Producing a piece of writing you are proud is hard. It often requires the use of multiple skills and a lot of time, elements a lot of first-year students don’t necessarily have (especially time!). As such, you might consider how you can design assignments so that students produce twenty pages of writing and practice different kinds of writing and thinking skills important to your discipline.

This page contains various types of writing assignments and design ideas including assignment sheets created by FYS instructors in the past. Take a look and be inspired!

Low Stakes Writing Assignments

>> Asking your students to sign up for a week where they are responsible for taking and posting Class Notes is a great way to allow students to practice their summary and reporting skills for the sake of the class as a whole. You can make it clear that rather than make an argument or respond to materials, students only have to practice one cognitive task: summary.

>> Moodle forums are a great way to get students writing regularly without too much evaluative pressure. Because Moodle forums are public to the class, students also learn how to write for real readers (their classmates). A great way to use Moodle forums is to require a certain amount of posts and responses to posts as part of participation.

>> Consider telling students to attend Bonus Events related to the course’s subject matter. Students must attend the event and submit a one-page response paper where they summarize the content of the event and offer a response, noting how the event relates to course materials.

>> Bi/weekly private “Writer’s Journals” on Moodle where students reflect on what they learned during the week. Ask students to write for 15 minutes and make the journals P/F based on completion. Weekly journals develop metacognition and writing fluency by requiring regular, low-stakes reflective writing, get every student to share their learning experience without class dynamics interfering in participation, and, perhaps best of all, they are a great mechanism for seeing how students engage with your course in real time.

In-Class Writing Activities

>> Ask students to draw their writing process. This is a great ice breaker activity. Moreover, you can save these drawings and hand them back out at the end of class to see if their process changed based on your course.

>> Have an assignment coming up? Notice your students are a big sluggish? Have students do flash writing. Come up with 3-5 questions and give students 1 minute to write whatever comes to mind for each question. At the end, students will have a good amount of ‘first thoughts’ written to start class discussion or brainstorming their papers. Great for writing anxiety and procrastination.

>> Want students to think about word choice and creativity? Give students a noun (something general like tree, ocean, desk, pen OR something specific to your course materials). Have them mention all the words they would use to describe the noun chosen. Put those words on the board/screen. When students have exhausted their list, ask them to write about the noun without using any of the words on the board/screen. This makes students think of creative and unusual ways to describe mundane objects. The class can vote on their favorites at the end.

>> Are your students struggling to incorporate textual evidence? Have them work on a shared google sheet that scaffolds the integration of evidence process. They will find quotes and key terms, put them in their own words, and begin to explain why they find these passages significant. Working on a shared sheet allows students to work together to find interesting and important passages from readings, building community and continuing discussion in a more formatted way.

>> Brainstorming together can be as simply as asking the class to discuss possible topics for the next paper. For example, for a research paper you might ask: (1) What are some of the research topics you’ve covered in class? (2) What are some of the research questions course materials have taken up? (3) What are some topics you’ve discussed but would like to learn more about? Each group and put up answers on the board and add to at least one other idea by extending it, posing a question, or bringing up a different source that might complicate the one written on the board.

>> Request a Writing Workshop Ambassador Visit. In only 10 minutes, your students will be introduced to a workshop tutor, various writing support services on campus, and the scheduling system for one-on-one appointments. If you’re interested check out the Faculty Resource Page for the Shapiro Center for Writing or contact Lauren Silber at lsilber@wesleyan.edu.

>> Show students the “Feeling Stuck” video created by Wesleyan workshop tutors and ask them to practice one technique from the video.

Assignments for Revision

>> If you don’t want to read student drafts, consider assigning Revision Reflections for each formal writing assignment. Students will submit a short (300-500 word) explanation of their writing process and the choices they made when producing their essay that you can grade P/F based on completion.

>> In a fast-paced FYS, it can be hard to fit in days focused on revision. If this is the case for your class, you might consider offering students the opportunity to revise their essays for credit. For example, allow students to revise their essays for an automatic grade increase (perhaps 1/3 of a letter grade). They should submit the revised draft with an explanation of what they changed (think: cover letter for a revise and resubmit). Making the revision a set increase saves the time of grading and does not penalize students for trying to revise and not quite getting it right.

>> Ask students to Respond to Feedback. Many students struggle to integrate feedback from one essay assignment to the next (let alone from one course to the next!). Consider assigning students this precise task. Ask them to compose a response to the instructor about their evaluation of their writing. Students can (1) summarize the feedback they received on their writing (2) cite specific comments/ideas they want to dive deeper into (3) explain how these specific moments made them think about the essay they submitted and their future writing projects. The assignment can be 5% of their total grade or more depending on how many times you ask them to do this. Making it P/F will also make it less time consuming for you to evaluate.

Process Oriented Assignments

>> Unlike writing assignments that focus on the product, writing portfolios ask students to illustrate their entire writing process. As such, students submit a portfolio of work along with their polished final product. This means they submit brainstorming materials, drafts, comments received from others, revision reflections, self evaluations, and possibly more. Students earn points for the portfolio materials as well as for their polished product (perhaps 50% of points are P/F for illustrating their process and 50% of the points go towards the grade received on the final product).

>> Try assigning a final reflective essay where students describes their learning journey in your course. Let your student be the insider, here, letting you see the course from their perspective.

>> Generative reading and writing assignment helps students read with intention and a mind towards writing a thesis-driven essay.

>> Ask students to construct visual representations of the structures of literary narratives. The assignment is meant to be generative as it introduces students to a method of analysis. In this way, it gets students to be in the process of developing an argument before making an argument in an essay.

Formal Assignments

>> Assigning short response papers helps students practice writing skills while also making sure they are absorbing the content material of the course.

>> When assigning more traditional, formal writing assignments, consider breaking the task into parts and scaffolding the assignment. For example, you might assign a 10-15 page research paper that students work on throughout the course (or the latter half of the course). You can assign them specific tasks like: (1) a project proposal (2) annotated bibliography (3) outline (4) section where sources are integrated (5) a draft of the full essay (6) a polished draft. Each element you assign should receive feedback from you or their classmates and also should earn them points. For example, perhaps the project proposal is P/F, but 5% of their total grade, as is their annotated bibliography and outline.

>> Prof. Weiner has three different ways of scaffolding essay assignments. Check out her two-part, three-part, and four-part assignments below

>> Prof. Silber’s scaffolded close reading assignments for literature and cultural studies FYS courses.

>> Prof. Utkin’s assignment for a response paper

>> Prof. McCann’s prompt for a short (4-page) response paper

>> Prof. Taylor’s prompt and rubric for “Chemistry in Your Life” Podcast Assignment