How To Get Students Invested in Writing
Multiple Approaches
Approach 1: Students Like to Be Asked Questions and Fix Bad Prose
Instead of telling them (or having them read something that tells them): What is clarity in writing?
I give them multiple texts and then multiple theorists (e.g. the Paramedic Method) and I ask them to work it out.
I also give them bad prose and–using the principles and theories of how to clarify your writing—I ask them to fix it.
Approach 2: Students Like To Learn Useful Skills
To create visuals (using Excel and/or Canva) that explain data for a particular audience.
To create a screencast tutorial for navigating a website (completing a difficult task) for a particular audience.
To practice writing based on a specific purpose and audience.
To do inquiry and analysis work in groups before moving to their own well-argued positions (essentially they learn to brainstorm with others).
To research things they want to research (how to find pirate radio stations, what the actual risks of illegal downloading are, whether AI can disguise AI generated writing).
Which AI are best for different tasks: summarizing, making prose sound legalistic, evaluating consumer products and services).
Approach 3: Students Like to Be Creative
Creativity isn’t just for poets, musicians and visual artists. Everyone likes creativity because of the moments of “flow” it provides. The trick is that there must be a very low bar to the activity so that everyone feels they can get going. Two examples:
I have an analytical writing assignment where I ask students to find passages in one or two authors (or artists) that illuminate a third (well known, well liked) author (or artist). So, students have to choose someone they really like and then they find one or two others (who maybe are not even in the same genre) whose words or productions illuminate in some way the first. To make things even more fun, I give them the option of making the comparisons humorous (e.g., Kermit the Frog used to illuminate Kierkegaard).
I got an assignment from my friend Dan: the Mixed Tape Analysis. Students trying to understand an author compile a song list that explains the ambitions or appeal of that author. Students produce an annotated playlist that must make use of 4 technical terms used in analysis (e.g., metaphor, ellipsis, conflict, etc.).
Approach 4: Make something (a zine, an exhibition, a podcast, a screencast, a Canva website)
Making things—whether print or digital—is a way to get students involved in each other processes in a way that feels real to them. It also allows those students whose forte is some other modality than sentences/words (i.e., drawing, photoshopping, interviewing/speaking) to shine a bit. Multilingual students especially like these assignments because there is more than one channel of communication and design.