Teaching Writing: Ideas and Strategies

Can I use the word "I" in a research article? This and other perplexing questions about the range of styles you can employ in your research writing are answered in this episode.

How can you get students to read your feedback to their assignments? First, separate formative from summative feedback. Second, structure opportunities for peer feedback. And third, give feedback to the class through annotated model papers.

In this episode we consider specific ways to write more clearly and more concisely. Clarity and concision both affect the overall style in which you write, and while both clear writing and concise writing are good things there are times when some writers need to produce elaborate discourse and longer texts.

Of the three main styles of writing, the plain (or low) style may be the most useful. This episode of Teaching Writing descirbes the plain style of writing and gives examples of how it is used in writing for academics as well as non-academic audiences.

In this episode I define writing style in academic writing, and consider the three levels of style: low or plain, middle or forcible, and high or elaborated. Using these as a rough guide to readability, we use a style analysis tool to both examine our own writing styles and those of other writers you might seek to emulate.

In this episode we'll examine writing style: the low or plain style, the middle or forcible style, and the high or florid style. Using those definitions, we'll describe ways to analyze the style a document is written in as a way to develop the ability to write in several different styles.

In this episode we’ll review some of the advice given to academics who write, including Helen Sword’s Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write, and map it against Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. We’ll consider the map those books provide in the context of research about writers to think about what makes us more or less productive as academic writers.

Heather Graves and David Beard, co-editors of a new collection of essays on the rhetoric of oil published by Routledge, speak about their book, their favorite chapters, and why this is an important book for them and for your students.

Despite a recent news story
posted on CBC.ca, students have been buying essays for over 100 years--this is nothing new. New artificial intelligence software promises to make it even easier to produce an essay without writing one. What can instructors do about this age-old problem?

What software tools and applications exist that might help you, and your students, write better documents? In this episode of Teaching Writing, we review what tools are out there that might help with different aspects of the writing process.