LRC, Smarthinking, Students in Class: What Can Peer Review Do for You?

In this blog, I give a pep talk for peer review, introduce USF’s CLAQWA rubric, and identify the fall 2011 LRC writing tutors. As anyone who’s been through a WI workshop knows, I’m a fan of carefully guided peer review.  Even expert writers need feedback from readers as they draft and revise.  Discussing work in [...]

Teaching Tip #3: Writing is Learning

Try this experiment:  ask your students to spend 5 minutes writing about a topic before beginning class discussion on the topic. You don’t need to grade it or even collect it, although you might want to use the students’ work as a way to take attendance.   Why do this?  Research findings suggest that students who [...]

Responding to Student Writing–Straight Talk

Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Ed, English professor James Lang reports favorably on using Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software to “write” reponses to student papers.  Lang notes that the software prompted his political scientist colleague to respond in a more conversational tone, so the benefit was not just functional but pedagogical.