Module 3: Creating Assignments

Module 3: How to Create Effective Writing Assignments

In 2009, the Writing Program Administrators (WPA) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) published their extensive examination of students’ experiences of writing in college. They discovered that students’ most valued writing experiences shared three features:

1. Clear expectations about the assignment in terms of its purpose, format, and the criteria by which it is to be assessed;
2. Interactive components in which students received feedback on ideas, plans, and drafts before submitting a final product;
3. Problem-based tasks which challenged them to do their own thinking on something that matters to them and to readers. (Bean, 2011, p. 97).

Our first module on planning your grading puts you in a good position to communicate expectations clearly (feature 1), and the second module describes how a cycle of writing projects allows you and the class to have several points of interaction (feature 2). This module takes up the third feature, which is to create assignments that stimulate critical thinking and prompt meaningful communication with readers.

1. Give ‘em a RAFT and Give ‘em a TIP

John Bean (2011, p. 96) uses two mnemonics to guide your assignment design.

Role  
Audience  
Format  
Task

Task (as an)  
Intriguing  
Problem

The concepts of RAFT and TIP are grounded in an ancient rhetorical concept called Kairos—the opportune moment for speaking or writing. Kairos expresses the understanding that communication is situation-based. We write to address a problem (task); we write to those who share that problem (audience); and we write from a socially sanctioned identity (role), such as a professor, expert, citizen, customer, parent. Lastly, we write in a socially understood or discipline-constructed medium, whether it’s a website, email, State of the Union Address,  
scientific article, eulogy, personal essay, love letter, grant proposal, etc.

First-year college writers grasp Kairos intuitively when they text friends or post content on whatever social media platform is popular this month, but they do not always understand how Kairos applies to academic writing. They frequently see themselves as students (role) trying to write an essay (format) on a topic about which they know little (task) to professors (audience) who know more than they do. Or if they do not imagine themselves writing to professors, they have a generalized sense that they are writing to “everyone”—some vague person who happens upon their paper and expects no more than to have things explained clearly.

An effective assignment, therefore, can advance your students’ rhetorical education by giving them intriguing problems and by grounding them in more dynamic rhetorical situations (roles, audiences, formats, tasks that are intriguing problems). How might that look?

2. Imagining the Social (Roles and Audiences)

Contemporary writing instruction stresses that students produce more engaged writing when they can imagine themselves participating in a larger conversation. In They Say / I Say, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein show students how academic writing derives from a writer’s understanding of a conversation around an issue (they say) and the writer’s effort to contribute to it (I say). In Andrea Lunsford’s Let’s Talk, the first chapter is not about making an effective point or how to write a great essay; it’s about listening.

You can increase students’ chances to produce engaged writing when your assignment provides specific audiences and roles involved in the content of your seminar:

• Some students missed our conversation last week about _____. Write a 500-word letter that catches them up on the main ideas in the reading, the positions taken on them, and your own take. (Note: students who actually missed the conversation will struggle, but hey—lessons learned!)
• Our readings suggest that Americans are divided over _____. Write a column (750 words) for publication in your hometown’s newspaper.
• Scholars disagree over the role of cruelty in Shakespeare’s comedies. Building on our study of Twelfth Night, write an essay (1,500 words) for them on either side of this proposition: “the cruelties perpetuated on Malvolio do/do not diminish the comic atmosphere of the play.”

Situation-based assignments such as these give students place and standing in a conversation. They help students imagine audiences of various sorts, from those most like them (other students) to those more distant and harder to imagine (scholars). And as their roles become more challenging, they learn how to recognize and adapt to a range of rhetorical situations. This adaptability is an important writing skill in itself--one that, we hope, transfers to writing endeavors beyond first-year writing.

3. Imagining the Writing (Formats and Tasks)

Note, too, that the examples in the previous section imply cognitive tasks like summarizing, making assertions, and using evidence. Likewise, these examples call into being specific genres (formats) such as the letter, the newspaper column, and the literary analysis. In your own assignment design, consider what cognitive tasks you wish to promote in your assignments and what formats will help student attend to the writing conventions most frequently found in academic settings.

Tasks as Intriguing Problems  
Here are three strategies that can help you devise intriguing problems for writing assignments.

Controversia: Sometimes called the strong response assignment, it challenges students to take a side on a proposition, make the best case for it while addressing arguments on “the other side.”

1. 1. This year’s Academy Awards were/not racially biased.
2. Animals do/not have rights.
3. Electric cars should/not become fifty percent of our fleet by 2030.
4. Cuts in government support is/not the leading cause of higher tuition costs.
5. Tax increases on the wealthy will/not slow the economy.

Although strong response assignments run the risk of over-simplifying complex issues, they often get students to see that issues are more complicated than they appear when they first take a side. They are especially likely to appreciate the complexity of the issue when the strong response is connected to seminar readings (e.g., “Agree or disagree with Zaloom’s thesis on rising college costs.”). If nothing else, they are motivating and clarifying, encouraging students to stick their necks out.

Best/Most Elegant Solution: You can also help students think critically by posing a problem that may be solved in several ways.

• Having explored Endicott’s and Wallace’s articles about the decreasing demand for recyclable plastics, what changes should Helena’s sanitation department make in its recycling program, if any?
• Harold Bloom and others have contended that The Merchant of Venice is unequivocally and irredeemably anti-Semitic. How can we read, teach, and perform the play in light of his assertions?
• Given what we have learned about “stranger danger,” how can we best encourage children to take risks and trust the world in which they must live?

Stasis Questions: Another way to construct intriguing problems is to recognize that almost every issue involves a constellation of disagreements—that is, we become “stuck,” or come to “stasis,” at various points in our efforts to solve problems, whether strictly academic or broadly social. The most widely recognized stasis questions are fact, definition, cause, evaluation, and policy. When we are stuck, we make competing claims on these points:

• Fact: What happened? Is “x” true? Does “x” exist? (e.g. “We have/not passed the tipping point on climate change.”)
• Definition: What is it? To what category does it belong or not belong? Does it belong in this category given the current context? (e.g. “Social media is not really social.”)
• Cause: What caused it? What didn’t cause it? Why? (e.g. “The wage gap between women and men is better explained by discrimination than career choice.”)
• Evaluation: Is it good or bad? Right or wrong? Better than/worse than? (e.g. “Art history may not provide an easy path to a job, but it enriches one’s life every day in ways that cannot be measured.”)
• Policy: What should we do about it? What is most expedient? What is most urgent? What is our priority? (“Because the benefits of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccination outweigh the risks, the CDC and FDA recommend its use.”)

Knowing these can help you refine intriguing tasks for your students; teaching these to your students can help them find their own issues—where they think a conversation is stuck and what they think needs to be written about the problem.

Formats  
Students and professors often speak in terms of writing “essays,” “papers,” “term papers,” or “research papers.” These terms aren’t wrong, but they sometimes make it difficult for students to learn about the conventions that shape written communication both in and outside of academia.

Teaching formats really help students mature as writers by making them more aware of conventions and more flexible in meeting readers’ demands. And while we necessarily privilege academic formats in first-year writing courses, non-academic formats help them explore different modes of expression, showing them what academic writing is by practicing what it is not.

Therefore, consider how assigning a specific format can give them clear expectations and allow you and your class to interrogate the conventions involved. If you want them to write a letter, for instance, you can investigate how a letter is laid out, how it conveys purpose, how it allows for a loose association of ideas, and how it leverages the first, second, and third person in pronoun and point of view (“I realize that you may be skeptical about it”). If you assign them to write a textual analysis after the letter, it gives you easy comparisons about how they should now convey a purpose, assert a thesis, create explicit connections between ideas, and the relative appropriateness of first, second and third person.

4. An Important Objection

Some question the wisdom of assigning students to write for specific audiences, roles, tasks, and formats. Students think they are deprived of the opportunity to be creative. Writing professors may think the same, or assert that we should be teaching them how to construct their own rhetorical situations by discovering their own task, readers, and formats.

These are valid concerns. If they are important to you, consider meeting the advice in this module half way. Create specific roles, audiences, tasks, and formats in earlier high-stakes assignments, and provide more scope for individual initiative with later ones. Or, give students the option of devising their own approach, provided they can convince you that they have devised a clear role, reader, task, and format for themselves.

5. Creating Effective Assignment Sheets

While sections 1 through 4 offer advice on wide ranging theoretical matters, this section names the practical matters you may already take care of when you assign major writing projects. It simply prompts you to mark the beginning of each writing project with some sort of communication that answers the specific questions students always have:

• What am I to write?
• When is it due? Is there more than one deadline? (rough draft and final draft, for example)
• How long should it be?
• Do I need sources? How many?
• What’s the format?
• Can I use MLA/APA/CMS for page design and citing sources?
• How will you grade it?

While the syllabus can cover many of these features, it helps to provide students with an assignment sheet (this can either be a material sheet you put in their hands it can built into an assignment module on Moodle).

On the next page you will find an example from my first-year course examining the idea of money from humanistic perspectives. Text boxes identify where the assignment sheet tries to answer the questions students typically have, and it includes a task-specific rubric that weights two focal points of writing instruction in this project: developing effective evidence and organizing for persuasion. What elements would you use and which would you reject in your own introduction to a writing project? What would you add that’s missing here?

Taking Action, 3.1  
Create an assignment sheet for a writing project that fits not only the purposes of your seminar, but also your approach to teaching and evaluating writing. Then, get some feedback on your effort, ideally by sharing it with a student tutor in The Writing Center.

In The Writing Center, we find that students often overlook the essential task of interpreting the assignment information and, when confused, they rarely ask the professor for clarification. Sharing your assignment with a trained tutor who works with student writers may help you see it from the student’s perspective.

SAMPLE ASSIGNMENT SHEET  
Writing Project 3: Finance, Romance, and Religion in The Merchant of Venice.

The Situation: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is listed as a comedy, but it has many elements that are unpleasant, controversial, tragic. One of the main characters may be a frustrated, closeted gay man. Another is a Jewish moneylender who was fashioned out of anti-Semitic ideas that are not behind us yet. The lovers in the play cheat their parents and each other, or worry about being cheated on.

While all these concerns show up frequently in commentaries on The Merchant of Venice, very few have noticed the role money plays in the drama. So, in a course in which we interrogate the realities of money from the perspectives of the liberal arts, can we argue that money--more than sexuality, romance, religious identity,  
or politics--is the true center of the play? (This section establishes an intriguing problem and connects it to the course’s inquiry.)

The Task: In your literary analysis of around 1500 words, argue either side of the following proposition: “Money is/not central to the drama in The Merchant of Venice.” (This paragraph defines the task and the format (literary analysis) while answering students’ questions about length.)

Who would read such an essay? Those who have read The Merchant of Venice already. Therefore, you do not need to summarize the plot, as you may have in high school or earlier venues of education. And not only have your readers read and seen the play, they are CURIOUS about it. They think they know what it means, but they’re open to learning more. They already like the play, but they would like to appreciate it more fully. A lot of  
college-level academic writing does two these two things: advance our understanding of something in the world; and/or appreciate the value of that thing. (This paragraph helps students imagine their audience and their role.)

How do you create the essay? We will read and discuss the play over four class sessions, starting today. At the center of our discussion will be the issues that mostly attract readers’ attention, and to assess if the issues around money are less important, just as important, or more important than them. From these discussions  
you will start to find the points you want to make to argue one of two sides possible with the thesis. We will also stress organization in this assignment: how we order points in the most persuasive way, and how we highlight them through clear, unified, analytical paragraphs.

As with writing projects 1 and 2, use Modern Language Association guidelines for page design and citing sources.

Due Dates: The rough draft is due Monday, March 9, at 5 pm. You will read two or three of your classmates’ drafts for the rough draft session on Tuesday, March 10. You will forfeit 10% of the final grade if a full rough draft is not turned in on time. The final draft is due Monday, March 16, 11:59 pm.

Grading: I will evaluate this paper according to the rubric found below.

Total: ______/40