along with teaching the writing process, teaching students to write meansteaching the writing conventions of a discipline: how to think, how to argue, how to write as scientists, sociologists, or music historians. Judith A. Langer’s “Speaking of Knowing” emphasizes that “writing (and the thinking that accompanies it) then becomes a primary and a necessary vehicle for practicing the ways of organizing and presenting ideas that are most appropriate to a particular subject area ” (71). This requires faculty to state explicitly the often tacitly held “rules of argument and evidence that represent the ways of thinking unique to each discipline” (83).
Avoid the tendency to attempt too much.
Two sequenced writing assignments with guidance and feedback in planning, drafting, and revising, for example, give students greater learning benefits than turning in a 20-page paper at the end of a course. Teaching with writing requires working smarter, not necessary harder.