Scientists Talk about Reading Research

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Earlier in the semester, we shared a few resources to support the ways in which faculty teach reading in (writing-intensive) courses.  While literacy scholars and reading teachers suggest a variety of useful strategies to help students engage with their reading more deeply, one of the most commonly offered recommendations urges faculty to talk and model productive reading practices.  That is why today we are sharing an article that does just that: interviews scientists about their reading practices.  Continue reading →

Join Professor Gesa Kirsch and WAC Mason Tomorrow

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Dr. Gesa Kirsch, Professor of English and Media Studies at Bentley University, will join WAC Mason for a discussion of “The Advocacy, Activism, and Rhetorical Savvy of Dr. Mary Bennet Ritter, MD, and her Contemporaries.”  Dr. Kirsch will explore Dr. Ritter’s life and legacy, trace her cohort of women physicians, and examine the role of the Woman’s Medical Journal in creating and sustaining a large professional network of early (mostly white) women physicians.

The talk will be held at 2:00pm in Johnson Center Room F on Mason’s Fairfax Campus.  It will be followed by a reception at 3:30 and a coffee hour for graduate students at 4:00pm.

 

Kirsch Colloquium - Advocacy, Activism, and Rhetorical Savy

Study: Peer Review Increases Impact of Published Scholarship

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Tomorrow afternoon, the WAC Program is sponsoring a talk at Fall for the Book on “The Future of Academic Writing and Publishing.”  The talk will feature five panelists who will consider how academic publishing is currently evolving and how scholars and editors might respond to that continuing evolution.  One facet of this evolution concerns the prevalence of metrics that quantify the “impact” of a given article or journal.  While impact metrics have been critiqued for a number of reasons, their use has remained prevalent, perhaps increasingly so.  And that prevalence lead researchers John Rigby, Deborah Cox, and Keith Julian to wonder what impact factor metrics might reveal about academic writing beyond the circulation of a particular text.  Continue reading →

Join WAC at Fall for the Book

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Writing Across the Curriculum is proud to sponsor “The Future of Academic Writing and Publishing,” a special event at George Mason’s annual Fall for the Book festival.  Panelists Adam Winsler, Emily Green, John Warren, Laura Poms, and Doug Eyman will consider how academic writing has changed to reflect digital landscapes, diverse audiences, and new publishing platforms.  This multidisciplinary panel will also contemplate recent challenges to definitions of academic writing and how we might anticipate further changes in coming decades.

Please join us Thursday October 11, 2018 at 4:30pm on the 3rd floor of the Johnson Center in Meeting Room G.

FftB Flyer - Academic Publishing

 

Strategies to Support Mindful Reading

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Since we are still feeling inspired by the Stearns Center’s fantastic conference and its theme of “Small Changes, Big Impact,” we thought that we’d share a few more ways to support reading in the writing classroom.  This week, however, we are offering a more complete resource with a series of useful reading strategies that we can teach to our students. Continue reading →

Using Annotations to Support Reading

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In our last post, we highlighted the need for faculty to think more intentionally about the ways in which they support student reading, particularly in college writing courses.  This might sound like it requires large-scale changes in teaching, but it doesn’t have to: we can start small.   In fact, the theme of this year’s Innovations in Teaching and Learning (ITL) Conference should help us realize that: “Small Changes, Big Impact.”  With that theme in mind and the conference just two days away(!), we thought that we would share a small change that can help us better support our students’ engagement with reading. Continue reading →

Cultivating a New Audience

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While writing specialists broadly understand that writing helps students learn, we also advocate for writing assignments that prompt students to think rhetorically: how writers use texts to convey meaning appropriate to an audience in a given context.  As a part of this conversation, writing specialists talk about the importance of audience, but research in writing studies, including here at Mason, reveals that college writing assignments do not commonly address an audience beyond the instructor, who typically is addressed as an evaluator.  Continue reading →

What Does an Effective Assignment Sheet Look Like?

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It recently occurred to us that, while we have been sharing resources about designing assignments this semester, we haven’t actually shared any samples of designs.  These resources are helpful when considering how to design our assignments, but they don’t show us how to communicate that assignment through a prompt sheet.  So, they compel us to ask: what does a good assignment sheet actually look like? Continue reading →