1. Have students write regularly and frequently.
Frequent writing helps to break down students’ writing inhibitions and make them more comfortable in
expressing their ideas in written words. Don’t worry: You don’t have to grade every writing assignment.
You might simply scan some of these assignments.
2. Focus less on mechanics than on the thinking and writing skills central to your discipline.
Your job is not to teach the basic mechanics of writing. By the time your students reach you, they will
already have had a great deal of instruction in grammar, syntax, word choice, organization, and other
aspects of writing. If they continue to have problems with mechanics, let specialists, in the Writing Center,
help them.
3. Stress the “pre-writing” process.
“Pre-writing” is the process through which a writer asks questions of the material and devises (or
brainstorms) strategies for analyzing the material. You might ask the students to summarize a particular
reader’s argument or describe a debate within the scholarship or formulate a thesis or draft a compelling
introduction to a topic. Pre-writing is a great way to overcome writer’s anxiety and get ideas flowing.
4. Vary the assignment’s purpose and audience.
Students write best when they have a clear sense of the purpose of the writing and of their audience. You
mightaAsk your students to write for an audience other than you. For example, in a Political Science course, you might ask them to write a memorandum to a political campaign or a brief to the Supreme
Court.
5. Tailor your assignments to the skills and conventions of your discipline.
In the social sciences, for example, students must evaluate quantitative data and critically evaluate
methodologies and distinguish between correlation and causation. Therefore, you might give your students
an assignment in which they must analyze a data set, evaluate a methodological approach, or assess
whether a correlation is spurious or causal.
6. Build assignments around focused “prompts.”
A common mistake in disciplinary-based writing is to give assignments that are too vague and unfocused.
Instead, consider build your assignment around a specific disciplinary skill. For instance, in a History
course this might involve weighing evidence or evaluating conflicting interpretations of a particular
historical event.
7. Integrate peer review into your class.
That doesn’t necessarily mean asking students to grade other students’ written work. It might involve
having the entire class discuss anonymous excerpts from students’ writing or having a small group of
students review the literature on a topic and draft a hypothesis.
8. Create sequential assignments that build on one another.
Each assignment should add a layer of complexity or broaden the range of students’ writing experiences.
For instance, you might ask students to begin by writing a literature review. Then you might ask them to
critique the literature, and then craft a thesis of their own.
9. Focus your criticism.
Instead of asking a student to correct all the errors in a paper, focus on the most glaring. Identify a
particular problem before moving on to other difficulties.