Writing Better Writing Assignments

Abstract

Although most instructors care deeply about student writing, they often give little attention to the part of the writing process over which they maintain complete control: the assignment itself. Yet, the written prompt that we distribute is often where student confusion (and confused writing) begins. Using Bloom's taxonomy as inspiration, we off er instructors a typology directly linked to course objectives, which we believe can be readily understood by student writers. aculty members care deeply about student writing and turn a critical eye to their syllabus, lesson plans, and teaching style in an eff ort to improve it (Beyer, Taylor, and Gilmore 2013). However, they do not often directly examine the part of the assessment process over which they maintain complete control and on which they rarely receive feedback: the formatting of assignments. We argue that the intent, structure, and wording of a prompt all help promote or impede student learning. In response, we developed a typology of assignment objectives as well as a series of suggestions for structuring and wording prompts. We review each in turn. Allison Rank will be an assistant professor at SUNY Oswego inIn the past three decades, numerous authors have bemoaned the lowered quality of writing on college campuses. The fi rst response was the development of writing centers, with which we have personal experience: we were both directors of a social science writing center at a large public research university. 1 The observations and suggestions in this article draw on our experiences and our challenges as we began to teach our own classes and develop our own writing assignments. Serving as graduate-student directors of a political science writing center exposed us to prompts from a variety of subfi elds and course levels. This provided the opportunity to think more deeply about how the wording and structure of writing assignments had an impact on student writing.The second response to concerns about student writing was a push to develop curriculum that more fully incorporates writing into course structures. Scholars off er a number of suggestions for how to best accomplish this second goal. First, evaluation measures, including exams and longer paper assignments, should be linked directly to the overall learning objectives of the course. Rather than treating writing assignments as a way to measure content mastery, they should be conceptualized along with learning objectives. In Writing in the Academic Disciplines, David R. Russell observes that the shift to mass education and the development of specifi c disciplines created "specialized text-based discourse communities, highly embedded in the diff erentiated practices of those communities," within which "knowledge and its expression could be conceived of as separate activities" (Russell 2002, 5). Instructors' eff orts to couple "knowledge and its expression" in their courses are exemplifi ed in the course-design process at McGill University. As they begin to outline courses, instructors are encouraged to c...