Early-stage Conference
Purpose: These strategies are intended to help facilitate the early-stage conference; they particularly focus on invention, outlining,...
Conducting Group Conferences
Purpose: Sometimes you might want to try conducting group conferences with two or more students. This can make the conference week—which...
Title Awards
Affiliated Project: Project 2, especially as a research paper; also works for Project 1 essays. Purpose of Exercise: This activity...
Changing Voices: The Helpful and Unhelpful Voices in Our Heads
Purpose: This exercise should be helpful when students are feeling stuck in the middle of their writing (and semester) and lack any fresh...
Brain Teaser: Voice Without Word Choice
Purpose of Exercise: This exercise fosters creative thinking in descriptions, development of voice, and playing effectively with sarcasm....
Audience and Voice Exercise
Purpose of Exercise: This exercise raises awareness of rhetorical situation and audience when developing voice. Works well with the...
Peanut Butter Jelly Time
Purpose of Exercise: To show students how they might consider audience in how they choose to write. Also, to help students see how...
Hook Me In! (or: How to Be Specifically Indirect)
Purpose of the Exercise: Students learn about the benefits of drawing a verbal picture in the first paragraph of a composition....
Abstract Shapes: The Importance of Visual Description
Purpose of Exercise: This exercise shows students the complex relationship between an object and the language we use to describe it....
Repainting Starry Night: Visual/Textual Remediation and Analysis
Purpose of Exercise: Allows the students to look critically and interpretively at visual images as well as practicing close reading of...