Teaching Writing: Ideas and Strategies

How can we develop better graduate student writers? In this episode I discuss several strategies: mapping out a plan of development over the entire degree program; developing and using specific models of the genres students need to master in order to graduate; and four specific strategies to adopt right away.

At the start of a recent workshop, I asked graduate student supervisors what they most wanted to know. In this podcast, I provide an edited version of my answers. How can your students write more efficiently in your lab? How can you give good feedback to the students? and what strategies might help English as an additional language students?

In this episode I talk with Boba Samuels and Jordana Garbati, authors of the textbook Mastering Academic Writing. You'll hear about how their wealth of experience working with students in writing centres informed the way they wrote this book and the kinds of needs the book fills.

How can we help students, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, understand how to create appropriate visuals to include in their documents? In this episode, I talk about research I've done with Chemical Engineering professors and with writing studies colleagues on the role of visuals in texts.

In this episode we consider the concept of genre, as writing studies researchers have framed it, to think about the kinds of writing we assign to students and that we encounter at work. What does genre add to our understanding of what needs to be written that purpose and audience do not already tell us?

In this episode I focus on purpose, both in academic and in professional writing contexts. The four main purposes for writing are to inform, to persuade, to deliberate, and to reflect. As instructors, we need to orient students to the purpose for their writing.

This episode examines purposes for documents, and, in fact, other communication situations. What is the purpose of a document? Referential, expressive, and persuasive are three of the main purposes that documents serve. When we communicate with students, we need to be clear about the purpose their documents serve.

Requiring students to write for different audiences is crucial for their development. In this podcast I review how audience is one of the three key characteristics of what Lloyd Bitzer termed "rhetorical situations."

I taught my first writing class 38 years ago. What advice would I have given myself then based on what I know now? In this episode, I begin to explore that idea, examining audience, peer response, and grading rubrics as some of the first things that come to mind.

In this episode, Roger Graves and Theresa Hyland talk about their 2017 edited volume, Writing Assignments Across University Disciplines, and the implications that research has for instructors, students, and university administrators.